Clocking in at 100 mph, we can sneeze faster than cheetahs run, four-and-a-half times faster than Usain Bolt‘s record, and 20 times faster than Michael Phelps. (Unfortunately, we also expel about 100,000 germs when we sneeze.)
The fire hydrant patent is credited to Frederick Graff Sr., who was the chief engineer for Philadelphia Water Works during the early 1800s. Unfortunately for Graff Sr., the patent was destroyed when the patent office in Washington, D.C., burned down in 1836. After 100 years, retired firefighter George Sigelakis reinvented the hydrant after they had been failing to work in too many critical emergencies.
Saudi Arabia is known for its vast expanse of desert, so it may seem unbelievable that they rely on Australia to supply them with animals that dominate their landscape.
Australia originally had camels imported to be used for transporting heavy loads or for riding. They were let loose when their work was done, causing an unwanted spike in their population. Australians then sold the camels back to desert-based countries like Saudi Arabia, which use camels at a much higher volume.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived both nuclear attacks to Japan when the U.S. dropped atomic bombs during World War II. Yamaguchi, sent to Hiroshima on business on August 6th, 1945, saw the U.S. drop the first atomic bomb. Miraculously, he survived with burns across his face and arms, but made it home to Nagasaki. Three days later, the second atomic bomb hit, flattening Yamaguchi’s home. Because his family was out finding ointments to treat his already existent burns, they were safe in a tunnel and miraculously survived as well.
When the show came to an end, the cast of the popular TV show Friends negotiated syndication rights for themselves. That means they receive a percentage of the revenue (two percent) from reruns airing across all broadcasting companies. Since the much-loved TV show still pulls in around $1 billion of revenue, Courteney Cox, David Schwimmer, Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, and Matthew Perry all make major dough each year for doing, well, nothing—$20 million is the estimate.
Pluto was discovered on February 18th, 1930. It is the farthest (dwarf) planet from the Sun, requiring it to go a much farther distance than we are used to on Earth. It takes 248 Earth-years for Pluto to complete one rotation of its own around the sun. This places Pluto’s first birthday since its discovery on Monday, March 23, 2178.
While sharks account for about 53 bites per year, only one of those ends up being fatal. Cows, on the other hand (or hoof), kill around 20 people per year.
This belief is only a half truth, as babies actually technically do have kneecaps when they are born. Those knees just aren’t hardened yet, and remain soft cartilage throughout their childhood until they eventually turn into bone.
You might not want to bring up the popular video game Frogger in Germany. There, they like to protect their frogs, toads, and other amphibians. In order to save them from harm when crossing the street, conservation organizations installed more than 800 fences along popular roadways. Along these fences are buckets, so when they try to cross, they eventually hop into one. At the end of the day, wildlife conservationists collect the buckets and release frogs across the road into a nearby forest with ponds and lakes.
Cheetahs can’t roar, but they can purr, meow, hiss, bark, and growl instead. This type of behavior is much like the domestic cats we keep in our homes.
The country with the widest stretch of land, Russia, spans 11 different time zones. France, though, technology has the most, clocking in at 12—but that’s due to the fact that its territories are dispersed in various parts of the world. The U.S. ties with Russia in second, but not all time zones are inhabited.
So, Russia is the only place in the world where one citizen could be waking up at 8:00 a.m. and another could be going to bed at 11:00 p.m.
We’ve seen the heartwarming videos of dogs nursing baby squirrels back to health—and that’s actually much more common than we think. It becomes mutually beneficial to have more furry friends in the group to take on other roles in survival—whether that be hunting, gathering, or just simply cute companionship. Though the phenomenon isn’t completely understood, it’s clear that both humans and animals have an instinct to care for others.
In January 2012, Jay-Z released his hit “Glory,” a dedication to his firstborn child, Blue Ivy Carter. The rapper decided it would make sense to have her featured on the song, so he included a clip of her crying before the track ends. Because her dad officially credited her in the song’s title, she became the youngest person ever to have a Billboard hit—at a mere two days old.
