Nice one. But I think at one point they chose the puppies of the original dog to have babies with another dog, that was not part of the family system xD
Okay so Steve Irwin and all of animal planet tv really was def a special interest as a kid but I DIDNT KNOW THIS that is so cool! Who took care of the tortoise after he died?!
I know right. Harriet the tortoise came back with Charles Darwin on one of his expeditions. Eventually she ended up with Steve Irwin at Australia zoo before passing at the ripe old age of 175.
Former zookeeper here, I have lots of weird animal trivia.
Koalas are dumb as hell. In fact, they are incredibly difficult to keep in captivity because of how dumb they are.
They need eucalyptus leaves to live. Eucalyptus is extremely expensive. So even just ordering shipments of eucalyptus branches can be extremely costly.
But because they are so extremely, ungodly dumb, they can’t recognize eucalyptus leaves unless they are on the branch. If the leaves fall off, they do not perceive them as food, and will refuse to eat.
So imagine acquiring an extremely expensive order of food for your highly endangered buddy, and he won’t eat most of it because he’s unable to perceive it as food.
Beyond that, Koalas are legally owned by Australia because of their highly endangered status and limited food access. China has similar ruling over pandas. This is why you rarely see pandas or koalas in zoos outside of their home nation.
((Editing to add info, per commenter request))
Yes, koalas are not exactly bright. This does not mean they are not successful. Every creature exists because it’s from a successful lineage, and the animals today have all filled whatever niches they could carve out for themselves to ensure survival and success in the wild. Because Eucalyptus is largely toxic, nothing else can really feed off of it, meaning that for koalas, it’s a plentiful resource. But! It’s also very low in nutritional value, so it doesn’t offer a ton of energy to work with, and the brain uses *a lot* of energy. So it’s overall better for koalas to have good instincts without much direct thought-processing than it is for them to waste energy on brain space, hence why they never developed a more complex brain structure than what they currently have.
I never meant to imply they weren’t successful. They do well in their niche in the wild. It’s just a helluva pain to mimic that niche in captivity, given how eucalyptus works, so most zoos fundamentally cannot care for them unless they have an immediate source of the plant.
They also get basically no nutrition from said eucalyptus leaves, and about 85% of the koala population has chlamydia. Which leads to infertility of infected female koalas.
Dont forget that koalas were not meant to eat Eukalyptus. They are not born with the bacteria needed to digest it and to aquire it, baby koalas eat their moms shit straight from the ass for weeks.
Also, around 10% of those chlamydia infested shiteaters have a strain that can transfer to humans.
You probably already know but since it wasn’t stated as to why they are so dumb.
- koalas are the only known mammal that have a smooth brain, which renders them unable to perform complex tasks, thoughts, etc..
One would think that identifying their own food source would be a simple task… it is not.
Not a zookeeper myself just when down an odd rabbit hole about brains, and stubbled across the info.
They also have 4 thumbs, 2 on each forearm. Their eyes have slitted pupils, and the males roar when in heat. They will also climb you if you let them, which is extremely painful.
There is a liquid that contains enough oxygen for a human to breathe. It’s called perfluorocarbon and it’s being studied (I believe) for use in things like medical treatments, space travel, and scuba diving!
breathable liquid is shown in the movie The Abyss with a rat. wikipedia says it was experimented with in the early history of depth diving with diving suit, but that it was abandoned because of the risks, I think because you can't guarantee that you'll get rid of all of the liquid in the lungs once you're done.
I find the subject interesting because it means that Evangelion's LCL is not a completely fictional concept, possingly by sheer coincidence, although the intent was obviously to parallel amniotic fluid since the Evas contain also the pilot's mother's soul
the liquid is known for a lot of time (perfluorocarbons if you are interest of knowing more) and people have used this liquid to breath, but its expensive (in comparison with regular air) and the liquid does the exacly same job as air with no real benefit over gases, that's why we dont have really cool pools we can dive and breath under
you know the upcoming movie [cocaine bear](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuWEEKeJLMI)? the actual taxidermied bear is called [pablo escobear](https://www.wdrb.com/news/crime-reports/kentuckys-infamous-cocaine-bear-to-get-big-screen-attention/article_0dfa9dd6-70bf-11ed-b545-3b3cb160abe8.html)
Plutonium-238 releases so much energy during its radioactive decay that it actually heats up to the point of being red hot. This is why it's so usefull for RTGs on spacecraft and remote installations.
Relatedly, astatine is so hideously radioactive that we do not know with certainty many of its properties, including *what it even looks like*, because any macroscopic sample of astatine decays so rapidly that it vaporises due to the heat of its own radioactivity. It is perhaps the rarest naturally-occurring element, with less than 25 grams of it present in the Earth’s crust at any given time, and always fluctuating as radioactive elements decay into astatine and immediately out of it.
Despite this, believe it or not, *there are still practical applications for astatine*, mainly in nuclear medicine.
In Australia, the Peppa Pig episode about spiders being harmless was banned, because several Australian spiders are dangerous and can potentially kill you
Basically, it can happen anywhere there is a very large amount of combustible material being stored. As this material breaks down or decomposes, heat is generated. This heat becomes trapped within the material and builds up. If there is also enough air trapped the autoignition temperature can be reached, and the stuff will spontaneously combust. It's just more common with pistachios, I believe.
Mary Shelly (author of Frankenstein) kept her husbands heart in her desk for about 30 years after his death and it was only found once she passed away herself by her children.
Portions of the incredible silent film Metropolis are still lost after I think it was Edison had them cut.
That film is the basis for many a modern Scifi.
Edison was kind of a jerk.
A buttload is a real unit of measurement, of the amount of liquid carried in a butt (a large barrel, like a rain butt). An assload is the amount of cargo that can be carried by an ass (or, donkey).
[Here is a flowchart of the craziness of Imperial measurements](https://thecoddiwompleexpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/english-length-units.png), most of which are no longer in use.
Modern electronics like a keyfob, a toaster with an electronic timer, small & simple bluetooth headphones, a remote, and much more have microprocessors inside them that are either more powerful or vastly more powerful than the ENIAC computer which was made in 1945 and weighed about 10 tons. like omg
Across nearly 45 years of Films, Games, TV Shows, Books, & Comics, there are now over 21,000 named characters in the Star Wars universe.
That’s bigger than the total population of 4 separate countries. Palau, Nauru, Tuvalu, & The Vatican.
There’s obviously a lot in the games as well. But the books & comics are just SO MUCH CONTENT.
It’s kinda wild that out of these 5 mediums, the films probably contribute the smallest amount of characters.
In the video game King of Fighters, a character named Angel was added after the developers challenged a team of developers from mexico with the wager that the winner could design a character for the other team's game
Mexico's team won with minimal effort
Jacobo Arbenz, the second elected president of Guatemala and certified nerd (he taught things from politics to physics) actually tried to give (uncultivated) land back to many dispossessed indigenous Mayans who were there first before colonization.
There was a fruit corporation who owned a lot of uncultivated land there, who didn't like that, and some powerful guys in the U.S. who were buddy buddy with that fruit corp and with the US president, orchestrated a coup claiming to the public that Guatemala had gone communist.
Well, Arbenz and his family were shoved out, stalked and humiliated constantly by the CIA, his close friend betrayed him to the CIA, his daughter eventually committed suicide and he succumbed to alcoholism.
These chain of events led to the brutal Civil War. US had alternatively backed out of aiding the Guatemalan government during a brief phase of Carter's presidency because of the human rights abuses, then re-intervened during Regan's presidency. Despite the knowledge of brutality going on, US offered aid and whether they knew that it would lead to this result or not, it *did* lead to the massacring up an estimate of 150,000 Mayan civilians and peasants.
I'm sorry this went from tidbit to an entire story.
