Miscellania

1. A mildly cold temperature of 65 degrees F can trigger accidental hypothermia.

2. There are no houseflies in the state of Alaska.

3. The chemical structure of most nerve gases is related to that of methylphosphonic acid.

4. According to Lewis Thomas' The Lives of a Cell, "there are 25 million assorted insects hanging in the air over every temperate square mile, in a column extending upwards for thousands of feet, drifting through the layers of the atmosphere like plankton."

5. Arthur C. Clarke: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

6. There are more than 1,000 rings around Saturn.

7. Saphenous veins taken from the patient's legs are used to detour blood around blocked heart veins.

8. Recombinant DNA ("genetic engineering") is a process that splices genes from one organism into genes of another, producing new forms of life.

9. Immanuel Velikovsky in his book Worlds in Collision blamed a near miss of a comet for such biblical events as the parting of the Red Sea and the plagues of Egypt, and said that the comet settled into an orbit that is now known as the planet Venus.

10. Ultraviolet radiation damage ranges from wrinkles and liver spots to precancerous dark patches known as actinic keratosis and, finally, basal-cell carcinoma and malignant melanoma.