1Wayne Murray's Scratch-Off Wins
A New York City man named Wayne Murray won two $10 million prizes on two different scratch-offs that he purchased from the same shop just over a year apart. Murray won his first top prize in August 2022 and won it a second time in December 2023.
2. The active ingredient in Ozempic, a type 2 diabetes medication, shares structural similarities with compounds found in Gila monster venom. This discovery led directly to the development of all semaglutide-based medications. Notably, Ozempic and similar drugs have gained recent popularity, with several celebrities publicly endorsing their use for weight loss and diabetes management.
3. For a long time, people have consumed corn silk as a folk medicine to treat gonorrhea and stop children from urinating in their beds.
4. Franz Kafka, a renowned writer known for his surreal and existential works, held a lifelong belief that other people found him mentally and physically repulsive. In reality, many who met him found him to be handsome, intelligent, and possessing a good sense of humor.
5. In 2007, a 75-year-old Swedish pensioner named Sigbritt Löthberg had the fastest internet in the world, with a speed of around 40 Gbps. She was the mother of Swedish "internet legend" Peter Löthberg.
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15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
6New Jersey's State Song Controversy
New Jersey almost made "Born to Run" the state song until its Senate realized the lyrics depicted a desire to leave New Jersey.
7. In the 18th century, Korean Crown Prince Sado went murderously insane while he was regent, torturing, assaulting, and killing courtiers and servants on a whim. In 1762, his father, King Yeongjo, executed him by locking him in a rice chest and starving him to death.
8. PTSD did not become an official medical diagnosis until 1980.
9. Gatorade established the Gatorade Sports Science Institute and later successfully influenced the sports industry in the United States to believe that athletes must drink their beverages to avoid muscle cramping.
10. Most Little Rascals episodes from the 1930s were heavily edited in the 1970s to remove jokes about race, women, disabilities, children, the elderly, and violence.
11Boiling Water for Microplastics
Boiling water can remove microplastics. Boiling hard water for a few minutes and then filtering it can remove up to 80% of microplastics, but soft water may only see a 25% reduction.
12. John Frederick Parker, the bodyguard assigned to protect Abraham Lincoln, left his post during the intermission of the play "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theatre. He went to a nearby saloon, got drunk, and fell asleep. Three years later, they fired him for falling asleep on duty again.
13. Josef Mengele, known as the "Angel of Death" for his horrific experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz during World War II, lived out the rest of his natural life in Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil. He operated under the names José Mengele and, later, Wolfgang Gerhard.
14. Male dolphins sometimes kill the baby dolphins of another father so that the female will be available to mate with them.
15. The Overcoat is an animated film that has been in production since 1981 (as of June 2024). Director Yuri Norstein refuses any extra assistance or use of a computer for his animation.
16Size Discrepancy in Blanket Octopus
The blanket octopus has the largest size discrepancy between the sexes of any animal. Females can grow over six feet, while males average about one inch.
17. Actress Michelle Trachtenberg was supposed to play Bella Swan in "Twilight," but she turned it down because she "had already done the vampire thing." She portrayed Buffy The Vampire Slayer's little sister.
18. Residents of Father Damien's birth town were upset when Pope Francis announced his visit to Belgium in 2023 because, 30 years earlier, Pope John-Paul II had promised to visit them but had canceled at the last minute after breaking his femur in the papal bathtub.
19. During Elmer Fisher's 1920 trial for illegal alcohol ownership, the jury took one of the bottles submitted as evidence when they deliberated to make sure that it was whiskey. After some time, the jury asked for a second bottle. A short time later, it found Fisher not guilty.
20. Skin cancer is 20 times more common in white people than in black people.
21White House Calligrapher Role
The White House employs a chief calligrapher. This job includes writing invitations to dinners, greetings, and proclamations, and the position earns $104,200 a year.
22. Giovanni Villani's chronicle, which documents Italy's history from ancient times until the contemporary 14th century, ominously ends mid-sentence, as the author was describing the effects of the Black Death. The author himself also died of the plague.
23. Ball lightning consists of luminescent, spherical objects that can appear and last for over a minute before disappearing either quietly or with an explosion, often leaving behind the smell of sulfur. There is no definitive explanation for this natural phenomenon.
24. Irish is an "endangered language," with fewer than 80,000 native speakers left.
25. The phrase "Give us today our daily bread," from the Lord's Prayer in the Christian Bible, is a mistranslation. The word translated as "daily" is "epiousion" in the original Greek. Scholars disagree on what this enigmatic word means exactly, but a direct translation would be something like "supersubstantial."
