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| facts about flora, fauna, and nature are leaf green. () | facts about space are dead gold. () |
| facts about humanity, history, the world and natural phenomena are fuschia. () | facts about medicine, chemicals and the human body are blue. () |
| random, trivial facts about humanity and the world are orange. () | cool or notable 'famous last words' are indigo. () |
| specific facts relating to specific people are burnt orange. () | facts from win are teal. () |
| facts from jodi are turquoise. () | facts from pan are gunmetal cobalt. () |
| facts from krieg are salmon. () | facts from sammie are moss green. () |
| facts relating to high scores, world records, longest/oldest/etc are bubblegum pink. () | |
| milestone facts (every hundred at this stage) have a fancy rainbow border |
| there exists a species of frog which freezes solid on purpose to survive winter. |
| according to recent research, bees can understand the concept of zero. |
| in 2014, we found out that crows understand causal relationships and water displacement. |
| a particular species of crustaceans, the mantis shrimp, have the best eyes in the world. |
| mantis shrimp also have possibly the most powerful punches in the world. |
| there exists a measure of radiation by comparison to bananas. |
| octopi are really, really weird. |
| most species of shark only 'sleep' one side of their brains at any given time. |
| some sharks must be swimming at all times to pass water over their gills or they cannot breathe. |
| there is a lightbulb that has been nearly constantly switched on since 1901 and never needed replacement. |
| the "rarest" human combination of eye and hair colour is red hair and green eyes because they are both the result of recessive genes. |
| life didn't give us lemons. we made them. |
| you know how bananas don't taste like banana flavouring? some do! |
| weird and rare condition: fatal insomnia. |
| weird and rare genetic abnormality: xy gonadal dysgenesis. |
| ants have very strange sleeping patterns. |
| we also recently found out that nearly half of a colony's workforce are reserves, not active workers. |
| you'd need to kill and drain the blood from nearly 400 people to make a sword from the blood of your enemies. |
| there exists a man whose brain has approximately 10-20% of the volume of a "normal" brain who still lives a normal life. |
| ever wanted to watch a white blood cell eat a piece of bacteria? now you can! |
| lobsters are biologically immortal. broadly speaking, lobsters cannot die of old age in the same way that humans can.
most of them die either due to resource exhaustion while moulting, or due to not being able to moult any more, in which case either their exoskeleton collapses and they are vulnerable to injury, or they are crushed alive inside their exoskeleton as they grow. |
| there exists an exoplanet, HD189733b, on which the atmosphere is approx 1,000° Celsius and on which it rains molten glass, sideways, at around 7,000km/h. |
| Megadeth's Rust in Peace album was so named because Dave Mustaine was inspired by a bumper sticker. |
| Windows Millennium Edition was getting security updates and other related junk all the way through to 2006. |
| Alexander the Great once solved a particularly difficult problem/riddle (several knots in a piece of string) by either slicing it in half or removing it from its post enabling him to untangle it, which is why "cutting the Gordian knot" now is used as analogy to refer to solving a problem by operating outside of its defined constraints. |
| Steal This Album! from System of a Down was originally a leaked CD containing MP3 tracks titled "Toxicity 2". |
| our Sun has its own astrosphere which, among other purposes, protects us from background solar radiation. |
| celebrated author Roald Dahl died of a rare kind of blood cancer, where his red blood cells did not mature properly. |
| bonus: as he was dying, he told his family he was not afraid of death, rather the problem was that he would "miss them all so much" and closed his eyes having said the perfect last words. the attending nurse prepared a morphine injection to ease him along, and gently inserted the needle into his vein. the sudden pain made his official last words "ow, fuck!" |
| the Sentinelese peoples, of North Sentinel Island, remain as at time of writing one of the last, or possibly the last, officially uncontacted tribes in the world, with their current development status estimated to be around the Stone Age. |
| the Greenland Shark is currently thought to be the longest living vertebrate species, with some specimens clocked at nearly 400 years old. |
| KoЯn's backwards R comes from Toys Я Us, where many of the band members worked. |
| Albert Stewart Meek hunted butterflies with a shotgun. talk about overkill... |
| there exists a man-made variety of tree which grows approximately 40 different kinds of fruit on the same tree. they are created through the process of grafting. |
| "left-handed" sugar exists. it's a mirrored version of the regular glucose molecule but doesn't digest the same, making it almost carb-free. there are other consequences, but work has been done to see if this is a viable replacement for regular sugar. |
| Monotropa uniflora is a species of plant which does not contain or use chlorophyll like most other plants. it's parasitic and leeches nutrients off trees that do. because of this, it can grow in very dark environments. |
| As Slow As Possible, a musical piece composed by John Cage, usually takes between 20-70 minutes to play. a performance in Halberstadt, Germany is scheduled to last 639 years, taking the title very literally. |
| copies of the book Agrippa are intended to only be read once and either destroy or encrypt themselves after reading. |
| Vettuvan Koil is a temple which plunges 7.5m deep into the ground and is carved from a single piece of rock. |
| in 2004, we created the smoothest and most accurate spheres known to man so far, with a maximum error margin of 40 atoms. |
| Saturn has an as-yet unexplained polar hexagon which might be cloud-related. |
| the Arsia Mons cloud on Mars is one of the only known cloud formations which disappears and reappears in the same place with roughly the same dimensions each time. |
| turns out manta rays might actually be the smartest fish. |
| Paul the Octopus accurately predicted 12 out of the 14 soccer games he was asked to pick. |
| hip-hop music causes cheese to taste stronger than in comparison to cheese exposed to other music. |
| weird and rare medical condition: atavism, aka "snake heart syndrome". |
| violet flowers temporarily turn off your sense of smell. |
| the domain milk.com is owned not by a dairy related entity, but by some guy who uses it to shitpost and won't take less than $10 million to sell it. |
| there exists a particular species of sea slug which can "steal" chloroplasts from its prey and continue using them to photosynthesize sugars for nutrition. |
| bonus: here's another one, called the leaf sheep. |
| Jeff Bezos and the Long Now Foundation are building a clock designed to run without human intervention for ten thousand years. |
| NYC has so many 6-story apartment buildings because the city's water system can only pump water 6 stories high without outside intervention. |
| it can take several thousands or tens of thousands of years for a photon born at the heart of the sun to escape the sun's outer layer. |
| mosquitoes tend to only eat blood when they are producing eggs, or to increase egg yield. other than that, they eat flower nectar. |
| Steve Harris on Iron Maiden's song Transylvania: "The initial idea on this one was to have lyrics. It originally had a melody line for the vocal, but when we played it, it sounded so good as an instrumental that we never bothered to write lyrics for it.". |
| in 1912 to 1948, painting was a sport in the Olympics. |
| Apple bought the domain iphone.org in 1999, 8 years before it was introduced. |
| the world record for holding one's breath underwater is just over 24 minutes and 30 seconds. |
| Robert Liston, once called "the fastest knife in the West End", may have performed the only known surgery to date with a 300% mortality rate: his patient, his assistant and a spectator are said to have all died due to complications post-surgery. |
| although the result doesn't have much practical use, tequila can technically be turned into diamonds. |
| Kolyma Highway, in Russia's Far East, has somewhere between 250,000 and 1 million people entombed in its foundations. |
| slugs evolved from snails, and snails exposed to platinum during their life cycle turn into slugs. |
| the Great Whiskey Fire of Dublin, in 1875, caused approximately 13 casualties. none of them were due to contact with the fire, smoke inhalation or burns... they were all related to drinking the whiskey from the streets as it ran past. |
| the U.S state with the lowest population is not Alaska, it's actually Wyoming. |
| stercobilin, which is a by-product of the catabolism of heme (a precursor to hemoglobin), is responsible for the brown pigmentation of faeces. |
