It costs more to buy a new car today in the United States that it cost Christopher Columbus to equip and undertake three voyages to and from the New World.

King Charles VII, who was assassinated in 1167, was the first Swedish king with the name of Charles. Charles I, II, III, IV, V, never existed. No one knows why. To add to the mystery, almost 300 years went by before there was a Charles VIII (1448-57).

During the 1960s, cast members from The Andy Griffith Show, Green Acres, and Gomer Pyle served as spokespeople for Jell-O instant pudding in nationally-televised commercials.

It's probably not a good idea. Acorns are poisonous to humans, and, if eaten, will cause kidney damage.

The oldest city in Germany, Trier was once the capital of the Western Roman Empire, and residence of the Emperor Constantine. Despite a bloody history, a remarkable amount of Trier's past has been preserved, including an impressive group of Roman monuments north of the Alps.

Pocahontas and her husband John Rolfe had one son named Thomas who was born and educated in England, but settled in Virginia.

Of all professionals in the United States, journalists are credited with having the largest vocabulary -- approximately 20,000 words.

A recent study found that 75 percent of headache patients felt relief when they rubbed capsaicin (the component that makes chile peppers hot) on their nose.

There are 420 seats on the standard 747 jumbo jet.

Key lime, a yellow lime with a bitter rather than sour taste, was named after the Florida Keys. Key lime pie became popular in the 1950s – a custardlike pie made with lime juice, condensed milk, and eggs and served in a pastry shell.

In a note in his diary Munch described his inspiration for the image thus: "I was walking along a path with two friends - the sun was setting - suddenly the sky turned blood red - I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence - there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city - my friends walked on, and I stood ...Read more

James Ramsey invented a steam-driven motorboat in 1784. He ran it on the Potomac River, and the event was witnessed by George Washington.

Cape Disappointment, a nob of land on Washington state's coast at the mouth of the Columbia River, lives up to its name. It was named by a British captain who, thanks to fog, couldn't find the mouth of the river said to exist there. Fog covers the land an average of 106 days per year.

The language of Taki, spoken in parts of French Guinea, consists of only 340 words.

Grasshopper Glacier in Montana was named for the grasshoppers that can still be seen frozen in the ice.

A chip of silicon a quarter-inch square has the capacity of the original 1949 ENIAC computer, which occupied a full city block.

Isaac Asimov wrote more than 500 books during his lifetime (1920-1992). He has the honor of being the only person who has authored a book in each of the Dewey Decimal System classifications.

More than half of school-age children in the U.S. have no cavities in their permanent teeth, compared with only 26 percent who were cavity-free in the early '70s, the American Dental Association has reported.

In 1901, Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen won the first Nobel Prize for physics. He noticed that certain rays caused paper coated with barium platinocyanide to glow, even when the paper was in the next room. Baffled by the mystery, he called them "X rays."

Almost half the newspapers in the world are published in the United States and Canada.