1Licca-Chan
Licca-Chan is a doll considered to be the Japanese equivalent to Barbie, enjoying more success in Japan due to appealing to 'sensibilities' that Barbie didn't carry since 1967.
2. NASA does not have an official protocol for what to do with an astronaut's body if one were to die in space.
3. The "Broken Windows Theory" states that maintaining and monitoring urban areas to prevent small crimes, such as vandalism, helps to create an atmosphere of order and lawfulness - thereby preventing more serious crimes from happening.
4. Yew trees can live for more than 1000 years, are often found in graveyards, and have a long association with death; they're deadly poisonous to humans, with no known antidote. However, the tree is used to make taxanes, which are used to fight cancer.
5. Two Australians named Morgan Ruig and Evan Shay fooled officials into letting them play in an international golf tournament at North Korea's only golf course. For five days they were treated as honored guests and taken on official visits around Pyongyang before being exposed as frauds due to their poor golfing skills.
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6Thagomizers
The spikes at the end of Stegosaurus's tail are called "thagomizers" because of a far side comic, published in 1982, that featured a cave man pointing to a diagram of a Stegosaurus tail with the caption "Now this end is called the Thagomizer--after the late Thag Simmons."
7. Panspermia is a hypothesis that life exists throughout the Universe, distributed by meteoroids, asteroids, spacecraft etc. in form of extremophile types of bacteria. If met with ideal conditions on a new planet's surfaces, the organisms become active and the process of evolution begins.
8. There's a huge illegal industry that salvages old shipwrecks that predate nuclear testing to get steel untainted by atmospheric radiation.
9. Tara Strong, the voice actress on Powerpuff Girls, Rugrats, Teen Titans, Hello Kitty, Ultimate Spider Man, Princess Mononoke, and much more, was given a visa into the US as an "Alien of Extraordinary Ability."
10. An expedition to the Titanic accidentally recovered "a wedding band and part of a human finger", confirming that human remains still exist on the wreck.
11Bob Costas
Sportscaster Bob Costas jokingly promised Kirby Puckett he would name his first child Kirby if Puckett was batting over .350 when the child was born. Kirby hit over .350 but the child had already been named. He reminded Costas and the birth certificate was changed to "Keith Michael Kirby Costas"
12. In the U.S. 42.6 million adults age 45 and older are chronically lonely.
13. The only reason we know about Onfime, a boy from the 13th century is because his handwriting lessons were found on pieces of birch.
14. When Robert Knievel was in jail, his cellmate's name was William "Awful" Knofel. When the jailer went to check on them he stated: "Well look who we have here, Awful Knofel and Evil Knievel." Thus the legend of Evel Knievel was born.
15. England used to have a "Window tax". People refused to disclose how much money they made, considering it an invasion of privacy - so you would be charged based on how many windows your house had. In retaliation, people bricked up their windows, which you can still see today.
16Starboard
Starboard means "steer" board, which is the side of the steering oar on the right side since most people are right-handed. Naturally, in that case, the left-side will be where you dock with the "Port".
17. Tanya Savicheva was a young girl trapped in the Seige of Leningrad. She kept a diary of the names of each family member that died, ending with a final entry for herself: "The Savichevas are dead Everyone is dead Only Tanya is left"
18. A group of women navigated canvas and plywood planes at night to drop 23,000 tons of bombs over invading German armies in World War 2. Their stealthy swooshing sounds led them to be known as the Night Witches.
19. In the early 20th Century, a surgical antiseptic was distilled and sold as a floor cleaner and a cure for gonorrhea. It was then re-marketed as what we now know as Listerine.
20. Sesame Street has an Incarceration Tool Kit which assists parents and family with explaining prison to children.
21Blooming onion
A one pound onion has 191 calories, a blooming onion from Outback Steakhouse has 1954 calories.
22. A man named Christopher Knight probably holds the record for the most burglaries committed. He was a hermit who lived in the Maine woods and avoided human contact for almost 30 years.
23. After the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 13% of the US people were in favor of "killing off" all Japanese people. And after Japan surrendered, 22.7% of Americans wished more atomic bombs had been dropped.
24. Forensic lip readers have analyzed silent footage from World War 1 and were able to reconstruct conversations that were previously thought to be lost in time.
25. When 20th-century archaeologist Leonard Woolley excavated the temple at Ur (Ennigaldi-Nanna's museum), he found rows of neatly arranged artifacts of varying ages accompanied by inscriptions describing them: a 2500-year-old archaeological museum.
