A very good site explaining on of the most important things ever.

http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com/ifyoucanreadthis.htm
A pdf version is here: http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com/ifyoucanreadthis.pdf

Who Invented The Telephone?

In February 1876 a Boston speech teacher named Alexander Graham Bell took out what was to prove the most valuable patent ever granted for a device that he said would transmit the human voice over a wire. His "telephone" made him rich, but embroil him in numerous lawsuits brought by people who debated the priority of his invention.

Bell's chief rival for the title of "Father of the Telephone" was a Frankfurt physicist named John Philip Reis, who in 1861 developed an apparatus for carrying sound impulses by wire. Constructed of such homey parts as a beer barrel cork (for a mouthpiece) and a sausage skin (for a diaphragm), it successfully transmitted the human voice. Reis clearly is the true inventer on the telephone.

Excerpt from Fabulous Fallacies, by Tad Tuleja.

Src: David Walechinsky and Irving Wallace, The Peoples Almanac #2 (Bantam, 1978)

Mike and Ray Mentzer Dead

I just found out about this.
http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/mentdeath.htm

Finding the Right Odor Word

Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? Apparently not. Words may very well influence how we interpret smell and other sensations.To test this idea, Oxford University experimental psychologist Edmund Rolls subjected a group of people to a cheesy aroma while simultaneously flashing before their eyes either the phrase "body oder" or "chedder cheese." The smellers werethen asked to rate the pleasantness of the scent.Not surprisingly, people prefered the chedder cheese scent over the body odor scent even through there were the same.

But the clincher came when Rolls analyzed fMRI brain images of the test subjects, which had been taken during the experiment. The scans revealed different patterns of activity in the secondary olfactory cortex- a collection of neurons that mediate pleasant sensory responses to smells and tastes. In the brains of those who liked the chedder smell, the scans showed much more action than in the brains of those turned off by body odor.

"The word label influences how the brain actually responds in its olfactory processing areas," says Rolls. "We're finding that words affect how you feel because they're influencing the emotional part of the brain." So if roses were actually called "stickweeds," he says, perhaps they wouldn't be so well loved-at least not by our noses.

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