35 Awesome Random Facts That You’ll Want to Instantly Share – Part 78

85-90% of passengers that fall overboard on cruise ships perish.

2. Lobster’s brain is located in its throat, nervous system in the abdomen, teeth in stomach and kidneys in the head, hears using its legs, tastes with its feet, and tends to favor one front limb meaning they can be right-clawed or left-clawed.

3. The largest pyramid north of Mesoamerica (Monks Mound) is located in Illinois. Covering 13 acres, its footprint is comparable in size to that of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

4. There was a tree found at ground zero a month after 9/11 in the rubble with burned and cracked roots and branches nearly dead. New York Parks and Recreation nursed it back to health and planted it where the towers stood in 2010. Today it marks survival, resilience, and rebirth.

5. In 2011, a 134-hour documentary showing a cruise ship (MS Nordnorge) on its voyage from Bergen to Kirkenes was transmitted live and non-stop on Norwegian television. Approximately half the population of Norway tuned in to watch.

Uraba lugens, the mad hatterpillar, is a caterpillar that goes around with its old shedded heads stacked on as hats.

7. In 2003, a woman had a heart attack during a flight. The attendant asked for any doctor on board, and 15 expert cardiologists appeared, saving her life. They were all heading to a cardiology conference.

8. All mountains on Titan are named after locations from J.R.R Tolkien's Middle Earth.

9. President Ulysses S. Grant gargled red wine laced with cocaine to relieve pain from throat cancer.

10. The demon core was a palm-sized orb of plutonium responsible for the death of scientists on two separate occasions. Both incidents included a slip of the wrist, resulting in a millisecond long burst of radiation. The blue light was emitted in the second incident.

Boris Yeltsin abandoned communism partly due to a visit to Randall's Grocery store in Clear Lake, Texas.

12. In April 2013, Charlie Sheen claimed that in 2011 he had laughed so hard while watching a Chappelle's Show episode that he experienced a ruptured hernia, and was rushed to a hospital.

13. Amercian game show host Bob Barker is part Sioux and spent most of his childhood living on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

14. Lays marketed a low calorie "WOW" brand of chips that made consumers crap their pants. The main ingredient, Olestra, is a fat substitute which allows for frying without calories being added. The problem is your body can't absorb it. Consumers suffered from cramping, diarrhea, and anal leakage.

15. Physical exercise during pregnancy has been found to have a positive impact on the cognitive development of the child, as measured using EEG a few days after birth.

A US couple named Peter Petrasek and Joan Petrasek willed $847,215.57 to the U.S. government as a "thank you" for the freedom of living in the U.S. after escaping Nazi-controlled territory in World War 2.

17. Vietnam vets have told William Shatner that they kept themselves sane while in POW camps by re-enacting Star Trek episodes.

18. When Alvin "Tex" Johnston was told to sell Boeing's new 707 jetliner to a crowd of businessmen and reporters in 1955, he rolled the aircraft inverted in a 1 G maneuver called a barrel roll without the knowledge of the company's president.

19. At the age of 9 Eminem was knocked unconscious by a childhood bully with a snowball with a hard object inside, and was found hours later in the school bathroom in a puddle of blood. This attack resulted in a 10-day coma that many doctors thought he wouldn't come out of.

20. In 1980 Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser (Zbigniew Brzezinski) was awoken by a report of 2,200 incoming Soviet missiles. It was a false alarm due to the malfunction of a 46 cent chip.

Up until the 1600s, “black swan” was a metaphor for something that did not exist. Then a group of Dutch explorers became the first Europeans to see black swans in Western Australia in 1697, and the phrase was amended to mean “a perceived impossibility that might later be disproven.”

22. On the tiny island nation of Tuvalu, every day for about two hours before sunset hundreds of Tuvaluans, young and old, meet on the international airport runway to just hang out.

23. The TI-83 Plus Calculator could run Doom and Tetris.

24. Broccoli is man-made. It was made over 2000 years ago by farmers breeding different types of cabbages.

25. Spiral staircases in medieval castles were deliberately made clockwise because it diminished the ability of attackers to properly swing their swords since right-handed fighters would have had to contend with the walls while making their striking motions.