1Quokkas
Quokkas have a survival instinct which triggers when a mother is threatened by a predator. She will throw her baby at the predator, which will hiss at the predator while the mother makes her escape.
2. Buzz Aldrin's first words on the moon were "Beautiful view. Magnificent desolation."
3. Neither the Spice Girls themselves nor their management came up with the Scary, Sporty, Baby, Ginger, Posh aliases. They were devised by Top of the Pops magazine in 1996 and later adopted by the group.
4. Julius Caesar was mocked by his opponents as "the Queen of Bithynia" over an alleged homosexual relationship with King Nicomedes IV. The scandalous part wasn't that the relationship was homosexual, but rather that Caesar was supposedly the sub.
5. Archaeologists have found slingshot balls in Greece engraved with “Take that!” or “Catch!” dating back to 4th century B.C.
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15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
6University of Wisconsin
In 2000, the University of Wisconsin photoshopped a black man's face onto the cover of an admission booklet to make them seem more diverse. He sued and won $10 million for diversity initiatives.
7. Tim Macartney-Snape is one of the first mountaineers to climb Everest without oxygen. Afterward, someone said to him “You didn't climb Everest. You only climbed the top part.” So he went down to the beach in India and re-did the whole thing.
8. Erna Flegel, Hitler's personal nurse revealed in 2005 that the death of Blondi the German Shepherd affected people in the bunker more than Eva Braun's suicide.
9. If you feed a chicken a diet of spicy red peppers, its egg yolk will turn red. This is harmless for the chicken as all birds are immune to capsaicin (the substance that makes food taste spicy).
10. Killer whales go through menopause to avoid competition with daughters. This may shed light on why menopause exists at all.
11Viola Desmond
In 1946, a Nova Scotian black woman named Viola Desmond was charged with tax evasion of one cent for refusing to leave a whites-only section of a theatre. She is featured on the new $10 Canadian bill.
12. Over 15 to 20 networks rejected the Duffer Brothers' "Stranger Things" series, saying no one would be interested in a Sci-Fi horror that revolves around kid protagonists. One executive said they need to make it kids show or have an adult character (Jim Hopper) be the main protagonist instead.
13. When Uranus was discovered it was called George for about 70 years.
14. In 2016, two alligators in Amsterdam were found guarding €500,000 worth of crystal meth, €300,000 in cash, and several firearms. The owner of the crocodiles was following the law and had the appropriate permits for the animals.
15. If you don't eat sushi by the age of 35, there is a 95% chance you never will. As we get older, we are less open to "novelty."
16Johnny Carson
In 1974, Johnny Carson requested that NBC stop airing Tonight Show reruns on the weekend as he wanted to save those reruns for the extra vacation days he was planning to take. NBC wanted to fill those slots, so they hired Lorne Michaels to develop a show. That show became SNL.
17. Having standard showtimes for films was not common until 1960. Previously most films would just play on a loop, and people could enter at any time. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho required that people watch from the beginning to the end and made showtimes more standard.
18. When a friend wrote "KURT SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT" on a wall, Kurt Cobain assumed it was an anti-establishment slogan and wrote a hit song. Months later he found out his friend had been making fun of him. Kurt's girlfriend wore Teen Spirit, deodorant marketed to teenage girls.
19. The first effective syphilis cure, called Salvarsan, was created in 1909. An arsenic-based drug, it operated on the same principle as chemotherapy: it poisoned syphilis before it poisoned you. Like chemo, it was very unpleasant, but a literal lifesaver.
20. In 1974, a chemical technician named Karen Silkwood died in a car crash after attempting to expose unethical things done at the nuclear power plant she worked in.
21John Lennon
John Lennon tried to convince Paul McCartney to drill a hole in his skull as part of a practice called trepanning explaining “All you’d have to do is just bore a little hole in your skull and it lets the pressure off. Paul replied ‘ John, you try it and let me know how it goes.'”
22. The French duo Daft Punk got their name from a negative review they received from MelodyMaker magazine for a trio they were in before. A journalist wrote that the band Darlin's music was "a daft punky thrash". They found it funny, creating one of the most influential music acts of the 90s and 00s.
23. The distinctive nose of the Shinkansen 500 bullet train prevents sonic booms whenever it exits a tunnel and was discovered when scientists studied the shape of a kingfisher's beak to learn how it hit the water at high speed.
24. When Charles Dickens was 12 years old, his father was thrown into prison for debt. Charles was forced to leave school and work ten-hour days at a boot factory in order to help support his family. Later when he started writing, the poor conditions of the working class became a major theme in several of his works.
25. In 2014, a Cockatoo celebrated its 100th birthday, it was also noticed by Queen Elizabeth II who sent a birthday card as is custom to 100-year-olds.
