Archives: Useless Facts

In 1903, Marie Salomea Skłodowska Curie, a Polish born and naturalized-French physicist and chemist became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.

She is also the first and only person to win the Nobel Prize in two scientific fields, the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice and sharing the prize with Pierre Curie, her husband, and with physicist Henri Becquerel, she and Pierre were also the first married couple to win the Nobel Prize.

The shared 1903 Nobel Prize was in Physics, for developing the theory of “radioactivity”— a word she coined.  Then in 1911, Madame Curie (as she was also known) won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discovery of two elements Polonium (named after her native country) and Radium. During World War I she developed mobile radiography units to provide X-ray services to field hospitals and she later founded the Curie Institutes in Paris and in Warsaw – centers of scientific research.

Marie Curie died on July 4, 1934, from aplastic anemia, the result of her exposure to the radiation she had devoted her life to researching.

 

Who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize?

* The award committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences initially intended to honor only two men, but Swedish mathematician Magnus Gösta Mittag-Leffler, who was a member of the committee and an advocate for women scientists, stimulated a complaint at the omission of the woman’s equal contributions and the woman’s name was added to the nomination, leading to the award of the Nobel Prize.

 

Although the word ‘critical’ had already been used in medicine to denote a very serious or acute state of a patient’s health, many scholars believe it first shows up in print as a term expressing disapproval or adverse judgments, in Act 2, Scene 1 of Othello, the Moor of Venice, a tragedy in five acts written by William Shakespeare. In that scene, Iago says to Desdemona:  “O gentle lady, do not put me to’t; For I am nothing, if not critical.”  Although Othello is believed to have been written by Shakespeare sometime in 1603–1604, it was first published in 1622.

Some scholars attribute the invention of many words to Shakespeare (see, for example,  The LitCharts Blog) and it was not uncommon for authors to invent words. However, it was also not unusual to find that words used in everyday language at the time, might first find there way into recorded literature through some famous author and sometimes in imaginative ways – poetic license, perhaps!

Did Shakespeare invent the word “critical”?

Audrey Hepburn was born Audrey Kathleen Ruston (known to her family as Adriaantje) in Belgium in 1929.  Since you don’t automatically become a Belgian citizen by being born there, she inherited the nationality of her parents, a British father and Dutch mother. Her family moved to Britain, but when her father abandoned the family in 1935, her mother moved back to the Netherlands – then a neutral country.  Her mother worried that an “English-sounding” name might be dangerous under Nazi occupation, so when Germany invaded, her mother changed Audrey’s name to “Edda” and her last name to “van Heemstra” (which was her  maternal grandfather’s name and her mother’s maiden name).

When the war ended, Audrey moved to the United States, took up acting and won Best Actress Oscar for her role in Roman Holiday in 1953, followed by another Academy Award nomination for her performance in Sabrina in 1954.  She went on to star in so many memorable movies such as Funny Face, Love in the Afternoon, Charade, My Fair Lady and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (another Oscar nomination).  She garnered yet another Oscar nomination for her 1967 performance in Wait Until Dark but ultimately retired from acting in the late 1980’s.  In 1988, Audrey Hepburn became a special ambassador to the United Nations UNICEF fund, providing aid to children in Latin America and Africa, a role she continued to fulfill until passing away in 1993.

 

What was Audrey Hepburn’s name at birth?

The skin of a grape contains all kinds of chemical compounds including bioflavonoids and polyphenols, as well as other aromatic molecular chains, tannins and, of great value in the fermentation process, natural yeast.  Most of these chemicals are used in winemaking and winemakers have to decide how long they want the must (i.e., crushed grape mash, containing skin, seeds, and stems) to remain in contact with the juices, because that helps determine a wine’s aroma and flavor during the fermentation and aging process. In fact, much of the taste we experience in wine, comes from the chemicals in the skin of the grape!

Grape skin, the outer layer of a grape, is either green, red, or purplish-black in color. What is important about the skin of a grape no matter what color it is?

Moonraker is the third novel by the British author Ian Fleming to feature his fictional British Secret Service 007 agent James Bond. First published in the UK in April of 1955, the US hardcover edition was published in the US in September of that year. In December, the paperback edition was published in the US under the title “Too Hot to Handle” having been re-written to ‘Americanize’ many of the British language idioms, including footnotes from Fleming to explain some of the text for an American audience. In 1979, the motion picture Moonraker was released – the 11th film in the James Bond series, starring Roger Moore in his fourth outing as the fictional 007.

Which of Ian Fleming’s 007 novels was sold in the United States with the title of “Too Hot To Handle”?