1Body Farms
America is home to “Body Farms,” where corpses are just tossed out into nature to rot for scientists to study decomposition and forensics.
2. In 1950, over 1 million French citizens were native speakers of a Celtic language called Breton. Today there are less than 250,000 speakers of Breton. The language is isolated to the Brittany peninsula in Northwest France.
3. The Brocken Spectre is an atmospheric phenomenon in which the sun casts a person’s shadow onto fog or clouds, making the shadow appear enormous, otherworldly, and ringed with a rainbow halo.
4. One popular account of the origin of the phrase "Milky Way" arises from the Ancient Greek myth of Hera (wife of Zeus) breastfeeding Heracles (also known as Hercules). Hercules fed so strongly Hera recoiled, spraying milk from her breast, creating the Milky Way.
5. 35% of British adults still sleep with a teddy bear.
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15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
6August Busch IV
August Busch IV, the former president and CEO of Anheuser-Busch, killed his passenger in an accident when he was 19. Although there were empty beer cans scattered around and he fled the scene, no charges were filed. The urine sample was lost and the blood sample was ‘mishandled.’
7. In 2017, an Irish golfer named Adam Rolston set up a 2,000 km golf hole across Mongolia. The hole was par 14,000 and took 80 days to finish. He finished the game 6,000 strokes over par.
8. Glossy paper is heavy because it is literally made of clay. The gloss is made using white clay to fill in the spaces between the fibers.
9. Days are gradually getting longer. A current day is longer by about 1.7 milliseconds than it was a century ago.
10. “Baker’s dozen” originated in the 1200s when King Henry III standardized bread loaf weights. A baker who sold skinny loafs could be beaten or thrown in jail. Bakers then began to throw in an extra loaf to cover the short fall.
11Narwhals
The Vikings hunted narwhals for their “horns” (which are actually their teeth) and sold them to clueless European traders as “unicorn horns,” which Europeans thought had magical properties.
12. Ukraine lost 20% of its population in World War 2. This is proportionately more than any other nation that took part in the war.
13. Insulin is the 6th most expensive liquid in the world at $9,400 per gallon with prices expected to rise in the future.
14. Tea is said to have been discovered in 2737 B.C. by a Chinese emperor named Shen Nung when some tea leaves accidentally blew into a pot of boiling water.
15. The African elephant has the longest gestational period out of all mammals, with an average pregnancy lasting almost 2 years.
16Serpent Column
The Serpent Column, which the Greeks created in 478 B.C. to celebrate their victory over the Persians at Plataea, still exists and was made from the melted-down bronze from the Persian weapons.
17. There was a pristine version of the Apollo 11 moon landing footage at NASA for years, but around 1980 due to a data tape shortage they reused the tape for something else. This is the reason we only have a grainy version of the footage.
18. In the United Kingdom, the April Fool's Day ends at noon.
19. In 2017, Bud light sent a cease and desist letter to a small brewer who named their beer “Dilly Dilly,” referencing a nonsense phrase coined and trademarked for a series of Bud Light ads. The letter was written on a scroll and announced by a town crier.
20. One of the most famous lines in movie history, "You're going to need a bigger boat" from 'Jaws' was actually an ad-lib on set. Furthermore, the audience screams at test screenings obscured the line, leading to a longer pause before hearing the line.
21Alexander Fleming
Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, but never tried to make an antibiotic out of it. It was not until a decade later that a man named Howard Florey found Fleming's little-known paper and realized the mold's potential. Florey's work is estimated to have saved up to 200,000,000 lives.
22. The loudest word ever shouted was the word 'quiet'.
23. In 1976, the team studying a newly-identified virus in Africa didn't want to name it after the village where it was found, so they named it after the closest river they could see on a map, which was the Ebola River.
24. The remote Ascension Island in the Atlantic was known as a barren, desert island when it was discovered in the 1700s, but today boasts one of the world's largest artificial forests, which was planned by Charles Darwin and botanist Joseph Hooker in order to make the island livable.
25. Jan Baalsrud was a World War 2 Norwegian commando, who was the lone survivor of a Nazi ambush. He survived an avalanche, severe frostbite and snow blindness, having to amputate his own toes, and being relentlessly pursued by Germans for 9 weeks before being whisked to safety in Sweden by locals.
