1Leaf blowers
Leaf blowers and other power tools emit up to 300 times more pollutants than American high-performance pick-up trucks.
2. Industrialist George Pullman was buried in a lead-lined mahogany coffin sealed in a subterranean reinforced concrete cube. After the national Pullman Strike failed, his family feared strikers would defile his gravesite in retaliation.
3. Pro wrestler Brutus Beefcake caused an Anthrax scare by leaving a bag of cocaine in the Boston Subway back in 2004.
4. The average number of stars we can see with the naked eye is around 10000. This number is only the 0.000004% of all stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
5. There are multiple replicas of the White House, built mostly by private citizens, throughout the United States, and two in Iran and China (the Chinese White House includes a replica of Mount Rushmore as well).
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15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
6Joseph Grew
Joseph Grew, who was the US ambassador to Japan during the lead-up to World War 2, heard rumors in in January 1941 in Tokyo that the Japanese were preparing a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in case of a break with the US. When Grew alerted Washington, his warnings were ignored.
7. The Australian Aboriginal flag is the only flag in the world that is copyrighted and ‘owned’ by a single (Aboriginal) individual who leased the royalties to a corporation who are now suing Aboriginal businesses for using images and/or depictions of the flag.
8. A chicken can be hypnotized, or put into a trance by drawing a line along the ground with a stick or a finger, starting at the beak and extending in front of the chicken. If the chicken is hypnotized in this manner, it will continue to stare at the line, remaining immobile for up to 30 minutes.
9. In August 2020, a group of scientists from the University College, London set a new world record for the fastest ever broadband speed at 178Tbps. That’s almost 3 million times faster than the fastest conventional broadband speeds.
10. Most people now think Oreos are vegan, but they’re not because they have cross-contact with milk.
11Alcohol metabolism
Women are naturally more affected by alcohol than men because they don't produce an enzyme in their stomachs that starts metabolization early as men do.
12. Pandora's Box is a mistranslation. In the original story of Pandora, the container was actually a large storage jar, meaning we should be saying "Pandora's Jar."
13. Oymyakon in Russia is the coldest village on earth. The lowest temperature recorded here was in January 1924 of -71.2°C (-96.2°F). It is known as “The Pole of the Cold”. Food here includes the frozen raw Arctic fish, white salmon, whitefish and frozen raw horse liver, which is considered to be a delicacy.
14. There is an equation to estimate how quickly a real conspiracy theory would reveal itself. The more people involved the quicker the truth comes out. According to this equation, if the Moon landing was really faked, it would have been revealed in just under 4 years.
15. Barcodes were first invented to track railroad cars traveling across the country in the 1960s. A colored barcode was attached to steel plates on the side of train cars and scanned as they entered and exited railroad facilities.
16Benazir Bhutto
Benazir Bhutto, the only female Pakistani Prime Minister was a Harvard graduate and served as Prime Minister from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996. After losing the election in 1997, she went into self-exile in Dubai. She returned to Pakistan in 2007 to run again but was assassinated during a rally.
17. The only existing film footage of Anne Frank is posted on YouTube by the Amsterdam museum ‘The Anne Frank House.’ The girl next door to Anne is getting married and the footage shows a 13-year-old Anne leaning out of a window to get a good look at the bride and groom.
18. The wealth of a Samurai in feudal Japan was measured in terms of koku. One koku was supposed to be the amount of rice it took to feed one man for a year, which was equivalent to around 180 liters.
19. The character of Ian Malcolm in "Jurassic Park" was nearly written out of the script. The writers planned to combine him with the character of Dr. Grant, but Jeff Goldblum wanted to be in a Steven Spielberg movie and asked Spielberg to keep the character.
20. Cats show you their butt to “politely open themselves up to a sniff” as a way of showing that they are comfortable with you.
21Rachel Jackson
Rachel Jackson, Andrew Jackson’s wife was once attacked as an adulteress. She then died during the 1828 Presidential election after falling into a deep depression. At her funeral, Jackson said, “May God Almighty forgive her murderers. I never can.”
22. A study in 2019 found that kids associate beards with being old and strong, but unattractive. As kids grow older into teenagers, they dislike beards even more. However, women with children see bearded men as better fathers.
23. In 2013, a 31-year-old woman named Natasha Marie Harris in New Zealand died from cardiac arrhythmia which was ultimately linked to her unhealthy habit of drinking 6-10 liters a day of Coca-Cola.
24. If you ever got shrunk down to the size of an ant, not only would everything look bigger to you, but the world would also appear almost a million times darker, the light would no longer appear straight meaning that the world around you would be covered in a haze of blurriness and shadow.
25. Anti-Work Movement is a philosophy that sees work as the cause of unhappiness, and should, therefore, be avoided. Although associated with anarchists and communists today, its roots can be traced back to the Ancient Greek Cynics.