Dogs have been known for the longest time as man’s best friend, but Americans are increasingly taking that to a new level. A 2017 study from Rover.com conducted over three years found that 54 percent of dog owners are willing to end a relationship if their pup doesn’t like their partner.
The study also found that 94 percent of dog owners consider their dogs to be a part of their family, and 78 percent include their pups in major family moments. Since one in four people said they bring their cuddly companions on first dates, maybe consider bringing dog treats instead of flowers next time.
The original 1977 Star Wars had a budget of $8 million, which distributor 20th Century Fox was reluctant to give to director/writer George Lucas, so he accepted a lower salary in order to keep the budget. The movie went on to make $775 million around the world, and Disney picked up the entire franchise for $4 billion. For comparison, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which was released in 2017, had a reported budget of $317 million.
The Greeks had it right with Prometheus, it turns out. According to Greek mythology, the titan was punished by having an eagle eat his liver day after day. The liver would regrow at night, leaving Prometheus at the bird’s mercy.
It turns out, the regenerative properties of this story are partially true: Doctors have found that the liver can regrow in three weeks, not one day.
In the early 20th century, those who resided in North Frisia under Prussian rule were not allowed to raise the Danish flag. But some crafty North Frisians took action by breeding a pig, known as the Danish Protest Pig, to be red in color, with a large white stripe around its belly—thus creating an animal version of the flag. As they technically did not break the law, and because it wouldn’t have been feasible to ban the breeding of pigs, the Danes successfully protested Prussia.
Chau Smith was always an avid runner, and, in 2017, she decided that for her 70th birthday, she would complete seven marathons in one week across all of the continents. Traveling made it challenging—for example, Smith made the race in Egypt just minutes before the start because her plane to Cairo was delayed. But despite the obstacles, she completed her goal.
Ever wonder why your little puppy obsesses over those squeaky toys? Because dogs are descendants of wolves whose instincts include hunting smaller animals. The sound a squeaky toy makes is very similar to the sound a small animal makes when being hunted. When Ol’ Lassie hears that, she gets excited because of these killer survival skills.
In 1972, Nolan Bushnell started the gaming company Atari, which gave us the classic arcade game Pong. Bushnell sold the company just four years later and the following year, he opened Chuck E. Cheese! In fact, there is one game in Chuck E. Cheese that actually is called Ping, a knockoff of his original arcade game, which he couldn’t use since he no longer owned it.
In 1965, 26-year-old Angus Barbieri, who weighed 456 pounds, was put on a fasting program. It wouldn’t be ethical to conduct a study like this today, but at the time, things were different, allowing Barbieri’s doctor, William Stewart, to experiment. On a strict regimen of multivitamins and minerals, Barbieri got his nutrients without eating a scrap of food, which resulted in nearly two months of constipation. By the end of the year, Barbieri was 180 pounds. (Note: Fasting to this degree is not recommended, as it can lead to serious health conditions.)
Searching through public Facebook data, Lee Byron and David McCandless found that relationship statuses changed for the worse two weeks before Christmas, around Easter, and on Mondays. Though this data may be somewhat misleading, as people might not be live-updating their breakups, it shows an obvious trend.
Thomas Hargrove has been archiving homicides for years through his Murder Accountability Project. Through his experience, he came up with an algorithm that found patterns in recent unsolved murders linked to at least one other murder through DNA. This allowed him to estimate the number of unsolved cases in the U.S. at any given time. According to The New Yorker, he believes that the number of active serial killers in the U.S. is around 2,000.
Upon going deaf, Beethoven discovered that if he bit onto a metal pole that connected to the piano he was playing, he could hear almost perfectly well. This process is called bone conduction, and while technology has evolved, the science is the same: Vibrations are transferred from the conductive metal into our bones. When this happens, our ears pick up the signal with no sound distortion.
While previous research found that ants use visual cues, a 2007 study discovered that desert ants have an internal pedometer that helps them keep track of their travels and find their way back home.
