10 things I didn't know until last week

1. Indonesia and Maldives are the only Asian countries through which the Equator passes.
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2. The bald eagle isn’t bald at all. Bald is actually a derivation of “balde,” an Old English word meaning “white” and referring to the colour of its head and tail feathers.
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3. A collector of transportation tokens is called a vecturist.
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4. The flag used by the International Red Cross was originally designed to be the reverse of the flag of Switzerland - to commemorate Jean Henri Dunant and his native country Switzerland, historically a neutral nation.
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5. Orogeny - Greek for mountain generating - is the process of mountain formation, especially by a folding or faulting of the Earth’s crust.
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6. The thinly woven cotton or linen curtain used for special effects on the theater stage is called scrim. When lit from the front, scrim can appear as a solid wall. When lit from behind, shadows and shapes of objects or people are visible through it.
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7. The IATA abbreviation “ORD” for Chicago’s O’Hare airport comes from its original name, Orchard Field.
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8. Olympus Mons on Mars is the largest mountain in the solar system; it’s almost three times as tall as Mount Everest.
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9. It is indeed easy to hold a crocodile’s mouth shut - the muscles that open its jaws are much weaker than those used for snapping them shut. However, it’s not something unique to crocodiles - most animals have stronger muscles that shut the jaws compared to the ones that open them.
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10. Though it was known by that name unofficially for almost a century before, the White House officially gots its name in 1902 when Theodore Roosevelt adopted it.
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