Author: scatty

We keep hearing about how obesity rates are on the rise year after year, but we don’t hear too much about how the average height has also increased during that time. While the average height (based on human remains) bounced up and down for centuries, it remained at a pretty constant baseline. 

Ever since the late 19th century, though, the average height around the world has skyrocketed and only figures to increase with time. Why is this? Let’s take a look at why average heights keep increasing around the world.

1. Nutrition

We’re all told from a young age that if we want to grow up to be big and strong, we have to eat our vegetables and take vitamins. It turns out, it’s not just something your parents said to get you to eat broccoli. More people have access to food than ever before, and getting a wide range of nutrition allows people to reach their maximum height potential.

This wasn’t the case during the 1800s. Food was scarce around much of the country, and it wasn’t until around the 1950s that food was becoming more abundant. Technology that allowed foods to be frozen and shipped easier made the supply chains around the world better for those that had been lacking in food availability.

2. Living Conditions

You’ve probably heard a lot about overpopulation, especially at the beginning of the 21st century. Urban areas simply are running out of room, but that’s nothing compared to the overcrowding that the world was facing during the plague times. People were all in one central area, meaning that disease could spread quickly.

For most people, that isn’t the case anymore. Because of suburbs and liveable rural areas, people are as likely to fall extremely ill. Of course, there are still areas where people are essentially stacked up, but the conditions are far better than they were in the 19th century.

3. Natural Selection

We’ve all been told over the years that taller people are more attractive. The “apex of humanity” is typically seen as athletes, models, etc., all of which happen to be occupations where it pays to be tall. Because of this, taller people tend to have an easier time finding a mate, especially another tall one.

Long story short, tall people are having more babies with other tall people, continuing to increase the average height overall. That doesn’t mean that short people aren’t also having children, it just means that there are taller people to bring up the numbers with each generation.

4. Lack of Infectious Disease

We already mentioned the plague and how it affected the population and stunted the average height all those years ago, but it’s not the only disease that prevented humans from reaching their height potential. Due to modern medicine, infants are less likely to suffer from severe infections. 

This allows them to grow at a rate much faster than previous generations. This is especially true for respiratory infections. Pollution, especially via air, is another respiratory factor that comes into play. Pollution is still bad, but it’s nowhere near what it once was, and it has led to taller people.

Will It Continue?

The fact that humans have grown taller on average so rapidly since the start of the 20th century is a bit baffling to many scientists, actually. For many generations, shorter people were typically part of the lower class, and also had more children on average. That isn’t the case anymore, which has led to a large genealogical melting pot. 

Toward the end of the 20th century, the average height started to finally plateau a bit after decades of tremendous increase. Because of this, scientists believe that our average heights now are what we were capable of in the first place, but never got the chance to get there due to many circumstances. Health problems are common in overly tall people, so the plateau is expected to continue with a very slight increase over a long period of time in the future.

Many of us have had the dream of owning an officially recognized world record but might not know what we’re good at. Sure, there are the obvious world records like being the tallest, shortest, heaviest, fastest, etc. However, there are those records that are set around the world that go largely uncontested. Maybe you have more record-holding abilities than you thought you did. Here are five Guinness world records you won’t believe, and maybe you can try out a few for yourself.

5. Feeding Time

Time consumes us all, but have you ever thought about consuming time? While there are plenty of records for eating food in a certain amount of time, one man stands out as the best at eating…watches. That man is Kim Sueng Do, who ate an estimated four tons of metal before setting out to eat five watches in front of a live audience.

Kim, a native of Seoul, South Korea, ate five watches on national television in just 94.07 seconds. To train for his big day, Kim had been eating more than one pound of metal every day. 

4. Will and Te…

When drafting your final will and testament, there tends to be a ton of lingo that gets sorted out by lawyers. However, there is a record for the shortest will ever written and accepted by the courts. In 1906, Thorne V. Dickens had just three words in his will that read “All for mother.” This was contested, though, as it was unclear who Dickens was referring to.

It turns out that Dickens wasn’t talking about his actual mother. Instead, he had left everything to his wife/the mother of his children, thus “mother.” The will itself was admitted to probate, making it the official shortest will.

3. Can Opener

There are a lot of various records for performing a task in one minute as many times as possible, so it makes sense that there would be a record for most cans opened in one minute. However, there’s a very specific category that will surprise you: Most canned drinks opened by a parrot in one minute.