| Tug Of War used to be an Olympic event. |
| in Street Fighter Third Strike: Online Edition, the final parry challenge asks the player to re-create the Daigo parry. |
| the bony-eared assfish, along with having a hilarious name, also has the lowest brain-to-body-weight ratio of all vertebrates. |
| weird and rare medical condition: craniopagus parasiticus, a phenomenon where a fully developed baby has a second head with a fully developed second brain, but nothing else. |
| it's possible to marry dead people in France... with the permission of the President of France. |
| some brain cells grown in a dish learned how to play pong faster than an ai. |
| 2,000 year old roman concrete is sometimes stronger than modern concrete. |
| the Sigmodon inopinatus species' common name is the 'unexpected cotton rat', owing to the fact that researchers did not expect to find any cotton rats where they first found it. |
| a length of greater than 6 but less than 9 mm can be called bee length, or bee space, because leaving a 'bee length' between hive frames means they won't build honeycomb into it, nor cement it closed as they usually would with smaller or larger spaces. |
| due to (lazy) lat/long approximation, a random farm in Kansas has become the epicentre of any US-based IP geolocation query that cannot be further refined. |
| if you're a horrible person and you were to grind a sea sponge to bits into salt water, it would reorganize itself into a sea sponge afterwards. |
| Darwin's bark spider spins silk which is known to be the toughest biological material ever studied, in some cases over ten times tougher than a similarly-sized piece of Kevlar. |
| the mugger crocodile uses tools to hunt birds, which might be the first known example of tool use in reptiles. |
| a particular specimen of an Egyptian desert snail lived for four years glued to a postcard as a museum exhibit (and once discovered to be alive, lived another few years happily taken care of by the museum). |
| there is some evidence to suggest that a black pirate flag meant "we're coming to steal your things but if you behave we won't kill you" but a red one meant "we're coming to steal your things and kill you and we won't change our minds". |
| not all ant colonies treat their queens nicely. |
| here's a moving size comparison that goes from a single unit of DNA all the way up to the entire observable universe. |
| ever wanted to explore publicly broadcast radio stations? now you can. see also: #378 |
| crustaceans seem to collectively, but separately, evolve towards all being crabs. it's a localised, but extreme, example of convergent evolution. |
| chocolate and vanilla are consistently the most popular flavours of ice cream in the world, often flipping between each other between tests/polls/studies. |
| geographical areas with naturally occurring or supplemented lithium in their water supplies seem to have lower rates of suicide and inpatient psychiatric admissions [1] [2]. |
| one of the genes that controls how fingers/hands develop allows for the expression of polydactyly, which causes six (or sometimes more) fingers. it is actually the dominant gene compared to the one which causes five fingers, it just usually doesn't get expressed. |
| Dorothy Eady had some minor fame due to her (somewhat substantiated) belief that she was a reincarnation of Bentreshyt, a young Egyptian woman from ~1300BC. |
| the world's oldest straw is also likely to be one of the more expensive ever known - it was made of gold and lapis lazuli. |
| a particular mutation related to bone density has left a particular genetic line found in Connecticut with 'the strongest bones on the entire planet'. |
| Claude Monet may have been able to see the UV spectrum without external aids after a corrective eye surgery late in his life. |
| invertebrate iridescent virus 31 causes infected hosts to appear blue due to the way light reflects off the actual virions in the tissues. |
| the children of a particular tribe in Thailand are able to see underwater with near-perfect clarity, and a reasonable number of them retained this ability into their teenage years. |
| in some circumstances, drunk fish somehow convince sober fish to follow them. |
| evidence and cause are both shaky, but it seems that priests in ancient egypt were forbidden to eat onions [2] [3]. |
| a protein involved in the healthy development of a functional placenta during pregnancy was integrated into our genes via viral infection more than 25 million years ago (and without it, pregnancy would be very unstable). |
| Ritchie Valens, a pioneer of rock and roll, was killed in a plane crash eight months into his career. in order to further his music career he had gotten over his fear of flying, which had been deeply seated in him due to a near-head-on mid air collision near/over his school that killed several people and injured many more. he was not at school that day because he was attending a funeral. |
| following some remarks from the then-current commander in chief of the united kingdom's naval forces, submarine crews began flying the Jolly Roger to signify successful missions, with some flags even being gifted to crews by other crews or officers for particularly significant achievements. |
| bonus: after making or being gifted one, the crews would often update their Jolly Roger with sigils and symbols to display their achievements. |
| double bonus: the HMS Sibyl has a scarlet pimpernel mark on her Jolly Roger to commemorate the time a spy forgot the secret password and quoted from the play of the same name to prove herself. |
| a brand of candy called 'toxic waste' did actually end up having toxic waste in it (in this case lead). |
| humans are the only animals able to throw with precision. |
| the Moho braccatus, formerly the last surviving member of its entire genus, was recorded on tape for the final time calling for a mate that for obvious reasons would never come. |
| the half-moon at the bottom of your nails is called the lunula, and is involved in controlling how your nail grows. |
| to date, the only known graves located in/under an airport runway are those of Richard and Catherine Dotson - and the airport developers embedded a grave marker into the runway for them. |
| the babirusa, a genus in the swine family, are notable for their tusks - if not mitigated by the individual specimen, the tusks will curl upwards and inwards and pierce their forehead (and possibly their skull and brain). |
| bonus: said tusks actually pierce the jaw and flesh of the babirusa, and the dermis actually heals around and adheres to them. this is one of the only known occurrences of the dermis fully healing around a percutaneous (skin-piercing) structure. |
| flamingos aren't naturally pink and get their colour from what they eat. |
| guinea pigs in Switzerland are classed as social animals and must, by law, have a companion when in captivity. |
| to date, the deadliest single-craft accident in aviation history was Japan Air Lines flight 123, the cause of which was an improper rear bulkhead repair. |
| bonus: the crew kept the plane in the air for around half an hour after the initial incident, a feat which experienced crews who were a) using simulators, b) pre-warned of the parameters and the issues and c) not affected by hypoxia as the original crew was, were unable to reproduce [1] [2] [3]. |
| Terry Nichols currently holds the world record for the longest consecutive prison sentence, clocking in at 2,415 years without parole with a further 9,300 years of parole (using conservative calculations). |
| cool animal: Polyrhachis bihamata is a species of ant that has developed inwards-curving spines like fish hooks to discourage predators. |
| to date, the only known case of a movie literally scaring someone to death was The Quatermass Xperiment, which caused a 9 year old to rupture an artery (who lets a 9 year old see a movie like that anyway?). |
| a particular nanocrystalline form of diamond, aggregated diamond nanorods, is 'stronger' than natural diamond and can be naturally generated by, for example, meteor impact into graphite. |
| a polycrystalline and highly impure form of natural diamond called a carbonado is, in some cases, tougher than its more shiny counterpart. |
| along with identical and non-identical (ie fraternal) twins, there is an extremely rare third type: semi-identical, or sesquizygotic twins. |
| Ernest Hemingway, as in the extremely famous author, also participated in at least 3 wars (some in a non-combat capacity), survived 2 plane crashes (which occurred on successive days), was a chronic alcoholic and also survived various physical ailments like a broken skull, various liver issues and a near-uncountable amount of other miscellaneous acute and chronic injuries and ailments. |
| ticks are incredibly resilient and can survive 1. in a state of near-vacuum for as long as half an hour, 2. external temperatures of up to -30° Celsius (at least for a short time), 3. external temperatures of -18° Celsius for around two hours, and 4. external temperatures of between -9 and -2° Celsius for two weeks (or more). |
