A lot of people think Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity when he flew his kite with a key on it.   Electricity had already been discovered.  For quite some time actually.   What Mr. Franklin was doing that night during the lightning storm was trying to prove the electrical nature of lightning.

When he flew his silk kite with key at the end of it that night, a lot of people will tell you that it was struck by lightning.  Again, not true.  What he did notice was the fibers standing straight out on the thread he used to fly the kite.  Also when he touched the key after the short flight, he felt a small charge from it.  This was more than enough evidence to prove his theory that lightning was electricity.

To further prove his theory, a few months after Mr. Franklin did the kite test with key experiment, Professor Georg Wilhelm Richmann of St. Petersburg, Russia, attempted the same experiment.  He unfortunately proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that lightning not only was electricity, but was strong enough to kill a man, when a bolt of lightning hit his key, traveled down the wet string and killed him.

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If you ask anyone what kind of slippers did Cinderella wear to the ball, they would say, glass slippers.   Did you know, there are over 500 versions of the classic fairy tale dating back to the 9th century!  In each account, Cinderella wore a magic ring, or slippers made of gold, silver or even fur.  Sometimes they had her slippers covered in gems, or precious stones.  But they have never been glass slippers.

Some believe that we get our idea of glass slippers from an old French version where she wore fur slippers.  The French word for fur is Vair.   When it was translated several years later, it was written out as Verre, meaning glass.

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Those baby-faced people now have another reason to be smug: a new Danish study says looking young apparently means a longer life.

In 2001, Danish researchers conducted physical and cognitive tests on more than 1,800 pairs of twins over aged 70, as well as taking photos of their faces. Three groups of people who didn’t know the twins’ real ages guessed how old they were. The researchers then tracked how long the twins survived over 7 years.

The experts found that people who looked younger than their actual age were far more likely to survive, even after they adjusted for other factors like gender and environment. The bigger the difference in perceived age within any twin pair, the more likely it was that the older-looking twin died first.

They also found a possible biological explanation: people who looked younger also tended to have longer telomeres, a key DNA component that is linked to aging. People with shorter telomeres are thought to age faster. In the Danish study, the more fresh-faced people had longer telomeres.

The authors said that perceived age, which is widely used by doctors as a general indicator of a patient’s health, is a good biomarker of aging that predicts survival among people over age 70.