1Red pandas
Red pandas, one of the most liked and famous animals aren't a single species but two. Chinese red pandas have redder fur and striped tail rings, while Himalayan pandas have whiter faces. This makes the efforts of their conservation a bit trickier.
2. Consuming too much lean protein can cause symptoms similar to broad malnutrition in a condition known as protein poisoning, or more colloquially called "rabbit poisoning" due to the first observed cases in frontiersmen who ate nothing but wild rabbits over the winter and developed symptoms.
3. The ancient Chinese emperor, Zhu Houzhao, had a fake shopping market built outside his palace so that he could pretend to shop like the commoners did. It was staffed by his servants who he ordered to dress up as merchants and commoners.
4. The world's smallest playable guitar is 10 microns long (about the size of a red blood cell). It has six strings each about 100 atoms wide and is played by aiming lasers at the strings. Its tone is about 130,000 times higher than a regular guitar which is supposedly the highest pitch ever recorded.
5. Polish Catholic midwife Stanisława Leszczyńska delivered 3,000 babies at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust in occupied Poland. She also smuggled false documents and food to Jews inside the ghetto as part of growing Polish resistance.
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6Bees
It is possible to raise bees in the desert, as they will collect pollen from many different desert plants. They also produce different types of desert honey at different times of the year.
7. ‘The Whole Shabang’ is a brand of chips which was initially only sold at prison commissary stores. The chips became so popular amongst ex-inmates that it became a grey market commodity and finally was sold to the general public.
8. The Japanese Navy personnels always eat curry on Fridays to help sailors keep track of which day it is.
9. Historians have estimated that from the years 1798 to 1848, the U.S. Navy lost two-thirds as many officers from dueling as from combat.
10. Alexander the Great once built a half-mile causeway through the sea to capture the impregnable Tyre island. The island has remained a peninsula ever since.
11Annie Murphy
Annie Murphy (Alexis from Schitt’s Creek) almost quit her acting career after her apartment burnt to the ground and she had $3 in her bank account. A couple of days later she secured her audition for Alexis.
12. In 1910, two boys, Louis and Temple Abernathy decided to cross America by horseback from Oklahoma to Manhattan to meet Theodore Roosevelt. They were 10 and 6 years old. While coming back home, they decided to buy a car, while their horses made the return by train.
13. There are 7 primary keyholders of the Internet. Each keyholder is chosen for their geographical spread and Internet security background to ensure that no one country has more keyholders. The keyholders are a last resort option in case something catastrophic happens to the world's Internet.
14. James Cameron originally wanted Billy Idol to play the T-1000 liquid metal Terminator in Terminator 2. Idol got into a serious motorcycle accident before filming and Robert Patrick was cast instead.
15. In 1985, Wong-Staal became the first person to clone HIV and to generate a genetic mapping of the virus which would be used for the research and design of treatments for AIDS.
16Richard the Lionheart
When Richard the Lionheart got married, he was busy with the Crusades, so his bride came to Cyprus for the wedding. Richard then deposed the ruler of Cyprus, claiming the island for England. Richard wrapped the ruler in gold and silver chains and presented him to the new queen as a wedding gift.
17. George Lucas wanted to be a racecar driver when he was a teenager. In 1962, he suffered a terrible car accident when another driver broadsided him. He required emergency medical treatment. The incident caused him to lose interest in racing but inspired him to pursue other interests.
18. Sony needed military export permits from the Japanese trade ministry for the export of PlayStation 2s. The PS2 was so good at processing high-quality images quickly that the Japanese government believed it was possible to adapt it for use in missile guidance systems.
19. Steven Schussler, the creator of the Rainforest Cafe chain first tested out the concept in his house. He decorated it with 45 birds, 9 fish tanks, and many plants. He even set up fake thunderstorms. His neighbors thought he was crazy.
20. American chemist Alexander Shulgin personally tested hundreds of drugs, meticulously recording their effects in his lab notebooks. He is also credited with introducing MDMA to psychologists in the late 1970s.
21Paul Revere
American silversmith Paul Revere never shouted the legendary phrase “The British are coming!” as he passed from town to town. The operation was meant to be conducted as discreetly as possible since scores of British troops were hiding out in the Massachusetts countryside.
22. Before Walt Disney opened Disneyland he ran out of cash and was unable to remove all the weeds and finish the landscaping. So he wrote the Latin names of the weeds on little signs giving them the appearance that they were intentionally planted there.
23. Because the original Pac-Man game stores the level counter as an 8-bit integer, an overflow error occurs when reaching level 256. This causes the level map to only half load, rendering it unbeatable. Making it to level 256 was used as a mark of prestige amongst players.
24. Friedrich Kellner’s diary titled “My Opposition”, consists of 10 volumes, 861 pages, and 676 individually dated entries from September 1939 to May 1945. His diary offers a glimpse at what an average German citizen might’ve known of during the height of Nazi Germany’s power.
25. The Inka never developed writing but instead had a system of tying knots called khipu in which the color, direction, and structure of the knots communicated different information. While most of it is numerical, fully cracking the code reveals a phonetic khipu alphabet with records of history.