| bonus: ticks (of the family Ixodidae, being "hard-bodied" ticks) are even found in antarctica. |
| around 80% of commercially available "extra virgin olive oil" is actually combined with other (usually significantly lower quality) oils or 'filler' contaminants. |
| bonus: it's estimated that the illicit commercial gains from this scheme may be up to 3-4x as profitable as trading illegal drugs. |
| ascetics in Jainism take non-violence so seriously that, among other things, they carry a broom when walking to sweep smaller living things out of the way and wear fabric masks so they don't inhale (and kill) bugs. |
| when Marvin Pipkin started working for General Electric, he was assigned an 'impossible task' (design a frosted light bulb, but frosted on the inner layer) as a form of hazing or tomfoolery. unaware that it was considered impossible, he took it seriously, and succeeded. |
| Jannetje Johanna Schaft, after only being wounded by a firing squad instead of executed: "I shoot better.". |
| Thomas de Mahy, Marquis de Favras, upon reading his death warrant with a noose around his neck: "I see that you have made three spelling mistakes.". |
| Saint Laurence, after being literally grilled alive for quite some time: "I'm well done on this side, turn me over!" |
| approx 15cm (6 inches) of water will cover more than half the height of the wheels on most passenger cars, causing loss of steering control. |
| bonus: approx 30cm (1 foot) of water will cause most light vehicles to float, 60cm (2 feet) will cause most vehicles including heavy vehicles to float. |
| whales and other non-gill-breathing aquatic mammals can actually drown due to their reliance on gaseous air. |
| around 54,000 tennis balls are kept at wimbledon to be used in games and training. |
| bonus: they are all strictly stored at 20° Celsius (68° Fahrenheit) to ensure all of their physical dynamic properties remain consistent and uniform. |
| Ocimum tenuiflorum is sacred in Hinduism, and... |
| ...also has disinfectant, nematocidal, insect repellant and air purifying properties. |
| chronologically, we are closer to the t-rex than the t-rex was to the stegosaurus [1] [2]. |
| Harvard was founded before calculus was conceptualised. [1] [2] |
| Joan Pujol Garcia received two of the highest possible military honours in World War 2... each from opposing sides. |
| Arilus cristatus has a preference for laying its small tubular eggs in a hexagonal cluster [1] [2]. |
| long, long ago, Bayer marketed heroin as a cure for children's coughs and colds. |
| Cagots, as a distinct social group, were ostracised and discriminated against for nearly 1000 years, and nobody is certain why. |
| North Korea and Finland are only separated by one country though it helps that said country is Russia.... |
| there's an unexploded nuclear bomb chillin' off the coast of Georgia and nobody knows exactly where. |
| Issus coleoptratus has the only 'mechanical' gears ever found in nature. |
| someone managed to sell the Eiffel Tower, despite not owning it. he nearly did it twice. |
| due to their colouring, tomatoes were once thought to be poisonous. |
| cool animal: Slimonia acuminata, found in the oceans around 467 million years ago, used its tail like a sword to kill prey it grasped with its front claws. |
| geosmin, produced by various algaes and bacteria, is responsible for petrichor, the smell of earth after rain (along with the chemical ozone and a few other things). |
| bonus: we can detect geosmin at concentrations as low as 0.4 parts per billion, which makes us several times more sensitive to it than sharks are to blood (max sensitivity one part per million) [1] [2]. |
| the Guinness Book of World Records itself holds the record for the book most often stolen from public libraries. |
| a small amount of people can deliberately control a muscle in their ears to change how things sound. |
| Charles Dickens, the famous author, may have been an actor instead of an author had a head cold not prevented him from auditioning. |
| although the direct cause of sunburn is heat/UV radiation from the sun, it's not that our skin actually 'burns'. the phenomenon is caused by skin cells committing mass suicide (medically known as apoptosis) to avoid the subsequent generation of cancerous cells. |
| ketchup, as in the tomato based sauce, was once sold as a medicine. |
| your immune system does not ordinarily know your eyes exist in order to protect them from a damaging immune response. other sites in the body which are immunoprivileged are the testes and the fetus and placenta (when they exist). |
| bonus: traumatic injury to immunoprivileged organs or their surroundings can prompt said organs to lose their immunoprivileged status (due to the immune response to injury), which can lead to disastrous results for those organs. |
| sound travels through steel over 17 times faster than it does through air. |
| the orbital floor, a thin shelf of bone under the eyeball, seems purposed specifically to fracture or break on impact in order to protect the eye from a catastrophic pressure increase. |
| hunters from the bajau tribe in asia can hold their breath for around 13 minutes straight underwater. |
| the liver has the greatest regenerative capacity of any organ in the body, which might also have implications for other treatments and therapies. |
| mutations in the melanocortin-1 receptor gene cause red hair... along with an increased resistance to anaesthetic. |
| there is a piece of landscaping design element called a ha-ha (the etymology of which is disputed). |
| vulture bees are somewhat like regular bees, except that they feed on carrion (ie dead flesh) and make 'honey' out of it. |
| bonus: they do this using the same glands that honeybees use to make royal jelly. |
| cool animal: red triangle slugs have a triangular shape on their dorsum surrounding their pneumostome (breathing hole) which is composed of muscle-bound calcium. |
| bonus: they can secrete a kind of adhesive which glues predators (or prey) in place for days at a time, and it works better when it's wet. |
| cool animal: Mount Kaputar pink slug, located only at the top of Mount Kaputar (an isolated sky island). it's literally entirely fluorescent pink. |
| lots of mollusks actually do have teeth (of a sort). |
| moon snails use a combination of acid and circular boring using their radula to drill holes in their prey's hard shells. |
| cone snails use their radula like a harpoon to hunt prey, and tip it with poison/toxins. they can strike at any point on, around or (within a small area) near their shell. |
| two species of cone snail also secrete insulin to force their prey into hypoglycaemic shock. they are the only known animals so far to use insulin as a weapon. |
| ziconotide is an atypical analgesic, 1,000 times more powerful than morphine, which is derived from a toxin found in cone snails. |
| cool animal: Colobopsis explodens - they grab intruders and enemies and intentionally rupture their own bodies with force to coat foes in a toxic substance. an exploding ant using this technique can kill an enemy ant quite a lot bigger than itself [1] [2] [3]. |
| Henrik Ibsen, when a nearby nurse informed a visitor his condition was improving: "On the contrary." he died the next day. |
| the white bellbird is the loudest bird in the world (bonus: video of it yelling). |
| Rudolph Valentino, Pola Negri, Russ Colombo, Joe Casino, James Willis and Jack Dunn all met their end (one by one) due to coming into ownership/custody of a supposedly cursed ring. |
| in a crisis or critical emergency, coconut water can be used for emergency intravenous hydration. |
| fluoroantimonic acid is the strongest acid currently known. it can only be contained by a vessel lined with teflon and could, in theory, dissolve an entire body in less than half an hour. |
| Harlow Shapley, apart from changing his mind when presented with differing evidence which is an achievement in and of itself, was one of the first astronomers to believe in and find proof of galaxy superclusters (which he had previously disputed the existence of). |
| Georgia (as in the country near Turkey) holds all of the top four known deepest cave systems. |
| Lake Peigneur, situated above a huge salt mine, was accidentally drained into the mine by oil driller employees.
the incident caused 0 human fatalities, but killed 3 dogs and caused significant environmental disruption and damage. |
| a female ferret who enters heat and does not mate will die due to estrogen-induced aplastic anemia. |
| there is a social phenomenon in the Philippines relating to people murdering each other over the singing of Frank Sinatra's "My Way". |
| Ireland has attributed hundreds of driving offenses to Prawo Jazdy, supposedly various different people from Poland according to the driver's license details. Prawo Jazdy is Polish for 'driver's license'. |
| Mosinee, Wisconsin's mayor died of a heart attack after surrendering to a mock Communist invasion.