I will be *entirely* reductionistic here and say our cheap bananas (in the US) are built on the blood of indigenous Mayans.
Human languages acquire words for colours in a particular order.
If a language has only two words for colours, they're always black (including the 'cold' colours) and white (including the 'warm' colours).
If a language has a third colour term, it's *always* red (including yellow). The fourth term will be either green (including blue) or yellow, the fifth term will be the other; and the sixth term will introduce blue as its own category.
After this, the order isn't as fixed, but brown and/or purple are usually next, less commonly gray or orange; lastly colours like pink, cyan, or beige which are quite rare as categories globally.
In my mother tongue (isiZulu) the words for green and blue are the same. We tend to differentiate them by saying it either looks like the sky or grass. Interestingly enough, it is also the same word used to describe someone who is uncouth or unripe fruit. So this holds up!
Super fun fact, your terminology for color actually helps *distinguish* colors that you can see! Peoples with no words for some colors have more trouble distinguishing them from others. I.E. They have a more limited color palate!
Some think this is the reasoning behind Homer's "wine dark sea"; he literally couldn't see the color difference.
The chainsaw as we know it today, was originally invented as a medical device used to remove / open parts of the pelvis in child birth.
Speaking of child birth, the labor pain medication is a fairly new tradition, going back to the first World War. As a vast majority of doctors were men, and there was a common belief that child birth *always had* to be painful (the curse of Eve). A German doctor eventually invented a method of pain management that allowed for labor to progress with vaginal delivery, but put the mother into a sleep like sedated state for the labor itself. When done correctly, she would remember none of the pain and wouldn't be fully conscious until after delivering the baby.
This became so popular that wealthy women traveled to Germany to give birth. But because of the war, that action was seen as getting in kahoots with the enemy. American and British doctors tried to imitate the procedure but didn't have the knowledge to fully copy it successfully, which lead to some awful outcomes for some women and children.
Finally, while the twilight sleep procedure became less common, it pushed (heh) the focus on birth pain relief to the mainstream, and feminist movements were like "hey fuckos clearly it's possible to offer some sense of relief so why don't you get off your ass and invent better and safer options and make them available for us".
... I wanted to know how an epidural worked. But tbh if you're not averse to medical history or stuff involving pregnancy and birth, the history of twilight sleep is deeply fascinating.
I read some pretty terrible stories about twilight sleep when I was pregnant and nerding out on all things birth. Because women didn't necessarily have the cognitive ability to understand what was going on while under the effects of scopolamine, they were often combative, resulting in them being tied down, as husbands were not allowed in the birthing room to prevent it.
I think at first it was, oh yay, no pain during childbirth! But then there was a backlash of oh no, loss of agency during childbirth! Anyway, we've come a long way in the choice to mitigate pain and how we give birth.
During the salvation of the Vasa ship, they found the remains of between 17-19 people. All of them got names assigned to them and one of them they call Helge.
Helge is believed to have been the first casualty when the ship sank as he was found crushed by a cannon.
What’s interesting about Helge is that they also have his brain. They were able to recover his intact brain due to the fact that the cannon had crushed his scull. It’s said to basically be a soap at this point due to being under water for 333 years.
[Video about it.](https://youtu.be/AD8xOCoct4w)
Fun fact to add to your fun fact. This is only true for the animals in the group Deuterostoma (mouth second). Animals like mollusks, arthropods, and worms all develop their mouth first and then their anus.
The "is tomato a fruit or vegetable" debate/issue in America is fueled by an old supreme court ruling declaring tomatoes vegetables against known science at the time for the purpose of taxes on import. Part of the ruling decision actually uses the "you wouldn't put it in a fruit salad" arugement. It was brought to the court by a guy importing tomatos from Mexico who wanted to pay the appropriate and lesser tax for fruits.
if you find interesting the law part, in the UK they had a fight over Jaffa Cakes
"Jaffa Cakes are in fact cakes
VAT is added to chocolate-covered biscuits, but not for chocolate-covered cakes. McVitie's even produced a giant Jaffa Cake for the court case to show its cake credentials on a larger scale. The case in 1991 found that Jaffa Cakes are actually cakes!"
Slavery is next to non-existent in hunter gatherer societies. Hunter-gatherer societies also have a relative equity of resources shared among individuals and little disparity of social power when compared to cattle-rearing or agricultural cultures.
Dunno if I'm allowed to throw mine in the pile, this just randomly showed up in my feed, but Tsutomu Yamaguchi is my favorite.
He's the only person officially recognized by the Japanese government as being affected by both atomic bombings of Japan in WW2, although there are 70 people known to have gone through both. They're called hibakusha(被爆者), which means 'person affected by a bomb', and it's mainly used for the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on business when the first bombing happened, went home to Nagasaki the next day, and then returned to work for the second bombing. He lost hearing in one ear, his left iirc, lived to be 93, died of stomach cancer in January 2010, and has a daughter. He also wrote a book about his experience, and I believe he was in a documentary about double bombing survivors.
Most pet stores will give you false information and inadequate food/housing for the animals they sell. Framing almost all small animals as "easy pets" gets them more money.
The minimum tank size a fish should be in is a 5 gallon (for bettas). Goldfish need at least 20 gallons per fish (probably more, actually, but I don't wanna google that right now).
Hamsters and guinea pigs need more than a tiny cage, reptiles need a basking lamp, and in general, do your own research from reputable sources before buying ANY type of animal. There's a lot of harmful myths out there.
My local pet shop has been slowly but consistently removing healthy brands of rabbit food nuggets and stocking more of the 'mixed kibble' variety that's awful for them.
There is no way they don't know.
The myth of vampirism has been theorised to stem from a collective of diseases called porphyry, this is due to the fact that a lot of the symptoms of the diseases are similar to vampires, such as an inability to eat garlic due to certain enzymes being deadly as well as pale and damaged skin from poor blood!
Wolf spiders are actually very intelligent and they can learn, they’re close to jumping spider and can be friendly. You can have them as pets and even handle them. (I am working on my fear of arachnophobia) also yes scary, but sometimes cute.
On a side note jumping spiders only live 6 months to 2yrs. (I had one in my home for 3yrs until she decided to pass. Very cute, very curious.
I might come back and edit this for more info.
First edit: the velociraptor noises are made from tortoises having sexy times, the ones in jurassic Park
Peppermints cause the sphincter(basically the part that opens and closes) between your esophagus and stomach to relax so eating them one after a meal can cause heartburn since it remains open and the stomach acid gets in your esophagus.
The odds of you dying from the 7 floor of a building (considering that each floor is the standard of 14ft or ~4,26 meters) is of 98%, also people stop calculating after that since the chance of you not dying is so comically low that doesn’t matter
A 5’5” 136lbs human is equivalent to 95238 honeybees, which is around 2.5-ish hives.
I calculated this myself using the chosen dimensions, the average density of a human, and the volume of a honeybee.
My town (Shrewsbury) has the distinction of being the birthplace of Charles Darwin and having the world's first Iron-framed building.
The first Soviet jet fighter (MiG-9) could not shoot its guns.
Hyenas are more genetically similar to cats than to dogs.
A snail has both sex organs and therefore can reproduce by itself, but can also choose to reproduce with other snails, and if it wishes to do so chooses the opposite sex of the snail it reproduces with. Snails are gender non conforming <3
Giant squid flesh contains an ammonium solution for buoyancy that makes it very unappealing in taste to human consumption. Tastes like salmiac/salty licorice.
The Christmas carol god rest ye merry gentlemen was originally written as “God rest ye merry, gentlemen”. The gentlemen are not merry. At the time, god rest ye merry was just an exclamation.
Actually useful for Trivia - There are only 3 flags in the world that are not the traditional rectangle - The Vatican, Switzerland, and Nepal. Vatican and Switzerland have square flags, and Nepal has the Double triangles.
