33 Obscure Random Facts That’ll Improve Your Mood | Random List #258

Velcro was invented by a Swiss electrical engineer named George de Mestral after a hunting trip in the Alps in 1941. He took a close look at the burrs of burdock that stuck to his clothes and his dog’s fur and developed the technology for commercial use in the 1950s.

27. Australia has an unofficial national anthem named "Waltzing Matilda" which is basically a song about a hobo getting caught for grabbing a stray sheep and commits suicide in a nearby pond to avoid punishment. Then he haunts the pond.

28. The term ‘patient 0’ is based on a misunderstanding. One of the earliest recorded HIV patients was named ‘patient O’, standing for ‘patient OUT of California’. Readers and journalists then misinterpreted this letter as the numeral 0, leading to its wide usage today.

29. For most people, the pain from kidney stones is not from passing the stone. Rather, it's from the stone making its way from the kidney down the ureter towards the bladder, causing muscle spasms. Most stones pass from the bladder out of urine relatively pain-free.

30. Ferrari's famous "prancing horse" logo was coined because one of Enzo Ferrari's best friends gave him a necklace with a prancing horse just before taking off and then getting shot down in a World War 1 dogfight over the Isonzo Front.

Newspaper cleans windows better than microfiber rags and paper towels.

32. Anarchist thinker Peter Kropotkin was a military officer turned geologist. In 1871, he explored the glacial deposits of Finland and Sweden. In 1873, he published a map and paper in which he showed that the existing maps entirely misrepresented the physical features of Asia.

33. "Wolf Tree" is the term used to describe trees that were not cut down during deforestation and left to grow in the new growth forests of New England.