(yes, you read that right, and yes, it's as crazy as it sounds) |
| Wolfgang Pauli is known first for the Pauli exclusion principle, but second for the Pauli effect: intelligent or exceptional theorists cause observational and measuring equipment used in practical experiments to break. |
| bonus: R. Peierls set up a 'fake Pauli effect' by rigging a chandelier to fall and smash on the ground when Pauli entered a reception. upon Pauli's entrance, the trigger was activated, but failed, thus turning a fake Pauli effect occurrence into a real Pauli effect occurrence. |
| when ants are alive, they constantly emit chemicals/pheromones. the absence of these chemicals, rather than lack of physical activity, tells other ants that a subject ant has died, along with eventual accumulation of oleic acid. |
| bonus: dropping oleic acid on a live ant causes their colony to treat it as if it is dead. they carry it to the colony graveyard even if it is literally alive and kicking, and will forcibly carry it back again when it leaves the graveyard. |
| double bonus: Trix contains oleic acid as a fungal inhibitor. dropping a Trix into a colony causes them to treat the Trix as the new graveyard due to the high (compared to a dead ant) oleic acid concentration. |
| the wet-bulb temperature (WBT) refers to the air temperature when at maximum relative humidity. a WBT of 32° Celsius will incapacitate almost all humans, even those who are well heat adapted. |
| bonus: a WBT of 35° Celsius is invariably fatal within a few hours due to the body no longer being able to regulate its temperature by exchanging heat with the environment. |
| Celia, the last extant wild mountain goat of the bucardo species, extincted her species when she was crushed by a falling tree. her species was un-extincted by 'Jurassic Park'ing her DNA. |
| bonus: although said pregnancy was successful, the offspring's lungs were severely deformed and it died seven minutes after birth, making bucardos the only species to go extinct twice. |
| most, if not all, metallic (aluminium, steel, etc) cans have a plastic epoxy layer on the inside to avoid them corroding and releasing byproducts into the contents. [1] [2] |
| there exist a large number of voids or 'supervoids' in the observable universe, in which the average density of galaxies or cosmic structures is far lower than seen elsewhere. |
| bonus: it has been (controversially) postulated that the characteristics of some of these voids supports the existence of parallel universes. |
| Wojtek the Syrian brown bear smoked cigarettes, drank beer, was enlisted in the Polish Army as a private in order to allow transport for him on a military ship, was then officially promoted to Corporal for outstanding service, carried ammunition alone that would have taken four men to carry, and retired to Edinburgh Zoo when the war was over. |
| Lynlee, from Lewisville, Texas is likely the only human to have been "born twice". |
| the possibility that "microclots" in the blood are responsible for chronic fatigue syndrome along with long-covid related symptoms is currently being investigated. |
| doctors Angus Wallace and Tom Wong once performed emergency surgery in mid-air aboard a flight using scavenged supplies including cognac for sterilisation, silverware as surgical clamps and a coathanger/urinary catheter/water bottle lid assembly as a chest tube. |
| cool animal: the net-casting spider weaves a basket-like net and uses it as an implement to ambush and trap prey. |
| cool animal: cup moths have psychedelic coloured caterpillar stages. |
| after the USS West Virginia was sunk during the battle of Pearl Harbor, three men survived in an airtight storeroom for sixteen days under the water.
they could not be rescued because the pressure equalisation would have killed both the rescuers and the rescuees. |
| Archimedes had a theory of calculus published around 530 AD, but the book it was in was erased and overwritten by a monk. |
| pulmonary surfactant allows our lungs to expand and contract without sticking to each other and/or collapsing. |
| bonus: infant respiratory distress syndrome is caused by a lack of pulmonary surfactant and/or structural immaturity of the lungs, and is the leading cause of death of newborns within the first month of life. |
| locusts are actually just upgraded grasshoppers. |
| cool plant: Rhizanthella gardneri is a member of the orchid family and spends its entire life cycle underground, embedded in soil. |
| birds have extremely efficient respiratory systems compared to mammals, and their lungs work unidirectionally rather than bidirectionally like ours. |
| bonus: the respiratory systems of birds are closer to the respiratory systems of dinosaurs than they are to those of mammals (as far as we can tell). |
| Dromiidae is a family of crabs that are notable for their ability to convince a living sea sponge to act as a portable shelter for them. |
| bonus: lots of Dromiidae are very furry, especially this recently discovered one. |
| opiorphin is an endogenous compound which can be isolated from saliva, and it can have an analgesic effect greater than that of morphine. |
| saliva has many functions that are useful beyond the obvious use in eating and digestion, namely due to antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral, coagulant and tissue growth agents (among various others). |
| lysozome, apart from being an endogenic antibacterial agent, is able to cause other cells to rupture and burst by intentionally manipulating the osmotic pressure around the other cell. |
| Huy Fong Foods, which produces one of the most recognisable hot sauces in the world and made over $150m USD in revenue in 2022, does not advertise its products at all and relies on word of mouth. |
| bonus: David Tran, the founder, taught himself welding and machinery skills and built the foundation for his sauce-making during his time in the South Vietnamese Army. |
| Alexis Carrel kept an in vitro clump of chicken heart tissue alive for 30 years without it ever having been in a body. |
| particularly cold weather in Snag, Yukon (capping out at -62.8° Celsius without wind chill) caused people's breath to freeze in front of their faces, ordinary sounds to travel for nearly 6km, and could have caused exposed skin to freeze in around three minutes. |
| ibuprofen (aka nurofen, advil, etc) belongs to a class of drug called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. their main method of action is to inhibit the creation of inflammatory agents, which means they are generally ineffective against pain that isn't a result of inflammation.
conversely, paracetamol (panadol, tylenol etc) seems to act mostly by meddling with the brain's chemical receptors [2] in order to kick the natural pain regulation system into overdrive and decrease the upwards action of the body's thermal system. you should avoid using ibuprofen for pain when the inflammation is important to the healing or damage mitigation process, such as a still-bleeding cut, and you should avoid using paracetamol for pain when you have a fever due to viral infection because viruses don't like high temperatures and your body is trying to burn them out. in short: it's important to understand your physiology and what medications are doing! |
| myrmecophily, referring to interspecies associations between ants and other species, can be mutualistic, commensal, opportunistic, obligate, facultative or even parasitic. however, a large portion of the interactions are mutualistic, and a staggering number of species interact positively with ants.
interactions can result in the ants giving or receiving services and resources including but not limited to food, protection, cleaning/hygiene, housing/shelter and nursery services. |
| bonus: myrmecophytes are plants which have developed mutualistic relationships with ants. a large portion of them seem to have developed adaptations specifically for ants to use, such as Myrmecodia. |
| double bonus: some plants defined as myrmecophytes produce auxiliary food bodies, which can be plucked and taken away without damage to the plant. this encourages species such as ants to protect the plant. |
| Vladimir Komarov reportedly spent the last few minutes of his life yelling incoherently at the ground control team while falling to earth from space in the soyuz-1 module. the module had experienced various equipment failures, not least the drag parachute deploying incorrectly, the main parachute failing to deploy, and the reserve parachute getting tangled in the drag chute.
the module hit the ground at approx 40m/s. komarov's remains were defined as "an irregular lump". |
| a strange and poorly-understood single celled organism family called slime mould a) is only visible during one stage of its life cycle, b) exhibits both navigation skills and spatial memory (which is highly unusual for a single celled organism), c) look really weird and d) can amalgamate learned knowledge such as food locations when fusing into their plasmodial stage. |
| cool animal: the bombardier beetle can be found everywhere on earth except Antarctica, and primarily defends itself by ejecting a (literally) boiling mixture containing 1,4-benzoquinone which is an irritant to the eyes and respiratory systems of vertebrates (and can even be fatal!). |
| Masha the cat saved an abandoned baby in Russia. she kept him warm and was uncharacteristically vocal in an attempt to solicit help from nearby humans. |
| birds literally can't feel/taste capsaicin, which is responsible for the burning feeling in your mouth when you eat a chili/pepper.