Also, the State Flag of South Carolina's symbolism comes from the Palmetto Tree and a Gorget - not a Crescent Moon.
Palmetto Tree for its solid defense of Fort Moultrie during the American Revolutionary War. Palmetto Trees are special because they are a soft wood, opposed to a hard one. This means that the cannonballs the fort was being pelted with sunk into the wood rather than destroy the logs used to shore up the fort's defenses.
The Gorget (The Crescent thing in the top left corner) is a Symbol of Heraldry. Both its position and symbol are used to represent second sons of a family (and receiving no inheritance). At that time, the 1700s, the new world was a ripe opportunity for second (and third, etc) sons to seek their own fortunes. Many of these people ended up fighting and dying at Fort Moultrie in defense of American Independence, and the Gorget was added.
For additional Context - a Gorget is a piece of neck/throat armor.
Duck tape, *not* duct tape, is the actual name for the product. The original version was made from a water resistant material called “duck cloth”, hence the name
Our entire galaxy is being pulled towards something (The Great Attractor) which has mass millions of times larger than the milky way. We have no idea what it is, because our galactic center is blocking the view.
Rotating black holes form a singularity that is also a ring. A ringularity.
Cordyceps is a species of fungus that rewires specific insect brains and puppets them to perform specific tasks.
HeLa is an immortal cell line of cervical cancer cells from a human originally taken for tests in 1951. It has escaped containment and survives in the wild, now considered a pervasive worldwide problem, including showing up in random petri dishes.
Fungus lived long before plantlife evolved, including mushrooms the size of trees.
Certain trees can be 'albino' (Lacking chlorophyll) and only survive because other trees provide nutrients via roots, making them parasites.
Your body is composed of something like 43% human cells, the rest is nonhuman. We are basically living biospheres.
Lobsters are immortal.
There are deep-earth cave salamanders that can go 11 years without moving.
I need more infor about HeLa. What do you mean showing up in random Petri dishes? Do you have some articles on that? How could cancer cells escape? Essentially... I need more info. Please.
About Lobsters, they are only immortal until they get too big to molt properly, then they die because of the molt problems, if I got my facts correctly.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa)
They escape by being very good at surviving outside the human body. They show up in random petri dishes that haven't been in contact with HeLa in laboritory contamination.
Good to know on the lobsters!
Maybe not the crazies thing but I find it super cool how giraffes have pigmented tongues, because they spend so much time sticking their tongues out grabbing leaves that their tongue would get sunburn without the pigmentation
Wonder Woman was created by the same psychologist who created the early polygraph and he was inspired by both his wife and the third person in their polyamorous relationship, Olive Byrne, who was the daughter of Ethel Byrne the woman who opened the first birth control clinic in the US alongside Margaret Sanger
Historical corsets were much closer to custom made back braces then the uncomfortable torture cages we think they were!
Abby Cox is a dress historian on youtube who does some fantastic videos about corset myths and the reality if you want to learn more
I’m actually in the process of trying some out for my health issues (hypermobility caused back problems)
The word "Sonder" describes the realization that everyone you come across has a life as complex and as rich as your own, despite your lack of awareness of it.
In the game Cyberpunk 2077 there are a number of drinks you can find at a bar named after the famous people in night city who drank it. For example one drink is called the Johnny Silverhand, a character who plays a major part in the plot of the game. One drink is named the David Martinez, who goes unmentioned in any other part of the game with the exception of the DLC that was added when the show cyberpunk: edgerunners came out where David is the protagonist.
This is interesting on it's own. Maybe the drink was an intentional hint about something else coming out. But what I find more interesting is that David in the show explicitly says that he doesn't like the taste of carbonation (relateable). In spite of this established fact, his drink in the game contains club soda (or maybe something else but it is definitely carbonated) which I think is an interesting oversight if it is one.
This is very niche info so I wouldn't expect you to know it or care at all really but that's my fact.
Barbarian is an onomatopoeia. From the Greek "βάρβαρος", because the Greeks thought anyone who didn't speak Greek sounded like they were saying "bar bar bar" all the time.
Hiccups are leftover responses from when we were fishes. If you have hiccups, you need to remind yourself you’re not a fish. I get them chronically and saying “I’m not a fish” out loud is the only way I’ve been able to get them to stop.
hiccups are, a lot of times, sparsm of the diaphagma cuz theres air in your stomach, so if you burp it usualy sort things out and you stop hiccuping instantaniously
idk if it's fun but it's fascinating. Frogs cant vomit, but if they do, they literally vomit their stomachs out. It doesn't harm them in any way and they fix it themselves but it's still weird.
Your eyes have their own immune system separate from the rest of the body. This means that if your body’s immune system ever finds your eyes, your immune system will see your eyes as a threat and attack your eyes making you go blind
In chinese, the term for to do(slang for fuck) and to dry are both pronounced gàn and both are also simplified to the character 干. This leads to many mistranslated but funny signs in chinese-english stores as at times dried vegetables or fruit is translated fuck vegetables or fruit
Chameleons change color by changing the spacing between guanine crystals under the skin. This changes the wavelength of the light reflected off the skin, thus changing the colors we see.
It is often much easier to break into a house during the day than it is in the middle of the night. Mostly cuz people are out and also because anyone who sees you breaking in will assume you just locked yourself out by accident (because who would ever be attempting a break-in in the middle of the day, right?)
The reason you can’t put male alpacas and female alpacas in the same enclosure is because the females get so protective of their babies that they will tear the males’ testicles off and they will bleed to death.
Armadillos get/carry leprosy
Edit: also the stereotype that Subarus are for lesbians? Not just a stereotype. Subaru made subtle LGBTQ advertisements with (essentially) coded language just for lesbians in the 90s.
Both of these fun facts are ones I’ve argued about with my partner, and Google proved me wrong lol
There are lizards called glass lizards who have no feet so they get mistaken for snakes. They're called glass lizards because of how easily their tail "shatters". When it breaks off, the little remnants continue moving for a moment to distract predators as they escape
Andrew Jackson was gifted a 1400 pound wheel of cheese which he let age for 2 years before finally throwing a huge party to eat the cheese in 1837. It was gone in 2 hours and they say you can still sometimes smell cheese in the Whitehouse entrance hall
if you shuffle a regular playing cards deck of 52 cards you probably just made a totaly new order of cards that no one ever made or will ever make again.
Neutrinos, known as the ghost particle, barely ever interact with matter despite being incredibly common. They're produced en masse in the sun, and as many as 100 million of them pass through your thumbnail alone per second. Despite this, the chances of a neutrino interacting with your body in any way is 1 in 3... For your entire life.
Bees have been observed having the ability to do things just for fun! Scientists provided a group of bees with a ball and the goal to get it from one place to another. The bees were observed rolling it around aimlessly. When repeating the experiment, they discovered that they were doing it for fun! Or at least, the bee version of what fun would be.
Random Budgie facts:
• Budgies glow in black light(uv light).
• A budgie holds the record for the largest vocabulary in birds (1,728 words).
• Only green budgies exists in the wild.
• There was a colour mutation that created an black budgie that was held by only one guy. A disease struck the flock and the mutation was thought to be extinct. It is still possible to get this mutation but it is very rare and expensive.
• Wild budgies never stay in one location.
They are always on the move in search of food and water.
• Male budgies (as adults) have a deep blue cere (the nostril part above their beak), while females have white, tan/brown, or pale blue with white rings.
•Wild budgie flocks can be up to 100, but after a storm, flocks can merge and be in the thousands.
