26Elena Mukhina
Soviet gymnast Elena Mukhina was widely touted as the next great gymnastics star until 1979. Her coach rushed her recovery from an injury and pressured her to perform a dangerous move (the Thomas salto), which caused her to break her neck, leaving her a lifelong quadriplegic. She died at the age of 46 in 2006.
27. Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire killed 11% of the world's population in the 13th century.
28. There was an elevator driver strike in New York City in 1945. Up until then, people were afraid to use automatic elevators but the strike drove their mass adoption. The elevator driver job driver demand started to decline which ultimately meant their job is lost forever.
29. The idea for the McDonald's Happy Meal originated in Guatemala. Created by manager Yolanda Fernández de Cofiño to simplify the menu for busy parents, it was later brought to the attention of the Chicago office who developed it further and deployed it in the U.S.
30. Drowning people almost never shout, thrash or wave for help. 10% of children who drown are supervised by adults who don't recognize the signs.
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31Olympic swimming
Olympic swimming is only timed to hundredths of a second because the pools aren’t built to the millimeter tolerances necessary to measure thousandths of a second.
32. The medals in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games (held in 2021) are made from metals recovered from recycled cell phones collected since 2017.
33. After ZZ Top's exhausting first major tour, the band went on a long hiatus to recover. When the band finally reconvened after two years of relaxing and decompressing, the two guitarists discovered they had both separately let themselves go and grown long thick beards.
34. MIT created a system that provides cooling with no electricity. It was tested in a blazing hot Chilean desert and achieved a cooling of 13°C compared to the hot surroundings.
35. Eric Moussambani had never seen an Olympic-sized swimming pool before the 2000 Olympics. He recorded the slowest time in 100m freestyle history at 1:52.72. He however won his heat as all other competitors false-started. He is now a national hero, the head swimming coach of Equatorial Guinea.