it's theorised that this is some kind of synergistic plant/animal relationship, because the birds are perfect candidates to spread the plant seeds. |
| bonus: cats can't taste sugar, but they can taste adenosine triphosphate, which is the organic compound that powers bodies. |
| Queen Elizabeth II will be interred in a lead-lined coffin, like most of the Royal Family before her. this is because the Royal memorial vault is above ground and lead helps to make an airtight seal. |
| bonus: as at time of writing, Elizabeth II retains the record for the second-longest uninterrupted reign ever recorded.
also the longest reign by a female. |
| the thing on the end of a shoelace is called an aglet. |
| the sky is blue because the wavelength of light corresponding to the colour blue scatters through our atmosphere easier than other colours. |
| bonus: the ocean is blue because water molecules absorb the rest of the red wavelengths that come through the atmosphere, which means the water reflects only blue. |
| Robert Landsburg photographed Mount St Helens several times in the weeks leading up to its eruption. the volcano erupted on May 18, and he was too close to the summit at the time to survive. realising this, he took photos of everything he could, packed his camera into his backpack and lay himself on top of it. because of this, his pictures could be saved and provided valuable information about the event. |
| Japan is running out of Japanese whiskey to sell due to an unexpected rocket launch in sales after a disappointing market showing in around the 1980s. |
| Earth has an ozone layer, which is a part of the atmosphere that makes life here possible. using CFCs, we made a hole in it which at time of writing fluctuates in size but is slowly closing. |
| due to some kind of anatomical abnormality (or possibly defect), some people can overcome the pressure in a downwards valve in their sinus/ENT system and force the pressure upwards instead, leading to the ability to expel air and sometimes liquids from their tear ducts. |
| through some astonishing technical bullshit, some scientists in Germany have literally stopped traveling light inside a crystal for about a minute. the light was then released from the crystal and the image it was carrying was still distinguishable on the other side. |
| "crystal" glassware is more sparkly than regular glass because it's (deliberately) contaminated with metals. |
| bonus: older crystal glassware used lead as the contaminant, until we worked out that lead was poisonous when consumed. newer crystal uses things like barium and zinc. |
| speaking of contaminants, uranium glass is consumer-grade glassware doped with, you guessed it, uranium. some runs/pieces were made with up to 25% uranium. |
| the Japanese art/practice of kintsugi/kintsukuroi refers to repairing broken items using materials mixed with gold, silver or platinum. this is done because it is believed that the breakage and repair is part of the history of the object and shouldn't be hidden. |
| the Radium Girls were female factory workers who painted self-luminous material (mostly containing radium) onto watch faces/dials. as part of their work, they ended up consuming enough radium to kill them.
the company they worked for (and largely the 'radium industry') repeatedly denied that radium was harmful. |
| bonus: the actions of the Radium Girls and their supporters laid the foundations for employers' responsibilities for workplace health and safety in the USA. |
| when cats sway their rear quarter before jumping, they're actually checking their balance and trying to ensure they can make the jump safely. |
| the posterior end of a wombat (Australian marsupial) is composed of very thick plates of bone and cartilage. the wombat uses this to make, and sometimes defend, their burrow. it's highly resistant to punctures and scrapes, which local predators would typically inflict. |
| bonus: when defending their burrow, they have also been known to use their shield ass to crush the skulls of predators who manage to slip their snout past the shield. |
| double bonus: wombats are the only known animals to have cube shaped faeces. |
| the tails of snow leopards are among the longest and fluffiest in the feline world. they are frequently seen to hold said tails in their mouths. the postulated reasons are a) to keep their delicate nose warm, b) because the tail is heavy and the base muscles get tired, and c) to play/because they're bored. mother leopards also use their tails as a blanket for their kittens. [2] |
| cool tree: Hura crepitans, affectionately known as the dynamite tree, spreads its seeds from its ripe fruit by exploding the fruit and shooting the seeds like a bullet. |
| when corvids lose a member of their tribe under suspicious circumstances, they investigate the cause so they know if there is a future threat to avoid. |
| water with an unusually high concentration of oxygen is near-impossible to float or swim in. |
| bonus: highly turbulent and bubbly water (which therefore has a high concentration of oxygen), or a high concentration of naturally occuring methane, can literally sink ships (in theory).
it's theorised this is what causes the Bermuda Triangle effect, ie the loss of so many seafaring vessels in that area. |
| there's no authoritative source, but it's postulated that the 100 pleats on a chef's hat are meant to represent the amount of recipes they know. |
| the use of the term 'bug' to refer to a software issue is frequently attributed to Admiral Grace Hopper in reference to a literal moth found in a computer, however Thomas Edison actually popularised it first, and even he was using it as an already-established term. |
| the Australian white ibis, colloquially called the bin chicken, is actually a great example of an animal adapting to oppressive urban environments. [2] |
| lots of hardware chips and components have tiny drawings on them. the reasons include but aren't limited to the designer's 'signature', in-jokes and memes. |
| cool animal: Uraba lugens sheds its skin multiple times throughout its development. this is not unusual in itself, however when it sheds, it retains its old 'head' every time, which leads to this.
it's nicknamed the 'mad hatterpillar' for this reason. |
| Psychrolutes marcidus, better known as the blobfish, is frequently maligned for looking like sad pink nuclear waste. this appearance is an unfortunate side effect of severe decompression damage from being dragged up from the seafloor where they reside. they normally look like this. |
| while crustaceans are normally thought of as aquatic animals, some are actually terrestrial, such as Talitridae (aka lawn prawns). |
| Charlie Chaplin might have lost a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest, however he entered without his moustache and boots. |
| bonus: Dolly Parton lost a Dolly Parton lookalike contest too. |
| the Australian lungfish can, as its name suggests, breathe terrestrial air and survive out of water for a couple of days. based on fossil records, the genus has changed very little in several hundred million years. |
| a patient in Britain in the 1960s had a large malignant meningioma removed from her brain on the advice of voices in her head, which she reported were not her own. |
| cool animal: Synalpheus pinkfloydi can generate a sound which could in theory reach 210 dB. the sound instantly kills nearby small fish.
i say in theory because a sound at 180 dB would catalyse instant death of hearing tissue and the loudest sound possible on land would be 194 dB. and yes, it was named after pink floyd. |
| crocodiles hold the record for the strongest bite force ever measured in a laboratory setting, clocking in at 16,000 newtons.
for reference, a Rottweiler has an average bite strength of 1,490 N. |
| bonus: despite the incredible down force, a crocodile's jaws can be physically held shut by human hands or even tape.
this is because the muscles used to control the opening of the jaw are tiny and weak. |
| rats have the best-adapted jaws of the rodent world.
while they don't "specialise" in front-tooth gnawing or back-tooth chewing, they are better at both than other rodents that do specialise. |
| bonus: rats can exert between 6,000-24,000 PSI of force (measurements vary quite a bit).
a rat able to exert this much pressure in bite strength would have to have teeth the size of your thumb, so... PSI isn't great for measuring small precise forces. |
| double bonus: rat teeth are harder than iron, copper and human teeth. |
| woodpecker tongues wrap around their brains, which affords them some protection from brain injury due to force impact. |
| bonus: while a human experiences a concussion at a g-force of around 60-100, a woodpecker's peck can exert 1200-1400 g's of force on its own body with each peck without obvious impact or issue. |
| cool/weird animal: Chionodraco rastrospinosus is notable for the fact that its blood is completely transparent due to the lack of haemoglobin. |
| kangaroos can't move backwards. |
| bonus: the Australian Commonwealth Coat of Arms includes a kangaroo and an emu, chiefly because it's near-impossible for either animal to move backwards. |
| part of the reason cats can jump so far and with such accuracy is something called a primordial pouch, which allows their bodies and muscles to extend, twist and stretch more than they otherwise would. |
| part of the reason cats are so flexible is that their clavicle (collarbone) isn't attached to the rest of their skeleton. |
| due to the Earth's oblate spheroid shape, the polar regions experience days and nights lasting several weeks or months at a time. [1] [2] |
| used in chemotherapy, 'bullets' of cobalt-60 in containment tubes are clearly marked with the words "DROP & RUN" - they are instructions on what to do if you can read them.