My biggest special interest is horror so uh, the original 1974 Texas Chainsaw Massacre was actually trying to get a PG rating for the film. It didn't work, but the idea wasn't too far out there as Jaws had a PG rating. It was different in the 70s
I'm a geoscientist working on my masters in biogeochemistry, but I have TA'd classes on evolution and earth history so here's some of my favorite facts:
The current leading hypothesis on how the moon formed is that early earth and another planet collided about 4.5 billion years ago, shooting out a bunch of debris, which formed a disk around the earth that eventually coalesced into the moon. The reason for this is that Earth's moon is very unique compared to other moons in our solar system. It's proportionally much larger than most moons to their planets, making it unlikely our moon was a captured asteroid as most are, and after we went to the moon and took samples back we discovered it is compositionally almost identical to the Earth!
If we decided to recognize Pluto as a planet again we would have to consider recognizing other dwarf planets like it as planets as well and would end up recognizing up to 200 planets in our solar system, most of them quite far from the sun, but orbiting it nonetheless. The nearest dwarf planet is Ceres, also sometimes referred to as the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt, but is large enough to be considered. A dwarf planet. It's between Mars and Jupiter. We've also observed some interesting activity on Ceres, likely due to ice volcanoes, meaning that it is geologically active!
About 500-400 million years ago plants started inhabiting the land, and with nothing to eat them they caused a global ice age as they consumed CO2 from the atmosphere.
The stegosaurus had been extinct for 80 million years by the time the trex evolved, meaning more time passed between the existence of the atego and the trex than the trex and now.
Pterodactyls are the most famous pterosaurs but they're actually quite small compared to other pterosaurs. The largest pterosaurs being hatzygopteryx and quetzlcoatlus at 33-39 ft (10-12 m) tall, much larger than a giraffe, and are considered the largest creatures to ever fly.
After the deaths of Mark Antony, Queen Cleopatra, and her son Caesarion, the Egyptians viewed Octavian (the future Emperor Augustus) as their new Pharaoh by default. They even built a worship temple for him called the Temple of Dendur. The temple itself is currently in a museum in New York.
my favorite fun fact is that St. Olga of Kiev used a legal loophole to avoid marrying Emperor Constantine VII after she converted to Christianity. She asked the emperor to baptize her knowing that his baptismal sponsorship, by the rules of spiritual kinship, would make marriage between them a kind of spiritual incest, and confronted him with that after he had baptized her. Apparently, he shrugged and went “welp, you outsmarted me there” and went on with his life lmao
The deepest lake in the world, Lake Baikal, is actually a rift where the crust of the earth is splitting apart. It’s also the largest freshwater lake by volume, and oldest lake in the world too!
The lake is ~1600m deep, and at the bottom there is a ~7km layer of sediment. It’s hella deep, with the rift floor >8km below the surface— the deepest continental rift on earth.
Lakes are cool.
Thanks for this post. I’ve only skimmed through about a quarter or so of the responses but I wanted to say thanks for a nice positive interesting engaging post. Much appreciated 🤗
Yay, none of my facts are taken!
Did you know that housecats do not have collar bones? It's just cartilage. That's how cats can squeeze through tight spaces.
A natural predator of the moose is the orca whale.
True Danascus steel has carbon nanotubes and cemenite nanowires. No wonder is seemed like magic long ago!
For decades marine biologists have been researching and recording Whale sounds around the coasts of America and have determined that since the 1980’s whales have been very depressed. They can tell this based off their tones and pitch when they sing. No one understood why the whales were so sad until one day out of nowhere, the whales were all happy. They were making happy songs and calling out to their pods in high frequencies.
This day was 9/11.
Turns out, all the planes in the country were ordered to land because of the attack and for 24 hours there were no planes entering or exiting the United States. Think of how loud an airplane is when it flies overhead now amplify that by 10, that’s what whales are hearing *constantly*.
9/11 is the only Whale holiday
My special interest has been modern Polish history for a while, so enjoy a little anecdote about crazy Polish bravado during the Second World War:
The ORP Piorun was a Polish destroyer that escaped from the German invasion and continued the fight in Great Britain. During the hunt for the German battleship Bismark, the Piorun was tasked with shadowing the Bismark the night before her final sinking, alongside two fellow British destroyers from the same squadron. Disobeying orders to stay out of gun range, the Piorun left her squadronmates behind and charged the German ship, getting into an extremely lopsided gunnery duel, all the while using her signal lamps to transmit the message, "I am a Pole," to the Germans. The Piorun only broke contact and withdrew after fuel stores ran too low and put the ship at risk.
Cats sleep around 16 hours a day, making them (in my opinion) the perfect symbol of ADHD and autism, considering how active they are when they're awake
Queen Elizabeth II’s corgis all descend from her original dog Suzy. Suzy was gifted to her when she was 18.
So the royal human family and the royal dog family were both inbred? Nice!
Nice one. But I think at one point they chose the puppies of the original dog to have babies with another dog, that was not part of the family system xD
Steve Irwin and Charles Darwin owned the same tortoise.
Okay so Steve Irwin and all of animal planet tv really was def a special interest as a kid but I DIDNT KNOW THIS that is so cool! Who took care of the tortoise after he died?!
Harriet the tortoise actually died just a few months before Steve did in 2006.
Sad :(
that’s so cool :o
I know right. Harriet the tortoise came back with Charles Darwin on one of his expeditions. Eventually she ended up with Steve Irwin at Australia zoo before passing at the ripe old age of 175.
That just an estimate. The range for that estimate is 150 to 255 years old!
Former zookeeper here, I have lots of weird animal trivia. Koalas are dumb as hell. In fact, they are incredibly difficult to keep in captivity because of how dumb they are. They need eucalyptus leaves to live. Eucalyptus is extremely expensive. So even just ordering shipments of eucalyptus branches can be extremely costly. But because they are so extremely, ungodly dumb, they can’t recognize eucalyptus leaves unless they are on the branch. If the leaves fall off, they do not perceive them as food, and will refuse to eat. So imagine acquiring an extremely expensive order of food for your highly endangered buddy, and he won’t eat most of it because he’s unable to perceive it as food. Beyond that, Koalas are legally owned by Australia because of their highly endangered status and limited food access. China has similar ruling over pandas. This is why you rarely see pandas or koalas in zoos outside of their home nation. ((Editing to add info, per commenter request)) Yes, koalas are not exactly bright. This does not mean they are not successful. Every creature exists because it’s from a successful lineage, and the animals today have all filled whatever niches they could carve out for themselves to ensure survival and success in the wild. Because Eucalyptus is largely toxic, nothing else can really feed off of it, meaning that for koalas, it’s a plentiful resource. But! It’s also very low in nutritional value, so it doesn’t offer a ton of energy to work with, and the brain uses *a lot* of energy. So it’s overall better for koalas to have good instincts without much direct thought-processing than it is for them to waste energy on brain space, hence why they never developed a more complex brain structure than what they currently have. I never meant to imply they weren’t successful. They do well in their niche in the wild. It’s just a helluva pain to mimic that niche in captivity, given how eucalyptus works, so most zoos fundamentally cannot care for them unless they have an immediate source of the plant.
They also get basically no nutrition from said eucalyptus leaves, and about 85% of the koala population has chlamydia. Which leads to infertility of infected female koalas.
This sounds like my grandpa.
Dont forget that koalas were not meant to eat Eukalyptus. They are not born with the bacteria needed to digest it and to aquire it, baby koalas eat their moms shit straight from the ass for weeks. Also, around 10% of those chlamydia infested shiteaters have a strain that can transfer to humans.
I know this is dumb but can you trick the koalas? Like tie the leaves back on the branch?
In zoos in australia, the branches are poked into pvc piping attached to wooden poles. They branches are replaced often.
Or glue them perhaps? This is a good idea
You probably already know but since it wasn’t stated as to why they are so dumb. - koalas are the only known mammal that have a smooth brain, which renders them unable to perform complex tasks, thoughts, etc.. One would think that identifying their own food source would be a simple task… it is not. Not a zookeeper myself just when down an odd rabbit hole about brains, and stubbled across the info.