A 2012 study published in the journal PLoS ONE found that men who are feeling stressed out prefer women with curvier figures. The study had one experimental group perform a stressful activity, while the other control group did not. Afterward, they were shown pictures of women with various body types. When the men in the control group were asked to rate the women on a scale of one to nine, they rated pictures of women with higher BMIs as the most attractive.
In 2010, researchers in Seattle found that formerly captured crows were able to remember the face of their abductor even years after the incident. Once they identified the suspect in question, they would threaten them by diving down and swarming the person that they had felt threatened by years before.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates encourages the Giving Pledge, a notion that, if you are fortunate enough, you should be giving 50 percent of your wealth to those who need it most. As of 2013, he has donated $28 billion and has saved around 6 million lives by bringing vaccines and better healthcare to people worldwide.
The human brain is capable of amazing things, but in order to do those things, it needs to block out distractions through a process called unconscious selective attention. The nose is one of those distractions. In his landmark 1960s study, Ulric Neisser discovered this phenomenon after he asked participants to count the number of times basketball players passed a ball in a video. What the large majority failed to notice in the video was a girl walking through the middle of the court with an umbrella, because they were so focused on counting.
It is true that everybody thinks their Italian grandma—or nonna—is the best cook around. So it was a genius idea when Joe Scaravella decided to gather up as many nonnas as he could to work in his restaurant in Staten Island. Enoteca Maria combines the skill of these delightful, talented grandmothers and has them create and cook recipes from their own family cookbooks.
Shaquille O’Neal made the only three-point shot he would ever make in his entire career on Feb. 16, 1996. When the Orlando Magic played the Milwaukee Bucks, O’Neal received an almost full-court pass before he shot the three-pointer. Despite being the only official three-point shot in his career, he went down in NBA history as one of the greatest of all time.
At the Bank of Philadelphia on Aug. 1, 1798, a sum of $162,821 was stolen from the vault. There was no sign of forced entry so it was thought to be an inside job. Patrick Lyon was imprisoned as the prime suspect, as he had been the carpenter that worked on the vault doors.
But then, they realized a man named Isaac Davis had been depositing large sums of money into the Bank of Philadelphia. It turned out, that he was one of the robbers involved. In 1799, Lyon was freed, and Davis only ended up repaying the money without serving a day in jail.
During World War II, the Allied forces dropped over a total of 2.7 million tons of bombs on Germany. Due to certain defects in their delay timers, a large number of bombs never exploded—around 10 percent, or 200,000 tons. As they’ve been discovered in years since, it’s routine for German citizens to be evacuated from buildings or sectioned off on streets, while bomb experts handle the devices.
Trees are young’ns compared to the geezer sharks that rule the sea. Sharks have existed for around 400 million years, while trees became their own official species only 350 million years ago. Other notable animals that outlive our leafy ancestors are the horseshoe crab as well as the jellyfish.
Today, bacteria and fungi eat away at fallen trees, but that wasn’t always the case. Bacteria had to evolve to eat wood, so hundreds of millions of years ago, trees would fall at death, leaving large piles of dead wood. Forest fires of unimaginable proportions would burn the massive mounds of dead wood. And that’s where most of the coal today on Earth came from, according to National Geographic.
You’re pronouncing Dr. Seuss’ name wrong.
We walk an Earth that has seen the extinction of 99.9 percent of all of the species who’ve ever lived on it, according to PBS. Congratulations—that means you are technically in the .1 percent… at least for now!
The Silverback gorilla can lift up to 10 times its body weight on average: a total of about 1,800 pounds, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. This makes them one of the strongest living animal species on Earth. Though they are feared, the Silverback gorillas will only use their strength when they feel threatened.
Your angsty teenage dreams of being the most original, unique person alive could actually come true! Grab a deck of cards and shuffle. Most likely, you will have created a combination of cards that had never existed yet until that moment. Any math experts out there know that this is because the probability comes out to 52 factorial or 52! (52 x 51 x 50 … x 2 x 1). The probability that two card shuffles are exactly the same is so small, it likely will never happen.