generally speaking, the more serious the warning (or more immediate the hazard), the fewer/more direct words it will use. |
| octopi sometimes punch fish for no apparent reason during cooperative hunting expeditions.
sometimes it's to tell fish not to take a certain item of prey, sometimes it doesn't seem to have any direct benefit. |
| Johns Hopkins university conferred an honorary degree to a service dog who attended all his human's classes with said human. |
| from the late 1800s to roughly the 1980s, "horse diving" was a thing. they were ridden and directed to dive off platforms which at their highest were around 20 metres high.
Sonora Webster, one of the most famous horse divers, lost her vision when a dive went partially wrong, but she kept diving for a long time afterwards. |
| bonus: the movie "Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken" (1991) was based on the true story of Sonora Webster, a famous horse diver. as part of the movie, horses did actually dive into tanks/pools under the supervision of the American Humane Association.
some of them were even seen to dive into the pools unaided/undirected, as if they enjoyed it. |
| jabuticaba fruits grow directly on the trunks/branches of their trees. |
| the component of spice that causes the burning sensation is capsaicin. capsaicin can be broken down by casein, found in dairy, and it can be absorbed by starchy products like bread. this means two of the most effective methods for removing spice from your mouth are milk and bread. |
| the cuckoo order of birds co-opts other birds to raise its young. |
| bonus: when cuckoos noticed their eggs missing from host nests, they destroyed the nest.
possibly to encourage future compliance? rebuilt nests in the same place were also destroyed. it's theorised that host species can tell which eggs aren't theirs, but keep them anyway because they are aware of this behaviour. |
| due to its nature, morse code can be logically represented by a binary tree structure. |
| the 4 beat timing base of the mission impossible theme spells "MI" in morse ( - - | . . )
this one hardly needs a citation lmao |
| horseshoe crabs have nine eyes. |
| bonus: horseshoe crabs aren't even crabs. |
| due partially to the human tendency towards pareidolia, heikegani crabs are believed to have the souls and faces of fallen Samurai.
it was speculated for a while that this was because the crabs which looked like Samurai were actively thrown back. this hypothesis is disputed. |
| the "fact" that lemmings commit mass suicide is entirely a fabrication, constructed by Disney via several film crew literally throwing tens of the unfortunate marsupials off a cliff. |
| Claudius Drusus, eldest son of Roman emperor Claudius, is thought to have died when he choked on a pear he threw in the air.
foul play is, however, suspected. additionally, it is reported that the offending tree was tried for murder, uprooted and burned. |
| the first bomb dropped on Berlin during World War 2 killed nobody except 8 elephants. |
| Qin Shi Huang foiled an assassination attempt primarily by running repeatedly around a structural pillar, which gave him time to draw his sword. |
| Montenegro, allied with Russia, declared war on Japan in 1904 but didn't officially declare peace until 2006. |
| sharks (est 450 million years ago (MYA)) existed before plants (est 350MYA). |
| there are more trees on Earth than there are stars in the Milky Way. |
| until 2011, anything with an alcohol content of less than 10% wasn't considered an 'alcoholic beverage' in Russia. |
| based on some moderately reliable sources, pirates wore earrings and other jewelry to allow payment for burial in foreign ports, should death be sudden and unplanned.
it's also theorised they wore jewelry as a kind of 'fuck you' to the establishment, who said men shouldn't wear jewelry. |
| bonus: morgan freeman wears them for the first reason above. |
| some five-pointed starfish can be born square, instead of star shaped due to birth/genetic defects.
no, i don't like using twitter as a source, but photo evidence is fairly reliable. |
| despite how counter-intuitive it sounds, Cleopatra (~30 BC) lived closer to the opening of the first Pizza Hut (1958) than she did to the building of the Great Pyramids (~2560 BC). |
| London's Tower Bridge has a little-known mortuary under it, built due to the amount of bodies that would wash up in that location and need attention.
the area is tiled, because bodies would often wash up there and not be seen for days - hence they would explode due to gases generated during decomposition. tiles are easier to power wash clean than other surfaces. |
| the only two known species to be susceptible to leprosy are humans and armadillos. |
| Piwnica Świdnicka is the oldest continuously-operating restaurant in Poland, and certainly one of the oldest continuously-operating in Europe.
it was largely untouched by bombings in WWII. |
| if you un-spun all the wires in the Golden Gate Bridge down to individual strands and laid them end to end, they would wrap around the planet more than three times (at the equator). |
| spider legs don't have any 'muscles', as we know them. their legs are controlled by tensors for contraction and hydraulic pressure for extension.
this is the reason their legs curl inwards when they die - the tensors are constantly pulling the legs inwards. only hydraulic pressure flexes them outwards. without the hydraulics, their natural state is flexed inwards. |
| cool animal: scaly-foot gastropods are basically iron snails and live near/in/around hydrothermal vents in water temps between 50-350° Celsius. [1] [2] |
| Michel Lotito suffered from pica, which led to him becoming famous for literally eating an entire plane. |
| although primates can be taught to communicate meaningfully (including the use of sign language), one of the major things setting them apart from us is that they don't ask questions about themselves, their environment, other primates or really just in general. |
| Phineas Gage is famous for (somewhat inexplicably) surviving an iron javelin being literally shot through his head. he recovered quite well after the incident and is one of the most significant examples of brain injury changing personality. |
| weird and rare medical condition: empty nose syndrome can make sufferers feel like they are constantly suffocating or unable to breathe despite no obstruction to air flow. |
| some towns around the world, such as Zuidhoek-Nieuwkoop in the Netherlands, have installed red streetlights in an effort to make their night-time light footprint less invasive on bats. |
| Sean's Bar is at least the oldest continuously-operating pub in Ireland and Europe, and possibly the world. |
| chickens sing a song both before and after laying an egg. |
| the Victoria Cross, the highest military award in the British Honors system, has since its inception been cast from the metal of Chinese cannons captured between 1839 and 1842. |
| bonus: every Victoria Cross ever produced in and for Britain, as well as every Victoria Cross equivalent ever produced for Australia and New Zealand, has been produced with only metal from said cannons. |
| somewhere around the 12th century BC, there was a widespread societal collapse across various civilisations. very few records from this period survive, and from what historians/archaeologists/etc can piece together, the possible causes range from droughts, floods and other weather phenomena to all-out cross-civilisation war. |
| various naturally-derived substances are susceptible to spontaneous combustion and autoignition, which means they literally set on fire with no external source of ignition (except ambient heat and light). [1] [2] [3] |
| scars use collagen from the body to stay closed. vitamin c is essential for the production of collagen. scurvy, being a severe vitamin c deficiency, causes a severe reduction in collagen stores. these things together mean that the scars of a person afflicted with scurvy are liable to spontaneously disintegrate. |
| mosquitoes take almost no damage or impact from being hit by raindrops, despite the fact that on average raindrops weigh 50x as much as a mosquito.
this is the rough equivalent to a human being hit and run over by a bus, and taking little to no damage. |
| cool animal: Chrysina limbata is a beetle whose carapace is naturally visually similar to reflective silver (or chrome). |
| cool (?) animal: Australian brown falcons deliberately spread fires in order to flush out small prey animals.
