1Project Steve: Evolution Support List
Project Steve, a list of scientists with the first name Steven or Stephen who support evolution, has had 1400 signatures since 2003. It was made in response to a 2001 petition, "A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism," collecting the signatures of 700 scientists critical of evolution.
2. Confectioner's glaze, a common glaze on candy, is made from shellac, which is a secretion secreted by lac insects.
3. Albuquerque's Minor League Baseball team is called the Isotopes and is named so due to the Simpsons episode where the Springfield Isotopes had a secret plan to move to Albuquerque.
4. The British company Kiddicraft produced a building toy in 1947 that served as the inspiration for the first LEGO building blocks. LEGO started selling their redesigned version in 1949. In the late '50s, LEGO contacted Kiddicraft to ask if they objected to LEGO bricks. They did not, and they wished LEGO good luck with them.
5. Mauritania's Moor population historically views female obesity as a status symbol, and higher-income girls are fattened with milk to make them more desirable to potential suitors.
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15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
6Boeing's Depleted Uranium Counterweights
Boeing used depleted uranium plates as counterweights in its 747 airplanes and some helicopters. While relatively safe, some of these plates have been lost. They stopped using it completely in 1981.
7. McDonald's was fined $4 million in 1999 for not reporting 400+ injuries to children using Big Mac Climber jungle gyms, where children climbed up a tube from the ground and played between two giant metal hamburger buns. The last Big Mac Climbers were removed from McDonald's playgrounds in 1997.
8. The Old London Bridge was crowded with houses and shops, some of them reaching up to six stories in height.
9. Pumpkin pie and Thanksgiving were a matter of mid-19th-century identity politics. When Abraham Lincoln declared a day of Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November in 1863, many Southern families refused Thanksgiving and especially pumpkin pie as cultural artifacts of the Yankees.
10. Babe Ruth, at the age of 40, hit his 714th and final home run over 500 feet, clearing Pittsburgh's Forbes Field's triple deck and bouncing off a nearby resident's roof.
11Kenyan Scientist's Plastic Homes
Kenyan scientist Hope Mwanake uses throw-away plastics to build homes in Kenya. She apparently makes roof tiles and other construction materials from plastic and glass waste in Kenya. After realizing that locals were throwing away plastic buckets and bottles, she had this idea.
12. The Rambo lunchbox by Thermos in 1985 marked the end of the metal lunchbox era. Due to cost savings and a complaint from a group of mothers in Florida that children were using metal lunchboxes as weapons, manufacturers switched to making lunchboxes out of plastic.
13. Alice Kober, who helped decipher an ancient script known as Linear B, meticulously recorded her research in a collection of 180,000 index cards over 20 years. The script was deciphered in 1952, shortly after her death. It remains the only Bronze Age Aegean script that is readable now.
14. Singer Teena Marie suffered a serious blow to the head while sleeping, from a large frame in a hotel room that might have contributed to her death.
15. In 1915, the USS Eastland cruise ship was retrofitted with additional lifeboats due to new regulations following the Titanic disaster. The additional top-heavy weight caused it to sink before it left port, killing 844 passengers.
16Immortal Animals: Hydra and More
Not all species die of old age. Some animals, such as hydra, planarian flatworms, and certain sponges, corals, and jellyfish, exhibit potential immortality.
17. Until the 1990s, the entire US supply of botulism antitoxin was developed from a single horse, named First Flight.
18. Employees at General Motor's Fremont Assembly plant were considered excessively unruly in the 1980s and often left empty glass bottles inside the doors of unfinished cars to annoy future owners.
19. Ancient Native Americans consumed a highly caffeinated ceremonial beverage of roasted holly leaves called cacina, or black drink. Conquistadores who consumed the drink daily provide some of the earliest written accounts of caffeine addiction.
20. Ruby Red grapefruit, among other modern foods, was the result of irradiating the seeds in the "gamma gardens" of the 1950s, an effort to show peaceful uses for fission energy.
21Jennifer Connelly's Chimp Encounter
Jennifer Connelly had one of her fingers partially bitten off by a chimpanzee during the filming of Darío Argento's 1985 film "Phenomena."
22. In preparation for his role in the movie Hunger (2008), Michael Fassbender went on a special diet of less than 900 calories a day for ten weeks. After meeting with a nutritionist, he settled on a diet of berries, nuts, and sardines and underwent periodic medical checks.
23. After World War II, Hungary's inflation was so severe that the government stopped collecting taxes because even a single day's delay in collecting would cause the value of the currency to disappear.
24. Andrew Jackson gave his 21-year-old niece the role of First Lady when his wife died, and she was praised for the food and alcohol she served during her tenure.
25. Persons over the age of 12 shouldn't use WHAM-O's Slip 'N Slide. There have been rare instances (and lawsuits) of adults breaking their necks while using it, and in 1993, the U.S. CPSC warned that the slide might cause permanent spinal cord injury to teens and adults.
