Ripley's Believe It or Not by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for November 27, 2016

Well, Hazel’s second birthday is coming close (I’m almost wondering if she was born in room 9 or 15).

So? The human body can easily generate enough electricity to light ten bulbs just by walking across a carpet. The real question is for how long? In our case, it’s only for a tiny fraction of a second.

An electric eel’s electricity can also electrocute divers when they’re 20 feet away.

The date thing only works in the USA because most other countries use the DD/MM/YYYY format, which is far more logical, just like the metric system.

I remember when the Bronx Zoo had eels lighting a lightbulb.

Himba Women or Space Alien

My question is are the bulbs incandescent or the more energy efficient CFL’s or LED’s? I think it would make a big difference in the number of bulbs it could light!

In addition, no where in the description does it tell us the wattage of the of the original bulbs! It would seem to be a big difference if they were 40 or 200 watt bulbs (both standard in a household).

There’s a good chance around 250 people in the world were born at that time. Creating that BION is a matter of finding one of them.

I used to drag my feet across the carpet on a low humidity day, and then discharge the static build up through a fluorescent light tube.

For what reason are some eels electric. Sound dangerous to me.

Sorry Hazel, but this is very believable. A baby is born every 8 seconds, 7.5 per minute, 450 per hour, 10,800 per day, according to the United States Census Bureau. Early Happy Birthday wishes anyway. You’re still special!

The Himba of northern Namibia appear bright red in color because they cover their hair and skin in Otjize’a paste made of butterfat and red ocher (a natural earth pigment containing iron oxide)- to protect themselves from the hot sun.

You can have the darkest skin ever dense with melanin pigmentation and still need further defense. The UV ray accumulate their effects.

during my time in the military I picked up the habit of using DD MMM YY (.i.e. 27 Nov 16) for dates and still use that format by default. As a computer geek the format I use when naming files is always YYMMDD (.i.e 161127) so that listings will sort neatly. I rarely use the US format, it never made much sense to me even before the military or the world travel that service afforded me.

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While not surprised, I’m still disappointed that we as a country refused to make the change to metric.

I learned about the military way of writing the date in high school, reading about some of the dispatches that were sent during WWII. I used it on a paper for English class, and was mocked by the instructor for doing so. I persisted in using it anyway, stubborn nut that I was/am.