When it’s an adult, the “Immortal Jellyfish,” scientifically named Turritopsis dohrnii, can transform its cells back to its childhood state. This usually happens when it is physically harmed, sick, or even when it is starving. The jellyfish evolved this skill in order to survive throughout history, specifically when latching onto ships. Since it can hitchhike, its DNA has spread and the not-so-rare species are emerging all over the world.
In March 1958, a B-47 plane was headed to the United Kingdom and was armed with an atomic bomb. This bomb was even bigger than the “Fat Boy,” the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
During the flight, the pilots noticed a fault light, so one of them decided to check it out. In doing so, he accidentally released the emergency pin, watching in horror as the bomb dropped to the ground. The good news was, that the critical part of the bomb needed to set it off was still on the plane, so it never exploded.
Blue Whale calves grow 200 pounds per day for the first year they are alive. They can move at a brisk pace of five miles per hour when fully grown, but can get up to 20 miles per hour if need be. They can also hear up to 1,000 miles away in the ocean.
Cats once delivered mail in Belgium.
In the 1870s, the city of Liège, Belgium, attempted to employ 37 felines as mail carriers, according to the BBC. Messages were tucked into waterproof bags that the kitties would carry around their necks. However, while one cat apparently made it to its destination in under five hours, the other felines took up to a day to complete their journeys. Due to the fact that the cats weren’t particularly reliable and definitely weren’t speedy, the service didn’t last very long.
You may have been told at some point in your life that you’re either left-brained or right-brained. The story goes that “people who are left brain dominant are more quantitative, logical, and analytical, while right-brained individuals are more emotional, intuitive, and creative free spirits,” writes Psychology Today.
However, this theory isn’t true. “On the contrary, most behaviors and abilities require the right and left sides of the brain to work together to achieve a common objective,” the website explains. So while you may have certain qualities and characteristics that define you who are, they have nothing to do with which side of your brain you use more. You can thank both sides of your noggin for contributing to your unique personality.
Perfumes and colognes offer alluring aromas, but it turns out that there is another smell combination that is likely to turn a lady on. One 2005 study by the Smell and Taste Treatment Research Foundation found that the most “attractive” scent for women was Good & Plenty licorice candy combined with cucumbers. The smells of cherries and barbecue were turn-offs, but “banana nut bread also had positive effects.”
It’s pretty darn impressive that scientists have been able to harness energy from the sun, wind, and water, providing us with all kinds of alternative sources of power. And now they’ve managed to create energy from snowfall. According to a 2019 study in the journal Nano Energy, engineers and chemists from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed a device made of silicone that can harness a charge from static electricity.
In 2013, Animal Planet aired Mermaids: The New Evidence, a documentary—or rather, a mockumentary—that “proved” the half-human-half-fish beings exist. And while the program was fake, plenty of the 3.6 million viewers that watched believed that the fictional claims were real. In fact, so many people were fooled that the U.S. government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a statement on its website addressing the confusion, saying: “Mermaids: The New Evidence is just entertainment. No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found.”
If you’ve ever been to the Iowa State Fair, you’ve experienced the sort of carnival-based fun that it’s been providing since 1886. And if you’ve never been to the annual event, then you should know that you’re missing out on quite a few quirky competitions, including cow-chip and rubber-chicken throwing contests, a husband-calling contest, and a beard-growing contest.
Publishers are always eager to release something unique—and Springer Nature did just that when they published a textbook by an author named Beta Writer in 2019. No, that’s not a cheeky pseudonym; it’s the name of a machine-learning algorithm designed by researchers from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. The book is called Lithium-Ion Batteries: A Machine-Generated Summary of Current Research. And while it doesn’t sound like the most interesting material, it is “the first machine-generated research book,” according to the academic publishing company.