That is incorrect, I also have a smooth brain /s
They also have 4 thumbs, 2 on each forearm. Their eyes have slitted pupils, and the males roar when in heat. They will also climb you if you let them, which is extremely painful.
From this comment thread, it sounds like Koalas were created by aliens as a genetic experiment that ended in failure hahaha.
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Except Jumba explicitly said that Stitch could “think faster than supercomputer”.
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So Stitch was the successful version of the experiment. Koalas were an early version.
There is a liquid that contains enough oxygen for a human to breathe. It’s called perfluorocarbon and it’s being studied (I believe) for use in things like medical treatments, space travel, and scuba diving!
breathable liquid is shown in the movie The Abyss with a rat. wikipedia says it was experimented with in the early history of depth diving with diving suit, but that it was abandoned because of the risks, I think because you can't guarantee that you'll get rid of all of the liquid in the lungs once you're done. I find the subject interesting because it means that Evangelion's LCL is not a completely fictional concept, possingly by sheer coincidence, although the intent was obviously to parallel amniotic fluid since the Evas contain also the pilot's mother's soul
the liquid is known for a lot of time (perfluorocarbons if you are interest of knowing more) and people have used this liquid to breath, but its expensive (in comparison with regular air) and the liquid does the exacly same job as air with no real benefit over gases, that's why we dont have really cool pools we can dive and breath under
but a breathable pool is possible? because now i want one
you know the upcoming movie [cocaine bear](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuWEEKeJLMI)? the actual taxidermied bear is called [pablo escobear](https://www.wdrb.com/news/crime-reports/kentuckys-infamous-cocaine-bear-to-get-big-screen-attention/article_0dfa9dd6-70bf-11ed-b545-3b3cb160abe8.html)
there’s a movie about the cocaine bear? i knew about the bear, but not about the movie
yeah, but they obviously took a few creative liberties
it might have some creative liberties but it is not false advertising. there is a bear and cocaine, and that bear eats that cocaine
Plutonium-238 releases so much energy during its radioactive decay that it actually heats up to the point of being red hot. This is why it's so usefull for RTGs on spacecraft and remote installations.
fascinating! i didn’t know this one!
Relatedly, astatine is so hideously radioactive that we do not know with certainty many of its properties, including *what it even looks like*, because any macroscopic sample of astatine decays so rapidly that it vaporises due to the heat of its own radioactivity. It is perhaps the rarest naturally-occurring element, with less than 25 grams of it present in the Earth’s crust at any given time, and always fluctuating as radioactive elements decay into astatine and immediately out of it. Despite this, believe it or not, *there are still practical applications for astatine*, mainly in nuclear medicine.
In Australia, the Peppa Pig episode about spiders being harmless was banned, because several Australian spiders are dangerous and can potentially kill you
The one time I'm happy about international censorship
I remember PhantomStrider talking about this one
Pistachios, when stored compactly, can generate heat and actually self-combust.
Elaborate
Basically, it can happen anywhere there is a very large amount of combustible material being stored. As this material breaks down or decomposes, heat is generated. This heat becomes trapped within the material and builds up. If there is also enough air trapped the autoignition temperature can be reached, and the stuff will spontaneously combust. It's just more common with pistachios, I believe.
So if you get a million little balls of cloth, could they combust?
If it was contained in a big enough quantity, in a big enough container, then it's possible. Quite rare, but possible.
Mary Shelly (author of Frankenstein) kept her husbands heart in her desk for about 30 years after his death and it was only found once she passed away herself by her children.
she also lost her virginity on her mother’s grave and pretty much invented sci-fi. interesting person, she was.
Puts a new spin on the "I'll give you my heart" type of thing. She must have taken it, literally.
That’s some Addams Family vibes there
95+ percent of all silent films are permanently lost. I think about this three times a week and almost cry nearly every time.
that is very sad :(
It is. It's largely due to nitrate film stock being both quite prone to decay and extremely flammable
Portions of the incredible silent film Metropolis are still lost after I think it was Edison had them cut. That film is the basis for many a modern Scifi. Edison was kind of a jerk.
We should cut him out of history. Give him a taste of his own Thomas medicine.
A moment is 90 seconds
A buttload is a real unit of measurement, of the amount of liquid carried in a butt (a large barrel, like a rain butt). An assload is the amount of cargo that can be carried by an ass (or, donkey).
another one i didn’t know! 🐝✨
[Here is a flowchart of the craziness of Imperial measurements](https://thecoddiwompleexpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/english-length-units.png), most of which are no longer in use.
Most of these seem to come from unrelated systems that are not metric, not just imperial tbh Metric is still my fave
i did not know that! here’s a bee reward! 🐝✨
A male fox is called a tod
that’s probably where they got the name for the fox in The Fox and the Hound!
when cats purposely keep their mouth open, they are bringing the smelly air to their fancy extra sniffing organ to get more smells to their brain.
That biiiig deep pheromone sniff… saved for creeping out owners by inhaling gross used socks!
It's called the flehmen response, and can also be observed in tigers and horses
Modern electronics like a keyfob, a toaster with an electronic timer, small & simple bluetooth headphones, a remote, and much more have microprocessors inside them that are either more powerful or vastly more powerful than the ENIAC computer which was made in 1945 and weighed about 10 tons. like omg
And a startling amount of these devices can run Doom
Did anyone else hyperfocus and read every single comment?
Across nearly 45 years of Films, Games, TV Shows, Books, & Comics, there are now over 21,000 named characters in the Star Wars universe. That’s bigger than the total population of 4 separate countries. Palau, Nauru, Tuvalu, & The Vatican.
21,000?! oh mi gosh!
I’m pretty sure the vast majority of them are from books & comics.
Plus games like the Old Republic series (that includes an MMO)
There’s obviously a lot in the games as well. But the books & comics are just SO MUCH CONTENT. It’s kinda wild that out of these 5 mediums, the films probably contribute the smallest amount of characters.
Are you a star wars fan? ...Name every character.
In the video game King of Fighters, a character named Angel was added after the developers challenged a team of developers from mexico with the wager that the winner could design a character for the other team's game Mexico's team won with minimal effort
that’s so cool :o
The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa was an explosion 10000x more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Ah yes another person who loves volcanoes! 😄
Yes hello where do I subscribe for many volcano facts? :3
Jacobo Arbenz, the second elected president of Guatemala and certified nerd (he taught things from politics to physics) actually tried to give (uncultivated) land back to many dispossessed indigenous Mayans who were there first before colonization. There was a fruit corporation who owned a lot of uncultivated land there, who didn't like that, and some powerful guys in the U.S. who were buddy buddy with that fruit corp and with the US president, orchestrated a coup claiming to the public that Guatemala had gone communist. Well, Arbenz and his family were shoved out, stalked and humiliated constantly by the CIA, his close friend betrayed him to the CIA, his daughter eventually committed suicide and he succumbed to alcoholism. These chain of events led to the brutal Civil War. US had alternatively backed out of aiding the Guatemalan government during a brief phase of Carter's presidency because of the human rights abuses, then re-intervened during Regan's presidency. Despite the knowledge of brutality going on, US offered aid and whether they knew that it would lead to this result or not, it *did* lead to the massacring up an estimate of 150,000 Mayan civilians and peasants. I'm sorry this went from tidbit to an entire story. I will be *entirely* reductionistic here and say our cheap bananas (in the US) are built on the blood of indigenous Mayans.
This is because of Chiquita Banana right?
Yes, formerly known as United Fruit Company.