The record was set (or established in most likelihood) by Zac the Macaw. On January 12, 2012, Zac set out to untab as many sodas in one minute as he could. The end result was 35 cans ready for consumption. Zac doesn’t have the record for most bottle caps removed by a parrot in one minute, though, as that record belongs to Gordon the Macaw, in Los Altos, California.

2. Sporting Futility

Losing streaks can go for a very, very long time, even in the professional ranks. No professional team knows that more than soccer’s Woodford United F.C. Between April 2012 and November 2013, the team didn’t collect a single win or draw. Instead, they lost all 65 of their matches before beating Blackstones F.C. 2-1.

On the international stage, the country of San Marino had the longest losing streak. For 61 matches between September 2004 and October 2014, they lost every time, making it more than a decade without a win. Finally, in boxing, Reggie Strickland holds the record for most professional losses, amassing 276 of them between 1987 and 2005.

1. Enter the Badlands

Those that have spent some time watching competitive eating or browsing through YouTube may be familiar with Eric Booker, a.k.a. Badlands, a.k.a. BadlandsChugs. After spending a lot of time trying to set new eating records, especially at the Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest, Badlands turned his attention to being the world’s best chugger.

Badlands has set a lot of Guinness World Records for chugging, including downing a liter of Mountain Dew in just 6.8 seconds. Perhaps his best accomplishment, though, came when he chugged two whole liters of soda in 18.45 seconds. 

There are 24 hours in a day, but not every country is in agreement on how these 24 hours are measured on a clock. Most countries use the 24-hour clock, while 18 countries use a 12-hour clock that measures both am and pm. Among these countries are Australia, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, and the United States.

However, most militaries that include the United States, use a 24-hour clock that’s called military time. The world had been more split down the middle on the 24-hour clock usage until the 19th century. That’s when Sir Sandford Fleming missed a train because the hours for am and pm weren’t listed. He set out to make the 24-hour clock a worldwide standard, and after some adjustments resulted in Coordinated Universal Time.

It might seem silly now to think that someone would get am and pm confused, it was a common occurrence in the 19th century. If it could fool someone of Fleming’s intelligence, it could certainly fool the average person. After all, Fleming was an engineer and brilliant inventor that was highly influential in the development of Canada heading into the 20th century. Interestingly enough, Canada is one of the few countries that didn’t adopt his 24-hour clock.

Fleming moved from Scotland to Toronto at a young age and helped to engineer many of the railroad tracks used in the Intercolonial and Canadian Pacific Railways. Fleming even designed the first postage stamp in Canada and founded both the Canadian Institute (now RCIScience) and Royal Society of Canada.

Just seven years before the 20th century, Italy became the first country to officially adopt the 24-hour clock as the standard measurement of time. It wasn’t long until other countries followed suit, especially during both World Wars. Eventually, the 24-hour clock became the standard for a majority of countries around the world, though some of the major countries previously mentioned are still on the 12-hour clock system.

In the United States, the 24-hour clock is still known as military time. The key reason for this is that the primary use of the 24-hour system in the country is used by the military to coordinate with a majority of countries. The United States first started using military time during World War I, but only in the Navy. The United Kingdom’s Royal Navy adopted military time in 1914, with the Army following suit in 1918. The Canadian military went into military time in 1917.

It wasn’t until the second World War (1942) that the United States Army adopted the 24-hour clock. The matter in which the 24-hour clock is read and spoken is agreed upon between the United States military and English-speaking allies, most notably the United Kingdom and Canada. While in the United States it may be 9:00 am, the military would refer to it as 0900, or zero nine hundred hours).

Over the years, there have been talks about the United States adopting the metric system and permanent daylight savings time. However, there have been very few pushes to adopt military time into civilian use. As the years go on, the pushes become fewer and farther between, too. A big reason for this is how familiar the 12-hour system is, as well as technology making it much easier to track and clarify the difference between am and pm.

If you’re in the United States, it can be easy to identify someone that has had a bit of military service depending on how they tell you the time. If the word “hundred” comes up for any time of the day, that’s a dead giveaway of military time. It remains to be seen if countries like the United States or Canada will adopt military time into everyday use, but for now, it’s reserved for members of the armed forces while civilians continue to work the 9 to 5 instead of the 0900 to 1700.