it's theorised they might be responsible for a fair portion of Australia's largest fires. |
| the first pilot of the first jet plane developed by the USAF flew it while wearing a gorilla suit so other pilots could be gaslit into believing what they saw wasn't real, due to the clandestine nature of the project. |
| the diet of Australian drop bears would be fatal to most other mammals due to the high level of toxins. |
| crown shyness is a biological feature of some tree species. it means their top canopies do not touch or impinge on each other.
it's theorised they detect neighbours by tuning into particular wavelengths of scattered light. |
| the son of the tree that owns itself is widely assumed to have legal ownership of itself and the land about eight feet around it. |
| Canada's Mount Thor has the world's longest continuous unimpeded vertical drop.
it's just over 1219.2 m/4,000 feet from top edge to bottom landing. it would take an average human approximately 15.5 uninterrupted seconds to fall from top to bottom. |
| most people are familiar with a 'mayday' call, being an outbound communication from a vessel meaning there is an emergency of some sort on board. pan-pan, a lesser known call, is a step down from mayday and means something is, or might be, wrong but doesn't qualify as an emergency yet. |
| bonus: both mayday and pan-pan are derived from French (mayday being a creative contraction of 'venez m'aider', or 'come help me', and pan-pan referencing 'panne', or 'breakdown'). |
| a particular frat party in Maryland, Baltimore consumed so much alcohol that the air inside the house showed a positive reading on a breathalyzer. [1] [2] |
| Queen's "We Will Rock You" is the song scientifically most liable to get stuck in your head. |
| to 'batten down the hatches' is an old nautical term which these days means to buckle down and prepare for trouble, but its origins are more literal: older ships had hatches in their decks to access the lower decks, and battens were lengths of rod which were used to fasten the hatches in a closed position. |
| during a Black Sabbath concert in 1982, Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a live bat on stage and had to get tested for rabies. |
| Bluetooth, as in the wireless communication technology, is named after Harald Blåtand Gormsen, a 10th-century Viking king. |
| given a mildly restrictive set of circumstances, counting cricket chirps can give you a remarkably accurate approximation of the temperature. |
| one of the most important reasons we have finger and toe nails is mechanical and evolutionary in nature: they provide counter pressure against our otherwise fleshy fingers and allow us to feel and manipulate with a lot of dexterity. |
| England's Alnwick Garden has a small section called the poison garden which is home to about 100 of the most toxic, narcotic, and otherwise harmful plants known to man. |
| the Treaty of Waitangi, which lays out the terms of British sovereignty/government over the Māori people, was written in both English and te reo Māori. the English version says the British get sovereignty over Māori land, people and affairs, but the Māori version says the British only get authority for lawmaking and that the Māori retain control over culture, land and people. disputes related to this mistranslation/misunderstanding still have effects today. |
| the first known named cat was Nedjem, around the time of Thutmose III (1479-1425 BCE).
her name roughly translated to "sweetie" or "lovely". |
| the etymology of the phrase 'bite the bullet' might be more literal than you expected. |
| Coca-Cola used to contain, and probably derived its name from, cocaine as an ingredient. |
| in 2023, the Denver Nuggets broke their 38 season playoffs losing streak, the longest in American sports history. |
| black, which looks like this: is not the same as the colour you see when you close your eyes, which looks like this: and is called eigengrau. |
| Johnny Cash's famous song about a boy named Sue, where a young man is named Sue by his father in order to make his life hard so he gets tough, might or might not have been inspired by renowned lawyer and judge Sue K. Hicks.
Johnny only took the name for inspiration; Hicks' life story is very different to Cash's character's story. |
| polar bears have two coats of fur. the outer coat is hollow and transparent, the inner coat is not hollow but still transparent. their skin is actually black. they appear white because of the properties of light when it's scattered evenly, which is accomplished by the transparent fur. |
| when Mr. Rogers' (very plain) car was stolen, he filed a police report which pretty much every media outlet in the area picked up. within 48 hours, the car was returned, near untouched, exactly where it had been stolen from, with a note on the dashboard which read "If we'd known it was yours, we never would have taken it". |
| certain species of octopi have been observed to create nurseries for their young. |
| the exact mechanism is not known, but whiskers can form in various metals. they are tiny hair-like projections that retain all the properties of the material they come from... including conductivity. this means they can short out electronic devices as well as cause various other kinds of damage, and they have been responsible for the loss of satellites and false positive shutdowns in nuclear plants, among other things. |
| bonus: in certain conditions such as those found in space, tin whiskers can be instantly ionized into a plasma that is capable of conducting large amounts of electricity, which significantly increases the damage potential of the short. more on whiskers from nasa. |
| the Kola Superdeep Borehole is at time of writing the lowest artificial point on Earth and extends roughly 12,262 linear metres below the surface. |
| in equivalent measurements, Australia is actually wider than the moon. [1] [2]
of course, the moon has significantly more surface area, but if measured as 'diameter vs point to point land width', Australia wins. |
| in the 1960s, Goodyear managed to engineer light-up/glowing tyres, made of neothane.
neothane is partially transparent and would have been a good tyre material but for the fact it melts when it gets too hot, and it has poor performance when wet. |
| Adam Rainer is the only person in recorded history to have been both a (medically classified) dwarf and a (medically classified) giant. |
| lactose-free dairy products are produced not by taking the lactose out, but by adding an enzyme (lactase) that breaks down the lactose in-situ.
most mammals naturally produce lactase for the same reason when young, with levels dropping as milk is weaned out of the diet. |
| bonus: we currently think that humans developed lactase persistence, where lactase continues to be produced after infancy, at the same time as we worked out how to domesticate cows. what a coincidence! |
| whips make loud cracking sounds because the cracker (technical term) at the end exceeds the speed of sound when cracked, which creates a small and localised sonic boom.
this is at least partially to do with the fact that the body of the whip tapers down in size towards the cracker and due to conservation of momentum, the velocity of the lower sections of the whip increases exponentially. |
| thanks to stuff like CRISPR gene editing, it's theoretically possible to engineer crazy shit like turtles with glass shells, or naturally decaffeinated coffee beans. |
| the US town of Centralia has been on fire for several decades, by most accounts beginning in 1962. and yes, that's present tense.
in theory, it could be on fire all the way up to around the near 2300s. |
| Australian comedian Hamish Blake once entered a New York bodybuilding contest, despite probably never having seen the inside of a gym.
due to technically being the only competitor in his weight class, he won. |
| despite appearances, bamboo is actually a grass. |
| the idiom 'to pour oil on troubled waters' actually has a practical origin. |
| according to a computer program designed to catalogue knowledge and happenings, April 11, 1954 was the most uneventful day in history. |
| the Members' and Ladies' Pavilions at the Sydney Cricket Ground are possibly the oldest continually operating/available spectator stands in the world. |
| when last checked, and with standard margins and scaling, eipfacts comprises a total of 33 a4 pages when printed. |
| some of the world's best and brightest minds once suggested sending a female astronaut to space with 100 tampons... for a six day mission. |
| lactucarium, found in certain lettuce varieties, is often called 'lettuce opium' due to its sedative and analgesic effects. it's also mildly psychoactive. |
| when damaged, onions catalyse a chain of reactions which lead to a gas being produced, called syn-propanethial-S-oxide. this gas is what makes eyes sting and water. |
| bonus: tear-free onions exist, where one of the genes involved in producing one of the reactants in the above process is turned off. |
| about 12 letters didn't make the jump from old English to modern English. |
| IKEA's weird product names actually have a formula. |
| the Strid, a section of the River Wharfe, might just be the only body/section of water where a) nobody who fell in has ever survived, and b) no bodies have ever been recovered from said drownings. |
| the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, informally Point Nemo, is the area most far away from any land, in any ocean.