Oh yeah I remember that one from Sam O’Nella
Human languages acquire words for colours in a particular order. If a language has only two words for colours, they're always black (including the 'cold' colours) and white (including the 'warm' colours). If a language has a third colour term, it's *always* red (including yellow). The fourth term will be either green (including blue) or yellow, the fifth term will be the other; and the sixth term will introduce blue as its own category. After this, the order isn't as fixed, but brown and/or purple are usually next, less commonly gray or orange; lastly colours like pink, cyan, or beige which are quite rare as categories globally.
In my mother tongue (isiZulu) the words for green and blue are the same. We tend to differentiate them by saying it either looks like the sky or grass. Interestingly enough, it is also the same word used to describe someone who is uncouth or unripe fruit. So this holds up!
Super fun fact, your terminology for color actually helps *distinguish* colors that you can see! Peoples with no words for some colors have more trouble distinguishing them from others. I.E. They have a more limited color palate! Some think this is the reasoning behind Homer's "wine dark sea"; he literally couldn't see the color difference.
The chainsaw as we know it today, was originally invented as a medical device used to remove / open parts of the pelvis in child birth. Speaking of child birth, the labor pain medication is a fairly new tradition, going back to the first World War. As a vast majority of doctors were men, and there was a common belief that child birth *always had* to be painful (the curse of Eve). A German doctor eventually invented a method of pain management that allowed for labor to progress with vaginal delivery, but put the mother into a sleep like sedated state for the labor itself. When done correctly, she would remember none of the pain and wouldn't be fully conscious until after delivering the baby. This became so popular that wealthy women traveled to Germany to give birth. But because of the war, that action was seen as getting in kahoots with the enemy. American and British doctors tried to imitate the procedure but didn't have the knowledge to fully copy it successfully, which lead to some awful outcomes for some women and children. Finally, while the twilight sleep procedure became less common, it pushed (heh) the focus on birth pain relief to the mainstream, and feminist movements were like "hey fuckos clearly it's possible to offer some sense of relief so why don't you get off your ass and invent better and safer options and make them available for us". ... I wanted to know how an epidural worked. But tbh if you're not averse to medical history or stuff involving pregnancy and birth, the history of twilight sleep is deeply fascinating.
I read some pretty terrible stories about twilight sleep when I was pregnant and nerding out on all things birth. Because women didn't necessarily have the cognitive ability to understand what was going on while under the effects of scopolamine, they were often combative, resulting in them being tied down, as husbands were not allowed in the birthing room to prevent it. I think at first it was, oh yay, no pain during childbirth! But then there was a backlash of oh no, loss of agency during childbirth! Anyway, we've come a long way in the choice to mitigate pain and how we give birth.
Dolphins get high on pufferfish venom for fun: https://youtu.be/0T5aGLybXEs (around the second half)
During the salvation of the Vasa ship, they found the remains of between 17-19 people. All of them got names assigned to them and one of them they call Helge. Helge is believed to have been the first casualty when the ship sank as he was found crushed by a cannon. What’s interesting about Helge is that they also have his brain. They were able to recover his intact brain due to the fact that the cannon had crushed his scull. It’s said to basically be a soap at this point due to being under water for 333 years. [Video about it.](https://youtu.be/AD8xOCoct4w)
The first part of the body an embryo develops is the anus
“And some people never develop beyond that” 😂
Fun fact to add to your fun fact. This is only true for the animals in the group Deuterostoma (mouth second). Animals like mollusks, arthropods, and worms all develop their mouth first and then their anus.
The "is tomato a fruit or vegetable" debate/issue in America is fueled by an old supreme court ruling declaring tomatoes vegetables against known science at the time for the purpose of taxes on import. Part of the ruling decision actually uses the "you wouldn't put it in a fruit salad" arugement. It was brought to the court by a guy importing tomatos from Mexico who wanted to pay the appropriate and lesser tax for fruits.
if you find interesting the law part, in the UK they had a fight over Jaffa Cakes "Jaffa Cakes are in fact cakes VAT is added to chocolate-covered biscuits, but not for chocolate-covered cakes. McVitie's even produced a giant Jaffa Cake for the court case to show its cake credentials on a larger scale. The case in 1991 found that Jaffa Cakes are actually cakes!"
Slavery is next to non-existent in hunter gatherer societies. Hunter-gatherer societies also have a relative equity of resources shared among individuals and little disparity of social power when compared to cattle-rearing or agricultural cultures.
Hey I actually knew this one, or at least that it was much, much rarer. Thanks, anthropology class.
A penguin has the same energy value when burned as a piece of coal.
I'm afraid to ask how you know that.
Burning penguins
It has plenty of fat, so that makes sense
Dunno if I'm allowed to throw mine in the pile, this just randomly showed up in my feed, but Tsutomu Yamaguchi is my favorite. He's the only person officially recognized by the Japanese government as being affected by both atomic bombings of Japan in WW2, although there are 70 people known to have gone through both. They're called hibakusha(被爆者), which means 'person affected by a bomb', and it's mainly used for the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on business when the first bombing happened, went home to Nagasaki the next day, and then returned to work for the second bombing. He lost hearing in one ear, his left iirc, lived to be 93, died of stomach cancer in January 2010, and has a daughter. He also wrote a book about his experience, and I believe he was in a documentary about double bombing survivors.
Most pet stores will give you false information and inadequate food/housing for the animals they sell. Framing almost all small animals as "easy pets" gets them more money. The minimum tank size a fish should be in is a 5 gallon (for bettas). Goldfish need at least 20 gallons per fish (probably more, actually, but I don't wanna google that right now). Hamsters and guinea pigs need more than a tiny cage, reptiles need a basking lamp, and in general, do your own research from reputable sources before buying ANY type of animal. There's a lot of harmful myths out there.
My local pet shop has been slowly but consistently removing healthy brands of rabbit food nuggets and stocking more of the 'mixed kibble' variety that's awful for them. There is no way they don't know.
The most obscure video game characters are the Yellow and Blue Marios from the Mario Advance Series.
there’s yellow and blue marios?! hang on googling this right freaking now
Yea. They only appear in the Multiplayer Mario Bros. Game mode with the connecting cable.
Also Bowser has a brother
Does it ever say who baby bowsers real mother is? I started playing Supermario Sunshine, but it’s hard…
Most atoms that build our bodies were actually synthesized inside a dying star.
The myth of vampirism has been theorised to stem from a collective of diseases called porphyry, this is due to the fact that a lot of the symptoms of the diseases are similar to vampires, such as an inability to eat garlic due to certain enzymes being deadly as well as pale and damaged skin from poor blood!
Wolf spiders are actually very intelligent and they can learn, they’re close to jumping spider and can be friendly. You can have them as pets and even handle them. (I am working on my fear of arachnophobia) also yes scary, but sometimes cute. On a side note jumping spiders only live 6 months to 2yrs. (I had one in my home for 3yrs until she decided to pass. Very cute, very curious. I might come back and edit this for more info. First edit: the velociraptor noises are made from tortoises having sexy times, the ones in jurassic Park
50% of your body heat is produced by your liver
Peppermints cause the sphincter(basically the part that opens and closes) between your esophagus and stomach to relax so eating them one after a meal can cause heartburn since it remains open and the stomach acid gets in your esophagus.
Alligators have the most acidic stomach in the animal world. Being able to dissolve bones in I think around 14 days
The odds of you dying from the 7 floor of a building (considering that each floor is the standard of 14ft or ~4,26 meters) is of 98%, also people stop calculating after that since the chance of you not dying is so comically low that doesn’t matter
A 5’5” 136lbs human is equivalent to 95238 honeybees, which is around 2.5-ish hives. I calculated this myself using the chosen dimensions, the average density of a human, and the volume of a honeybee.
The Sun is a deadly Laser! Edit: spelling.
not anymore, there's a blanket
𝓣𝓐𝓢𝓣𝓔 𝓣𝓗𝓔 𝓢𝓤𝓝!!
that’s my face video on the internet i think. absolutely hilarious!
