1Garter snakes
Garter snakes will retain poisons they eat in their liver, making themselves temporarily poisonous to their predators. They are also technically venomous but have long lost the ability to practically use the venom they produce.
2. Bill Niman, the founder of Niman Ranch and pioneer of humane animal farming, stopped eating Niman Ranch products after his farm was bought out by a corporation that dropped his humane treatment and sustainability standards in order to make a profit.
3. Henry Winkler's parents escaped Nazi Germany on the last day Jews were allowed to leave. Since they were given only a six-week visa, Henry's father hid his mother's jewelry inside pieces of chocolate to covertly take as much wealth with them as they could without being detected by the Nazis.
4. In 2017, doctors in Japan discovered a tiny brain and skull inside of a 16-year-old girl's ovarian tumor while they were removing the growth.
5. American film actress Jayne Mansfield died in a car crash in 1967 at the age of 34. Her car hit a tractor, killing her instantly. After her death, the NHTSA recommended requiring an underride guard on all tractor-trailers. In America, the underride guard is sometimes known as a "Mansfield bar."
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6Jen Bricker
Jen Bricker, a gymnast who was born without legs grew up idolizing an Olympic gold medalist. Later in her life she discovered that the Olympic gold medalist she idolized was her long-lost sister.
7. John Von Neumann was a mathematician polymath who invented computers (the architecture in every digital computer today), a precursor theory of DNA without having been a biologist, played a pivotal in creating the atom bomb and laid out the mathematical framework for quantum mechanics.
8. Fearing invasion during the Cold War, Albania’s leader Enver Hoxha forced his country to build 750,000 bunkers. Today, many of those bunkers have been converted into a variety of uses, like turning them into pizzerias, espresso bars, and makeshift bars.
9. A beggar was caught outside a mosque in Kuwait telling worshipers that he badly needed cash and that he had no home. Since it is illegal, he was arrested and police discovered he had over 500,000 Kuwaiti Dinars in his bank account ($1,650,000).
10. One unofficial method of defending merchant vessels against Somali pirates is to blast Britney Spears’ music and it has been reported to be effective.
11Monte Carlo Casino
On 18 August 1913, in Monte Carlo Casino, 26 roulette spins in a row landed on black. The odds of such an occurrence are 1 in 66.6 million. Many gamblers lost millions of francs as they continually (and incorrectly) reasoned that red was due to come up next.
12. The Chowchilla kidnappers who locked 26 children and their bus driver in a buried moving van never got to make their ransom demands, since the phone lines to the police were occupied by worried parents and the media calling in. The victims then dug themselves out and escaped.
13. Wilford Brimley, the “I’ve got ‘diabetuss.’” guy from the Liberty Medical TV commercials was once employed by millionaire recluse Howard Hughes as a bodyguard.
14. Rachel Carson is the author of Silent Spring (1962), a book which accused the chemical industry of spreading disinformation on the harmful effects of pesticides. The book is credited with inspiring the environmental movement and leading to the formation of the U.S Environmental Protection Agency.
15. Charles Darwin wrote the pros and cons of marriage (including the positivity of “female chit-chat) before marrying his cousin.
16Gaslighting
To gaslight someone means to make one think they are going crazy. This term comes from the movie Gaslight (1944), where a husband tried to make his wife (Ingrid Bergman) think that very thing by dimming the gas lights in the house and making her think she was imagining it.
17. When the results began coming in from the 30 March 2005 Powerball drawing, lottery officials suspected fraud was underway because 110 players claimed second prizes of $100,000 or $500,000. All 110 players and the jackpot winner got their numbers from fortune cookies.
18. Paraffin wax was a common waterproofing material used for circus tents but this changed in 1944 after the Ringling Bros. Fire in Hartford, Connecticut. The paraffin wax ended up accelerating the deadly fire and 1800lbs of hot wax “rained down from the roof”-killing 167 people; injuring 700, mostly women and children.
19. The oldest undisputed known depiction of a human being, the Venus of Hohle Fels, is about 40,000 years old and made from mammoth ivory. It is on display in a museum in a small German town.
20. A golfer can possess only one Masters green jacket. If a golfer wins multiple Masters they just award the winner the same jacket. The winner also can't hold onto their jacket and must return it to the clubhouse.
21Jiang Zemin jet
When China ordered a Boeing 767 from the U.S. in 2002 to serve as its presidential jet of Jiang Zemin, its intelligence service discovered nearly 30 bugging devices onboard the plane, "including one in the headboard of the presidential bed." The C.I.A. and the White House refused to comment.
22. In 2015, renewable energy provided almost 100% of electricity production in Iceland, with about 73% coming from hydropower and 27% from geothermal power.
23. In the 1920's, the Ford Motor Company produced so much factory wood waste that they manufactured it into charcoal and sold it under the name Ford Charcoal. The company was later renamed to Kingsford Charcoal.
24. The driest place on earth is McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica where it hasn't rained for 2 million years. Only anaerobic bacteria are able to survive in these extreme conditions. Scientists also consider the area terrestrially closest to Mars on earth.
25. A 'witch' named Zura Karuhimbi ended up saving over 100 people during the Rwandan genocide because the attackers believed she possessed magical powers.
