26Mammoth Ivory
There are 150 million mammoths buried in the frozen Siberian tundra. Trading in mammoth ivory is legal but elephant ivory is not, leading to poaching of mammoth tusk ivory. Hence, laws are being planned to include mammoth under protected species despite being extinct for 4000 years.
27. The reason we know what cyanide tastes like is because of an Indian man named M.P. Prasad, who when he committed suicide left a hastily scrawled note describing the taste. “Doctors, potassium cyanide. I have tasted it. It burns the tongue and tastes acrid,” he wrote, solving a long unanswered question.
28. Walt Disney bought his parents a house and asked his studio to fix the furnace there. His guys botched the job, causing the furnace to leak, resulting in his mother’s death.
29. New Mexico was not named after the nation of Mexico, but rather after the Aztec Valley of Mexico in 1563, more than 250 years before Mexico became a nation.
30. Three cameras were standard in multi-cam television filming prior to 1970s. Then Garry Marshall needed a 4th camera to solely follow Robin Williams while filming ‘Mork & Mindy’ since Williams was so unpredictable with his physical comedy.
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31Code of Hammurabi
The Code of Hammurabi (1754 BC) has 282 laws inscribed on stone. It includes the concept of "eye for an eye" and "tooth for a tooth" - more than 500 years before the Torah.
32. Within hours of its release in 1993, the video game DOOM was banned from numerous university networks as a rush of players overwhelmed their systems with death matches.
33. Michael Jordan took home economics in high school to learn to cook because he was worried his big ears would make it hard to find a woman who would want to marry him.
34. Charles Schulz always disliked the title of Peanuts, which was given to his comic strip by the syndicate. In a 1987 interview, Schulz said of it: “It’s totally ridiculous, has no meaning, is simply confusing, and has no dignity—and I think my humor has dignity.”
35. In 1867, a jar was found in Paris containing a human rib among other artifacts, and a label claiming that they belonged to Joan of Arc. Tests conducted in 2006 revealed that it came not from Joan of Arc, but an Egyptian mummy.
