Hello there!

I guess you were intrigued by the title – right?

Hopefully, the content won’t disappoint you, and you will look forward to each episode that comes along.

As I am now semi-retired, I find myself becoming more engaged in the nuances of life.  The strange facts, heroic acts, or those pieces of information that ‘simply make your head hurt’ thinking about them.  I love writing, so I thought, why not start a blog to share these with other like-minded people?

So here we are.  Whether you are an avid internet surfer or a more focused searcher, if you like what you see, subscribe to my blogs through the website and/or follow me on social media); the more, the merrier.  You may even find some great questions for your next trivia night or some magic conversation starters (???).

As the blog progresses articles will be in one of three categories:

• As time goes by: all those things that I am now allowed to think about as I get older.  The world continually changes, and sometimes it is valuable to look back and see how things have evolved, good or bad.  For example, how many of you can remember the first mobile phones that did nothing but make (local) calls and required a battery the size of a car battery?
  
  
• Things that make your head hurt: those things that just seem so unreal you get a headache just thinking about them. For example, where is the cloud that we store all our information, or (on the slightly risqué side), why do you grow more hair in placers you don’t need as you get older?
  
  
• Strange but true: All those strange things that have come to be or take place in our world. For example, did you know that Switzerland does not allow Guinea pigs and that fruit loops are all the same flavour despite being different colours (sorry Mr Kellogg!).

As the opening episode, I thought let’s start at the beginning with some stranger facts about babies, from the ‘Stange but true!’ category.  Here are four facts about babies (in the beginning) to get started.

Fact 1:  Babies are born with almost 200 more bones than an adult human.  As babies grow and develop, they lose some of the flexibility they require at birth and their bones fuse into an adult skeleton.

Fact 2:  Babies blink less than adults. Babies only blink once or twice a minute – we have all seen the vacant stare of a newborn baby, right?  Blinking coats the eye with a thin film of tear mucous to keep the eye moist and lubricated.  Babies don’t even manufacture tears in the first month of their life.  Although there are theories that a baby’s eyes are not as exposed to the elements that make adults blink more, and even that they do not experience the same degree of emotional excitement that adults do (you blink more when you are stressed), the real answer is still unclear.

Fact 3: Identical baby twins don’t have the same fingerprints?

Although identical twins are the same sex, have the same eye colour, same blood type, etc. they are not carbon copies of each other.  Parents can usually identify one twin from the other (thank goodness!) and even though they have the same DNA (that series of four molecules that make us who we are), they will have different fingerprints.  Why?

We are told that it is due to different experiences in the womb.  Disparate levels of nutrition, position in the womb, and the whole micro-environment cause subtle changes in how the skin cells that make up the fingerprint pattern develop.  So if you have identical twins and get confused who is who, just take a fingerprint!

Fact 4: Normal babies will breathe at a rate of more than 60 breaths/minute until after 2 months of age.  The adult rate is between 15 and 20 breaths/minute.

Who would have thunk it – right?

Hope to see you back again. Don’t miss out, stay subscribed and add your thoughts or any comments you have on this article in the comments, or the social media links.

Till next time,

Calvin

^©Copyright C London February 2024