April 11, 1954 was dubbed the most boring day in
history – nothing of any importance happened on that day. (Which makes
it rather unusual.)
Winston Howes, a farmer in South Gloucestershire,
England, planted thousands of oak trees to create a heart-shaped
clearing as a tribute to his deceased wife Janet.
Fingers prune in water to give you a better grip. Just another clever
evolutionary trick.
In 2021, Budimir Buda Šobat created a world record in
holding one’s breath – 24:33.
A single testicle of a blue whale can weigh between
99 to 150 pounds.
If you eat polar bear liver you might die – and
rather horribly, too, with the skin peeling off your body. The reason
for that is too much vitamin A – humans just can’t handle that much.
Adult elephants can’t jump. Neither can sloths, rhinos or hippos.
During the strike of medical doctors in LA in 1976,
the death rate decreased by 18%.
You have to grow, manually pluck and dry over
80,000 flowers to get 1 pound of saffron.
Ancient Romans used to boil vinegar with goat muck,
the result was an energy drink favored by charioteers.
A flea can jump a distance that is 350 times longer
than its own length. Translated into human terms, it would mean that a
man would be able to jump over 3 airplanes.
If you’ve ever wondered what to call the phenomena
when three astronomical bodies line up, it is "syzygy".
In 1971, Juliane Koepcke, a 17 year old German girl,
was flying with her mother over the Amazon rainforest. Their airplane
(LANSA Flight 508) was hit by lightning in a heavy storm and was
consequently torn to bits. At the height of 10,000 feet (3.2 km), the
forces ripped the girl out of the airplane, still strapped into her
seat, and she fell to the ground.
A few hours later she woke up with relatively minor injuries given the
length of her freefall – a concussion, a broken collarbone, an inch deep
cut in her leg and torn ligaments in her knee.
She was looking for her mother for a while unsuccessfully, and then she
remembered her father’s advice to follow the little water streams since
they lead to bigger streams and finally to a river where it was most
likely to find human habitation. So she did.
She spent 10 days walking through the rainforest without her glasses and
an injured eye, dressed in a skimpy mini-skirt and wearing just one
sandal, until she finally found people who then took care of her. Nobody
else survived the LANSA Flight 508.
Lions do it pretty often. Sometimes up to 40 times a
day.
Giraffes have the same number of teeth as humans.
Quite a few lip balms contain salicylic acid, a
substance that causes your lips to peel – which is in turn causing you
to go and buy more lip balm.
The camel protects his eyes against the ever-present
sand with three eyelids.
The first plant to have flowered and produced seeds
in space was Arabidopsis, grown in 1982 by the crew of the Soviet Salyut
7.
Do you know the difference between poisonous and
venomous snakes?
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It is surprisingly simple. If you bite the snake and you die, the snake
was poisonous. If the snake bites you and you die, the snake was
venomous. Enjoy.
An interesting simile of why pearls are the best
gifts for the angry girlfriend – oysters actually make pearls to get rid
of a nagging pain. When a parasite or a grain of sand or debris gets
inside their shell and causes their soft bodies discomfort, they coat it
with multiple layers of “nacre”. Eventually, a beautiful pearl is born.
The Alaskan Wood Frog spends the harsh Alaskan winter
frozen solid – with no heartbeat and no breathing. When the thawing rays
of the sun arrive with the spring, it simply unfreezes and hops off on
its way.
In 2005, a Swedish millionaire Johan Eliasch bought
400,000 acres (1,600 km2) of Amazonian forest near the Madeira River
from a logging company for 14 million dollars with the sole purpose to
preserve it.
No dinosaur has ever killed a human being.
Leonardo Da Vinci was a vegetarian and was known to
buy caged birds simply to let them free. He was also questioning man’s
superiority over animals and his right to raise them for slaughter –
this attitude was unheard of in his time.
Considering the work and processes our bodies are
constantly doing, they are remarkably quiet.
In Russia, there are 44 “closed cities” (“closed
administrative-territorial formations”) where no foreigners are allowed.
The total population of these towns amounts to 1.5 million; they are
administered either by the Ministry of Defense (75%), or the Russian
Federal Atomic Energy Agency.
The human eye can pick out over 10 million colors.
The highest doctor per patients ratio (least patients
per doctor) is in Cuba.
Steve Jobs’ father was a Syrian immigrant.
It is illegal to step on money in Thailand, because
you’d be insulting the king by stepping on his picture.