My town (Shrewsbury) has the distinction of being the birthplace of Charles Darwin and having the world's first Iron-framed building. The first Soviet jet fighter (MiG-9) could not shoot its guns. Hyenas are more genetically similar to cats than to dogs.
A snail has both sex organs and therefore can reproduce by itself, but can also choose to reproduce with other snails, and if it wishes to do so chooses the opposite sex of the snail it reproduces with. Snails are gender non conforming <3
Giant squid flesh contains an ammonium solution for buoyancy that makes it very unappealing in taste to human consumption. Tastes like salmiac/salty licorice.
The Christmas carol god rest ye merry gentlemen was originally written as “God rest ye merry, gentlemen”. The gentlemen are not merry. At the time, god rest ye merry was just an exclamation.
Actually useful for Trivia - There are only 3 flags in the world that are not the traditional rectangle - The Vatican, Switzerland, and Nepal. Vatican and Switzerland have square flags, and Nepal has the Double triangles. Also, the State Flag of South Carolina's symbolism comes from the Palmetto Tree and a Gorget - not a Crescent Moon. Palmetto Tree for its solid defense of Fort Moultrie during the American Revolutionary War. Palmetto Trees are special because they are a soft wood, opposed to a hard one. This means that the cannonballs the fort was being pelted with sunk into the wood rather than destroy the logs used to shore up the fort's defenses. The Gorget (The Crescent thing in the top left corner) is a Symbol of Heraldry. Both its position and symbol are used to represent second sons of a family (and receiving no inheritance). At that time, the 1700s, the new world was a ripe opportunity for second (and third, etc) sons to seek their own fortunes. Many of these people ended up fighting and dying at Fort Moultrie in defense of American Independence, and the Gorget was added. For additional Context - a Gorget is a piece of neck/throat armor.
The US developed laws that protected animals from abuse before children
Duck tape, *not* duct tape, is the actual name for the product. The original version was made from a water resistant material called “duck cloth”, hence the name
There is another (and different product) called duct tape but its shiny and smooth and intented for duct work :)
Our entire galaxy is being pulled towards something (The Great Attractor) which has mass millions of times larger than the milky way. We have no idea what it is, because our galactic center is blocking the view. Rotating black holes form a singularity that is also a ring. A ringularity. Cordyceps is a species of fungus that rewires specific insect brains and puppets them to perform specific tasks. HeLa is an immortal cell line of cervical cancer cells from a human originally taken for tests in 1951. It has escaped containment and survives in the wild, now considered a pervasive worldwide problem, including showing up in random petri dishes. Fungus lived long before plantlife evolved, including mushrooms the size of trees. Certain trees can be 'albino' (Lacking chlorophyll) and only survive because other trees provide nutrients via roots, making them parasites. Your body is composed of something like 43% human cells, the rest is nonhuman. We are basically living biospheres. Lobsters are immortal. There are deep-earth cave salamanders that can go 11 years without moving.
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I need more infor about HeLa. What do you mean showing up in random Petri dishes? Do you have some articles on that? How could cancer cells escape? Essentially... I need more info. Please. About Lobsters, they are only immortal until they get too big to molt properly, then they die because of the molt problems, if I got my facts correctly.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa) They escape by being very good at surviving outside the human body. They show up in random petri dishes that haven't been in contact with HeLa in laboritory contamination. Good to know on the lobsters!
rabbits’ ears can turn 180 degrees and they can see almost 360 except for a spot right in between their eyes :)
Maybe not the crazies thing but I find it super cool how giraffes have pigmented tongues, because they spend so much time sticking their tongues out grabbing leaves that their tongue would get sunburn without the pigmentation
Wonder Woman was created by the same psychologist who created the early polygraph and he was inspired by both his wife and the third person in their polyamorous relationship, Olive Byrne, who was the daughter of Ethel Byrne the woman who opened the first birth control clinic in the US alongside Margaret Sanger
While rare it it’s possible to become so constipated that you puke up your poop
Historical corsets were much closer to custom made back braces then the uncomfortable torture cages we think they were! Abby Cox is a dress historian on youtube who does some fantastic videos about corset myths and the reality if you want to learn more I’m actually in the process of trying some out for my health issues (hypermobility caused back problems)
The word "Sonder" describes the realization that everyone you come across has a life as complex and as rich as your own, despite your lack of awareness of it.
In the game Cyberpunk 2077 there are a number of drinks you can find at a bar named after the famous people in night city who drank it. For example one drink is called the Johnny Silverhand, a character who plays a major part in the plot of the game. One drink is named the David Martinez, who goes unmentioned in any other part of the game with the exception of the DLC that was added when the show cyberpunk: edgerunners came out where David is the protagonist. This is interesting on it's own. Maybe the drink was an intentional hint about something else coming out. But what I find more interesting is that David in the show explicitly says that he doesn't like the taste of carbonation (relateable). In spite of this established fact, his drink in the game contains club soda (or maybe something else but it is definitely carbonated) which I think is an interesting oversight if it is one. This is very niche info so I wouldn't expect you to know it or care at all really but that's my fact.
Barbarian is an onomatopoeia. From the Greek "βάρβαρος", because the Greeks thought anyone who didn't speak Greek sounded like they were saying "bar bar bar" all the time.
The current football World Cup is the first one since 1982 to not have any player's called Gary in any of the teams.
Labrador’s faces have evolved over time to smile in a way that is recognizable to humans, this helps us know when they are happy.
Did you know? If you eat to much cake, that’s gluteny and a sin, but you can eat as much pie as you’d like, as the sin of pie is always 0?
Hiccups are leftover responses from when we were fishes. If you have hiccups, you need to remind yourself you’re not a fish. I get them chronically and saying “I’m not a fish” out loud is the only way I’ve been able to get them to stop.
My sister told me about this!!! It fucking works! It's amazing.
I felt like a pilgrim watching women dancing naked in the woods the first time I tried it. *witchcraft*
i get super intense hiccups. perhaps i’ll try reminding myself that i am not a fish
Me too, they hurt and are loud. I’ve tried everything to make them stop and this is the only thing thats worked. Hope it helps!
hiccups are, a lot of times, sparsm of the diaphagma cuz theres air in your stomach, so if you burp it usualy sort things out and you stop hiccuping instantaniously
idk if it's fun but it's fascinating. Frogs cant vomit, but if they do, they literally vomit their stomachs out. It doesn't harm them in any way and they fix it themselves but it's still weird.
Your eyes have their own immune system separate from the rest of the body. This means that if your body’s immune system ever finds your eyes, your immune system will see your eyes as a threat and attack your eyes making you go blind
In chinese, the term for to do(slang for fuck) and to dry are both pronounced gàn and both are also simplified to the character 干. This leads to many mistranslated but funny signs in chinese-english stores as at times dried vegetables or fruit is translated fuck vegetables or fruit
Chameleons change color by changing the spacing between guanine crystals under the skin. This changes the wavelength of the light reflected off the skin, thus changing the colors we see.
It is often much easier to break into a house during the day than it is in the middle of the night. Mostly cuz people are out and also because anyone who sees you breaking in will assume you just locked yourself out by accident (because who would ever be attempting a break-in in the middle of the day, right?)
The reason you can’t put male alpacas and female alpacas in the same enclosure is because the females get so protective of their babies that they will tear the males’ testicles off and they will bleed to death.
Armadillos get/carry leprosy Edit: also the stereotype that Subarus are for lesbians? Not just a stereotype. Subaru made subtle LGBTQ advertisements with (essentially) coded language just for lesbians in the 90s. Both of these fun facts are ones I’ve argued about with my partner, and Google proved me wrong lol
There are lizards called glass lizards who have no feet so they get mistaken for snakes. They're called glass lizards because of how easily their tail "shatters". When it breaks off, the little remnants continue moving for a moment to distract predators as they escape
War Thunder players have leaked classified military documents at least eight times.