The North Star might seem like a fixed marker in the sky. However, what we now recognize as the North Star, Polaris, hasn’t always been our guiding light—and it won’t always be in the future. By the year 13,000 A.D., the star Vega will take its place, according to NASA. And by the year 26,000, Polaris will be right back where it was and return to its status as the North Star.
Members of the Marsili family handle injuries remarkably well and that’s because they only experience pain for a moment before it fades away. Letizia Marsili told Smithsonian Magazine, “I just thought of it as part of who I was. I was strong, I was resilient. I bounced back.”
However, when a researcher at the University of Siena, where Letizia works, noticed her unusual tolerance for pain—which is something her mother, sister, and son all share—the two decided to collaborate to see what was going on. They discovered that Letizia experiences “the good pain, the pain that alerts us to danger. Then it disappears. The bad kind of pain, the chronic pain, the ongoing pain that we take painkillers for—she simply [doesn’t] feel that.”
While “hipster” is used these days to describe someone who tries (perhaps too hard) to be stylish and trendy, the term is actually much older. According to Dictionary.com, the word was originally used (along with the similar “hepster”) in the 1930s to refer to someone in the jazz scene.
Lidio Valdez, an archaeologist from the Institute of Andean Studies, made a surprising discovery in Peru when he came across 100 dead guinea pigs that had been sacrificed by the Incan people during the 16th century. The rodents, which had clearly been a part of some sort of ritual, were adorned with earrings and necklaces made from colorful string. “Some were even wrapped in cotton rugs like a sushi roll,” wrote Gizmodo of the findings, which were published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology in 2019.
In 2012, Adolf Hitler‘s medical documents were auctioned to the public by Alexander Historical Auctions. According to the files, The Telegraph reported, flatulence had become such a pervasive issue for Hitler that he had to regularly ingest 28 different drugs to keep it under control. But some of the anti-gas pills he used contained a base of strychnine, a poison that caused further stomach and liver issues.
Whether you’re a professional photographer or not, you’ll probably be impressed by the photo-related feat accomplished by a team at Australia’s Griffith University in 2012. Using an electrical field to suspend a charged atom in a vacuum chamber, the team shot a laser beam at the atom and took a photo of the shadow it produced. While atoms have been photographed before, their shadows have not, making this accomplishment unprecedented.
If you’re in Maine, you’ll find the Atlantic Ocean to the south and Canada to the north. But if you want to stay in the U.S., you’ll have to head west to New Hampshire, because Maine is the only state in the country that borders just one other state.
If you truly want to be among the savviest social media users out there, you should know that the Twitter bird has an official name: Larry the Bird (yes, like Larry Bird, the former pro basketball player who played for Twitter co-founder Biz Stone‘s home team, the Boston Celtics).
The title of Srijan Timilsina‘s 2014 Guinness World Record-setting book is practically a full text in itself. Including 1,809 words (or 11,284 characters) it begins The historical development of the Brain i.e. from its formation from Annelida: Earthworm, Lugworm, Rag worm, Amphitrite, Freshwater worm, Marine worm, Tubifex, Leech. etc, Arthropoda: Housefly, Butterfly, Honey bee, Fairy shrimp, Horseshoe crab, Tick, Bluebottle, Froghopper, Yellow crazy ant…,” and continues to list pretty much every insect, fish, and mammal you can think of, including humans.
If you’re one of the millions of Americans who suffer from allergies, we’ve got bad news for you: Allergy season is getting longer and more intense each year, according to a 2019 study published in The Lancet Planetary Health. Likely another unfortunate result of climate change, scientists have found that pollen counts across the Northern Hemisphere have increased over the last 20 years and that pollen season is increasing 0.9 days a year worldwide.
And that’s because they’re a choking hazard without them. “In addition to help prevent the pen from leaking, all of our BIC caps comply with international safety standards that attempt to minimize the risk of children accidentally inhaling pen caps. Some of these vented caps … have a little hole in the top to comply with the existing safety standards,” the BIC pen company explains on its website.
