26Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease
In 1997, many people from Kentucky developed CJD (aka human mad cow disease). It was discovered that every single one of them had consumed squirrel brains.
27. Spitting Cobras emerged in the fossil record around the same time as early humans. It is speculated that the reason these snakes spray venom is because of the pressure humans in particular put on them. The spraying of venom from a distance countered the humans' use of projectile weapons.
28. Ranch dressing was invented in Alaska by a plumber trying to keep his employees satisfied with his cooking.
29. The Black Terror was a fake warship which was used in American Civil War to bluff Confederate forces into destroying the partially-salvaged remains of the ironclad USS Indianola. The Black Terror was also completely fake, and cost $8.63 to construct.
30. When Mozart died unexpectedly at age 35, rumors began circulating that he was poisoned by his colleague Antonio Salieri. Though proven untrue, the accusations and public belief contributed to nervous breakdowns later in Salieri's life.
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31Albert Woodfox
After being wrongfully convicted and suffering through the longest period of solitary confinement in American prison history, Albert Woodfox's conviction was overturned, and he wrote a memoir entitled "Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement. My Story of Transformation and Hope."
32. Ordinary South Korean citizens could not get a passport and travel abroad until 1989, which was right around the time the country saw the end of its brutal dictatorship. Until 1992, South Koreans who wanted to travel abroad still had to go through anti-communist education. Before 1989, the country went through brutal political repression, dictatorship, and even massacres of "leftwing" groups.
33. A Washington English teacher named Robert Shields wrote diary chronicling every five minutes of his life which consisted of 37.5 million words and filled 91 boxes. He spent four hours a day, in his underwear, recording his temperature, blood pressure, medications, and bowel movements, and he slept for only two hours at a time to record his dreams. He died in 2007 at the age of 89.
34. The Flintstones was the most financially successful and longest-running network animated television series for three decades until The Simpsons surpassed it in 1997.
35. Sediment cores retrieved from the Antarctic seafloor by researchers have been found to contain pristine samples of forest soil, pollen, spores, and even root systems. The soil, its fine-grained clay, and silt were dated to be 90 million years old. Researchers suggest that the continent was a swampy rainforest at that time.