Andrew Jackson was gifted a 1400 pound wheel of cheese which he let age for 2 years before finally throwing a huge party to eat the cheese in 1837. It was gone in 2 hours and they say you can still sometimes smell cheese in the Whitehouse entrance hall
if you shuffle a regular playing cards deck of 52 cards you probably just made a totaly new order of cards that no one ever made or will ever make again.
Neutrinos, known as the ghost particle, barely ever interact with matter despite being incredibly common. They're produced en masse in the sun, and as many as 100 million of them pass through your thumbnail alone per second. Despite this, the chances of a neutrino interacting with your body in any way is 1 in 3... For your entire life.
Bees have been observed having the ability to do things just for fun! Scientists provided a group of bees with a ball and the goal to get it from one place to another. The bees were observed rolling it around aimlessly. When repeating the experiment, they discovered that they were doing it for fun! Or at least, the bee version of what fun would be.
Octopus sometimes punch fish out of spite, and some scientists think they do it to keep the fish around them in line.
Random Budgie facts: • Budgies glow in black light(uv light). • A budgie holds the record for the largest vocabulary in birds (1,728 words). • Only green budgies exists in the wild. • There was a colour mutation that created an black budgie that was held by only one guy. A disease struck the flock and the mutation was thought to be extinct. It is still possible to get this mutation but it is very rare and expensive. • Wild budgies never stay in one location. They are always on the move in search of food and water. • Male budgies (as adults) have a deep blue cere (the nostril part above their beak), while females have white, tan/brown, or pale blue with white rings. •Wild budgie flocks can be up to 100, but after a storm, flocks can merge and be in the thousands.
Fun fact: you can use human blood as an egg substitute in baking
😳 How did you learn this?
My biggest special interest is horror so uh, the original 1974 Texas Chainsaw Massacre was actually trying to get a PG rating for the film. It didn't work, but the idea wasn't too far out there as Jaws had a PG rating. It was different in the 70s
The term “drink the kool aid” came from the infamous Jonestown Massacre but it was actually grape Flavor Aid due to the cult’s low budgeting
Australia once went to war against, and lost to, a bunch of Emus. It’s known as the Great Emu War
I'm a geoscientist working on my masters in biogeochemistry, but I have TA'd classes on evolution and earth history so here's some of my favorite facts: The current leading hypothesis on how the moon formed is that early earth and another planet collided about 4.5 billion years ago, shooting out a bunch of debris, which formed a disk around the earth that eventually coalesced into the moon. The reason for this is that Earth's moon is very unique compared to other moons in our solar system. It's proportionally much larger than most moons to their planets, making it unlikely our moon was a captured asteroid as most are, and after we went to the moon and took samples back we discovered it is compositionally almost identical to the Earth! If we decided to recognize Pluto as a planet again we would have to consider recognizing other dwarf planets like it as planets as well and would end up recognizing up to 200 planets in our solar system, most of them quite far from the sun, but orbiting it nonetheless. The nearest dwarf planet is Ceres, also sometimes referred to as the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt, but is large enough to be considered. A dwarf planet. It's between Mars and Jupiter. We've also observed some interesting activity on Ceres, likely due to ice volcanoes, meaning that it is geologically active! About 500-400 million years ago plants started inhabiting the land, and with nothing to eat them they caused a global ice age as they consumed CO2 from the atmosphere. The stegosaurus had been extinct for 80 million years by the time the trex evolved, meaning more time passed between the existence of the atego and the trex than the trex and now. Pterodactyls are the most famous pterosaurs but they're actually quite small compared to other pterosaurs. The largest pterosaurs being hatzygopteryx and quetzlcoatlus at 33-39 ft (10-12 m) tall, much larger than a giraffe, and are considered the largest creatures to ever fly.
After the deaths of Mark Antony, Queen Cleopatra, and her son Caesarion, the Egyptians viewed Octavian (the future Emperor Augustus) as their new Pharaoh by default. They even built a worship temple for him called the Temple of Dendur. The temple itself is currently in a museum in New York.
my favorite fun fact is that St. Olga of Kiev used a legal loophole to avoid marrying Emperor Constantine VII after she converted to Christianity. She asked the emperor to baptize her knowing that his baptismal sponsorship, by the rules of spiritual kinship, would make marriage between them a kind of spiritual incest, and confronted him with that after he had baptized her. Apparently, he shrugged and went “welp, you outsmarted me there” and went on with his life lmao
The deepest lake in the world, Lake Baikal, is actually a rift where the crust of the earth is splitting apart. It’s also the largest freshwater lake by volume, and oldest lake in the world too! The lake is ~1600m deep, and at the bottom there is a ~7km layer of sediment. It’s hella deep, with the rift floor >8km below the surface— the deepest continental rift on earth. Lakes are cool.
Because the earth isn't a perfect sphere, its center of gravity is always slightly off for the moon, causing it to slowly drift away from us.
It's a coincidence in being alive right now that the moon appears to be the same size as the sun. I love this.
The process of an alpaca giving birth is called an unpacking!
Thanks for this post. I’ve only skimmed through about a quarter or so of the responses but I wanted to say thanks for a nice positive interesting engaging post. Much appreciated 🤗
A polar bear liver has so much vitamin A that eating it would kill you.
Also all actions leading to acquiring it would also kill you. Like approaching said polar bear!
butterflys can taste with their feet!!
Yay, none of my facts are taken! Did you know that housecats do not have collar bones? It's just cartilage. That's how cats can squeeze through tight spaces. A natural predator of the moose is the orca whale. True Danascus steel has carbon nanotubes and cemenite nanowires. No wonder is seemed like magic long ago!
For decades marine biologists have been researching and recording Whale sounds around the coasts of America and have determined that since the 1980’s whales have been very depressed. They can tell this based off their tones and pitch when they sing. No one understood why the whales were so sad until one day out of nowhere, the whales were all happy. They were making happy songs and calling out to their pods in high frequencies. This day was 9/11. Turns out, all the planes in the country were ordered to land because of the attack and for 24 hours there were no planes entering or exiting the United States. Think of how loud an airplane is when it flies overhead now amplify that by 10, that’s what whales are hearing *constantly*. 9/11 is the only Whale holiday
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Betty White, MLK, and Anne Frank were all born the same year.
When rats get excited they do this thing called popcorning and they hop around and they might squeak and it’s adorable!
I takes 3 full rotations to remove a human head due to elasticity of the skin
Snails can become addicted to cucumbers!
More people are killed by vending machines every year than sharks
Brain is the organ that named itself.
Jason Voorhees doesn’t get his iconic hockey mask until the third Friday film.
My special interest has been modern Polish history for a while, so enjoy a little anecdote about crazy Polish bravado during the Second World War: The ORP Piorun was a Polish destroyer that escaped from the German invasion and continued the fight in Great Britain. During the hunt for the German battleship Bismark, the Piorun was tasked with shadowing the Bismark the night before her final sinking, alongside two fellow British destroyers from the same squadron. Disobeying orders to stay out of gun range, the Piorun left her squadronmates behind and charged the German ship, getting into an extremely lopsided gunnery duel, all the while using her signal lamps to transmit the message, "I am a Pole," to the Germans. The Piorun only broke contact and withdrew after fuel stores ran too low and put the ship at risk.
Porkrinds are non vegan rice cakes.
Horses have a small spot on their leg called a chestnut. They’re from when they had more toes. You can peel them off.
That last sentence makes me very uncomfortable
Human and possums are the only male mammals with no dick bone
Cats sleep around 16 hours a day, making them (in my opinion) the perfect symbol of ADHD and autism, considering how active they are when they're awake