Fans of George R.R. Martin‘s best-selling books and HBO’s hit series Game of Thrones will be able to tell you that High Valyrian is the Latin-like language used in formal circumstances by the fictional nobility of Essos and Westeros. And while the stories may be make-believe, the language is a fully developed form of communication that you can learn yourself thanks to an online course from Duolingo. By the end, you’ll be able to say phrases in High Valyrian like “kirimvose” (thank you) and “avy jorrāelan” (I love you), as well as “bantis zōbrie issa se ossȳngnoti lēdys” (the night is dark and full of terrors).
As they say, “nothing is certain but death and taxes.” Depending on where in the world you live, rain may be just as much of an inevitability. And for some Maryland residents, rain and taxes are both inescapable and tied together thanks to the “rain tax,” which was passed by the state legislature and signed into law in 2012.
In April 2019, a team at Yale was able to restore partial functionality to the brains of decapitated pigs for 10 hours or more after the animal’s death. Neuroscientist Nenad Sestan, who participated in the experiment, explained that the result might allow us to “better understand how brain cells react to circulatory arrest” and “test whether some cellular functions can be restored in the brain after death.”
When astronauts leave Earth, they face a range of factors that affect them physically. That includes the intense amount of radiation that they’re exposed to According to NASA, it’s the equivalent of anywhere between 150 to a staggering 6,000 chest X-rays.
The next time you eat something that flaunts the rich flavor of vanilla, you might want to be aware of—or do your best to ignore—the fact that castoreum, a goo that beavers excrete to mark their territory, is sometimes used to enhance the flavor of vanilla in food, according to National Geographic. The goo is “generally regarded as a safe additive” by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, but you’ll probably never come across it in real life because it’s difficult and expensive to collect.
In 1859, the U.S. almost went to war with Canada because of a pig. Just a few years after the Oregon Treaty was signed to end a border dispute between America and Britain (which still ruled over the area that came to be known as Canada), things got a little heated on San Juan Island where citizens from both countries were located. Historic UK explains that “a pig belonging to the British accidentally wandered onto the land of Lyman Cutlar, an American farmer. When Cutlar noticed the pig eating some of his potatoes he was incensed, and in a fit of rage shot and killed the pig.”
If you lived in the 18th century, you might have referred to tornados using the words “twirlblast” or “twirlwind.” Honestly, we might need to bring these back!
You may not recognize the name Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, and that’s because he was famously (or infamously) known by his nickname, the Sundance Kid. The American outlaw, who was born in 1868 and was killed in 1908, took his now-historical moniker from the only town that put him behind bars: Sundance, Wyoming. He was jailed there when he was just 15 years old for stealing a horse and was sentenced to 18 months. The Sundance Kid went on to join the Wild Bunch, a group of robbers and rustlers who ranged through the Rocky Mountains in the late 19th century.
The thought of any creature devouring its babies may be horrific to us, but for some animals, such as certain fish, reptiles, and amphibians, that’s not the case, according to 2019 research published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. Among these creatures, sacrificing some of their young via cannibalism may be a way to help their other offspring survive when overcrowding becomes a problem.
The original MacGyver series that ran from 1985 until 1992 featured a main character who could fashion pretty much whatever his heart desired with random objects. As a result, we’ve been using the word “MacGyvered” as an adjective meaning “adapted or improvised in an ingenious or expedient way.” And in March 2019, the term was officially added to the Oxford English Dictionary. It only took 34 year
If bourbon is your drink of choice, then you might want to plan a road trip to Kentucky. The state is not only responsible for 95 percent of the world’s bourbon, according to The Atlantic, but there is also so much of it that the 4.7 million barrels in the state’s distilleries outnumber the 4.3 million people living in the area.
Jupiter’s red spot is almost as well-known as the planet’s remarkable rings. But the spot, which is, in fact, a storm, has been shrinking for a century and a half. Although NASA can’t predict what will happen to the storm that was “once big enough to swallow three Earths with room to spare,” they do know that it “seems to have increased in area at least once along the way, and it’s growing taller as it gets smaller.”
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