1Manoj Bhargava
The guy who invented 5-hour energy (Manoj Bhargava) is a billionaire who has pledged 99% of his wealth to philanthropic solutions to help the developing world.
2. Purple butterfly stickers on incubators are for infants with a twin who passed away.
3. In a farm in Japan (Kitagawa farm), pigs are given a green tea in place of water to help with stress relief, flavor, and potential disease.
4. Despite it's more than half a century old, SR-71 Blackbird still holds the official Air Speed Record for a manned airbreathing jet aircraft with a speed of 2,193 mph (3,530 km/h)!
5. In 1968, Canada gave a $3,500 grant to a 35-year old man (Joachim Foikis) in Vancouver "to revive the ancient and time-honored tradition of town fool."
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15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
6Volcano suicide
Suicide by the volcano is an actual thing with more than 1200 people killing themselves in a single volcano until a barrier was erected.
7. In 1906, Eleanor Roosevelt bought a chicken-wire cage to hang out the window of her New York City townhouse for her first child, Anna Roosevelt Halsted, to nap in a practice known as "airing" for city dwelling children.
8. A 5-year-old William Everetz wanted to spend his allowance on kindness, so he saved his money for 5 months to buy lunch for the entire Winslow Township in New Jersey. He bought them Subway so they could 'be healthy' and the police gave him a shirt and badges, and made him an honorary officer.
9. In 1898, doctors began to suspect that smoking caused lung cancer, despite the fact that there were only 140 published cases of the then rare disease in 1900.
10. Margaret Hamilton who played the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz, went on the Mr. Rogers show many years later to help show kids she was a nice woman and not just an old witch who wanted to get kids and their dogs.
11Wally Hanks
The Mace Kingsley Ranch was a Scientology Private School where students were forced to do hard labor and the director, Wally Hanks, would punish the students with beatings (he was caught on audio tape). The school shut down in 2002.
12. Michael Keaton's real name is Michael Douglas, but he was forced to use Keaton because the other actor was already using his name. As a result, he often inadvertently plays tricks on people expecting Michael Douglas only to get Michael Keaton.
13. In 1980, oil drillers in Lake Peigneur, Louisiana accidentally poked a 14-inch hole in an active underground salt mine, which drained the entire 2.5 billion gallon lake. Incredibly, there were no fatalities.
14. In 1986, the store chain Silo advertised a stereo as costing "299 bananas", with "bananas" being a slang word for "dollars". However, 32 people legally bought the stereos with 299 banana fruits.
15. SIM cards are self-contained computers featuring their own 30mhz CPU, 64kb of RAM, and some storage space. They are designed to run "applets" written in a stripped down form of Java.
16Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey was born to a single mother, wore potato sacks for clothes, was molested by her family, and gave birth to a stillborn child at 14.
17. The computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor were all demonstrated for the first time in what is the called the "mother of all demos" back in 1968.
18. In Inglorious Basterds, during the scene where Brad Pitt and his team pose as Italian filmmakers, the name Eli Roth's character takes: Antonio Margheriti, is actually one of Quentin Tarantino's favorite spaghetti Western director's name.
19. Saturation diving: Divers working on deep-sea infrastructure such as oil pipelines live in a pressurized chamber for a month, taken between the chamber and their worksite by a pressurized diving bell. That way, they only need to be decompressed once, at the end of each 28-day job.
20. In order to secure the rights to use Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song", in the School of Rock movie, Jack Black shot a video of himself in front of 1,000 screaming fans begging the band to let him use their song.
21Waffle House
Waffle House serves 2% off all the eggs eaten in America.
22. After her mental issues, Britney Spears was placed under legal conservatorship. Her finances and many of her personal decisions are run by a group of paid conservators (including her father) for approval even today.
23. Cuba Gooding Jr.'s first movie role was the non-speaking role of the guy getting the haircut in the barbershop in "Coming to America".
24. There is a small four-acre plot of land inside Belgium, which belongs to Germany. It consists of a single inhabited house with a garden.
25. The scientists found that the descendants of Holocaust survivors developed a stress hormone mutation. They are inherently at higher risk of anxiety and stress disorders as a result of family trauma imparting gene mutations.