it is commonly reported that Point Nemo is unique because, due to its remoteness, the closest humans would theoretically be those aboard the ISS when it passed overhead. this IS true, however - Point Nemo is not unique in this aspect. any place outside of a 400km radius of an inhabited area would also have this property. |
| bonus: due to Point Nemo's remoteness and the fact it's in an ocean, many spacefaring objects including the ISS (intentionally) have crashed or will crash here.
satellite graveyard. what a concept. |
| to go with #84: a playlist full of free, publicly available IPTV stations. |
| in high enough concentrations, nutmeg can be a hallucinogen. |
| we're very lucky Jupiter exists in our solar system. it is theorised to have deflected or absorbed an uncountable number of high velocity spacefaring bodies like asteroids, comets, etc that could have hit us.
there's also a good chance it was responsible for throwing the space rock precursor for water at us. there's also a good chance it threw the dinosaur era-ending one at us too. take the good with the bad i guess. |
| in 1908, a dog is reported to have rescued a child drowning in the Seine, and been rewarded with a steak... then pushing more children in and "rescuing" them to get more meat rewards. |
| the Boops genus was so named from the Greek word for 'ox-eyed', which it was previously called as a description of the fish's face/eye arrangement. due to a bit of taxonomy shuffle, this has led to a species of fish having the binomial name of Boops boops, which of course is funny to the internet generations and nobody else. |
| hyperparasites, or metaparasites, are parasites that parasitize species that are themselves parasites of another species. there can even be further recursions: a "fungus on a fungus on a fungus on a tree" has been observed in the wild. |
| Vasily Arkhipov has been widely credited as literally saving the human race from global nuclear war. |
| during World War 1, the Christmas truce period saw many unofficial, unsanctioned ceasefires between combatant units, ranging from simple ceasefire to meeting in no man's land to exchange gifts and play football. |
| if lightning strikes soil, sand or other similar small-grained substrates, it can form fulgurites, which follow the path of the lightning as it travels through the substrate and usually end up rapidly vaporising and melting the substrate grains into a glass-like material. |
| in the absence of gravity, people get slightly taller and experience moderate back muscle atrophy due to their spines decompressing.
the extra height is temporary. the muscular atrophy is less temporary, unfortunately. |
| there isn't any empirical evidence at this point, mainly due to the fact that gathering such evidence would be unethical, but there are various documented cases of swans dying from a 'broken heart' after traumatic events like losing a pair-bonded mate, or their eggs not hatching the logical cause of this would be lowered immunity due to stress or possibly depression/grief. |
| when research/medical testing on dogs is required, beagles are most preferred due to their docile nature.
anecdotally, they are also more forgiving of the researchers who may inflict harm. additionally, eipFacts makes no comment on the perceived necessity of animal testing nor any good or harm that results from it. |
| elephants, known as rather intelligent animals, have been seen to grieve and bury their dead, along with appearing to cry. |
| when beginning nutrition intake after severe metabolic stress or starvation, refeeding syndrome can occur if the reintroduction of nutrition is not carefully managed, and can even be fatal. |
| Hachikō was a Japanese Akita dog who, after his master suffered a cerebral hemorrhage at work and died, returned to the train station where he would meet him every day for nearly ten years.
he even managed to return every day at almost exactly the time the train was due in at the station. |
| cats with white coats and blue eyes have a much higher chance of being deaf than cats with other coat/eye colour combinations. |
| bonus: in cats with white coats and heterochromia consisting of at least one blue eye, the ear on the side with the blue eye is more likely to be deaf. |
| the Bank of England issues, on occasion, non-circulating £100,000,000 notes, intended to back the Scottish and Northern Irish self-issued banknotes' value. |
| bonus: for every banknote Scottish and Northern Irish banks issue, they must deposit the equivalent amount in pounds sterling with the Bank of England. |
| there is currently no consensus on what causes hypnic jerks, which a lot of us know as that weird feeling of suddenly falling while transitioning to sleeping. theories include the body misinterpreting the lowered blood pressure and heart rate as a problem, and dumping some adrenaline to wake itself up and assess the situation. |
| weird and rare medical syndrome: exploding head syndrome causes sufferers to randomly hear extremely loud, short sounds just as they are transitioning to sleeping. we also don't know the causes for this one. |
| when we are awake, toxic byproducts build up in our brain as a result of normal brain activity. during sleep, the brain is able to remove them, like housekeeping. |
| bonus: despite all the study about sleep, sleep quality, sleep health, etc, we still don't fully understand what happens to the brain when we sleep, how the restorative effects brought about by sleep occur, how the brain converts short term to long term memory while sleeping, etc. |
| the native Australian ibis has come up with a novel way to eat a poisonous frog that involves forcing it to expel its toxins, washing it, then eating it. |
| human tears have different chemical compositions depending on why they are being secreted. |
| the cells in your body sometimes naturally turn carcinogenic, meaning cancerous, but your immune system tends to kill them before they can turn into a tumour. |
| in 1930, a ten thousand ton building was moved 46 metres (and rotated 90 degrees) without interrupting any services or utilities inside. |
| a website dedicated to pudding, containing a single low-quality image of it, has long been famous in Brazil. so famous, in fact, that in 2015 it was hacked by Islamic State. |
| bananas are technically berries. |
| bending at the waist and bracing with your hands on your knees or thighs, as people instinctively want to do when out of breath, is actually the optimal position for breath recovery. |
| Hongyancun station, in China, is the deepest metro station in the world. |
| Mark Twain was born during a year in which Halley's Comet made a pass around Earth. he also died during such a year. |
| the country of Bhutan has the highest average elevation. |
| an explosion at 07:25pm at the West Side Baptist Church in Beatrice, Nebraska would have killed up to 15 people, had they not all been running late for a myriad of separate reasons. |
| Nicholas Alkemade, during World War 2, survived a 5,490m freefall without a parachute and received only minor injuries. |
| bonus: after returning home, he also survived: a severe electric shock which led to inhalation of toxic fumes, being sprayed with industrial-grade sulphuric acid, and being pinned under a massive steel door runner, all with minor injuries too. |
| Michael Malloy survived no less than 9 separate failed murder attempts by 5 conspirators attempting to collect on a fraudulent life insurance policy. |
| Edwin Booth, son of John Wilkes Booth (Abraham Lincoln's assassin), saved the life of Robert Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's son. |
| the explosion of Krakatoa is thought to have reached 310 decibels, which makes it the loudest sound in recorded history. |
| Buckingham Palace has its own dedicated, private ATM in the basement. |
| North Korea reportedly publicly executed some officials using an anti aircraft gun, which is notable and significant because most modern AA gun calibres range between 20-60mm. |
| in 1989, a still-unidentified man climbed the flagpole of a McDonald's in Anchorage, Alaska and jumped off headfirst, eventually dying in hospital. his autopsy did not find any evidence of drug use or other mind altering phenomena. |
| on March 3rd 1876 near Olympia Springs, Kentucky, pieces of meat approx 5x5 - 10x10cm fell from the sky for about an hour, in a space approx 45x90m. the cause and exact nature of the meat is still unknown. |
| in 2010, a Let L-410 Turbolet passenger plane crashed during final approach for landing due to a crocodile in the cabin.
the crocodile didn't actually do anything. a passenger had smuggled it aboard, it escaped, and everyone ran towards the cockpit to get away from it, which irrecoverably unbalanced the aircraft. bonus: of the 21 people and one crocodile on board, only one person and the crocodile survived. the crocodile was reportedly almost immediately murdered with a machete. |
| Vespa orientalis hornets can survive, thrive and work efficiently on a diet consisting of up to 80% ethanol (ie alcohol) without any adverse effects. |
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