38 Bizarre Random Facts Most People Don’t Know – Part 287

Mercy Dogs or Red Cross Dogs would go out into the warzone to find wounded soldiers. They brought medical supplies for the soldiers to patch themselves up or if the soldier was mortally wounded, stay and comfort them in their final moments.

27. Domesticated blueberries are only just over 100 years old and were thought to be impossible to domesticate until it was discovered they thrive in acidic soil.

28. Beethoven loved his coffee so much that he had his own recipe. It consisted of 60 beans. Not 59, not 61, but precisely 60. He would drop them into a cup separately and sometimes do a second recount. He also had a special apparatus for preparing it.

29. The lyricist for the theme song of the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon (Spider-Man! Spider-Man! Does whatever a spider can!) won three Academy Awards for Best Original Song and was nominated 16 times for the award.

30. During the U.S. Civil War, Andrew Carnegie was drafted for the Army; however, rather than serve, he paid another man $850 to report for duty in his place, a common practice at the time.

The Japanese film Battle Royale (2000) is banned in South Korea and took 11 years before it was released in the United States and Canada. The film was banned in Germany in 2013, but this was later overturned. Quentin Tarantino considers Battle Royale to be one of his favourite films.

32. The Chimney Sweepers Act of 1788 was a British Act of Parliament passed to stop child labor, as boys as young as four were being used as chimney sweeps. The Act raised the minimum age to eight years old.

33. American public official Robert Moses built bridges across his parkways low in order to "restrict the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families," who did not own cars and would arrive by bus.

34. While 4-8% of people have at least one food allergy, a large proportion of people in developed countries believe they have food allergies when they actually do not have them.

35. Renowned scientist Michael Faraday, whose work on electromagnetism made him one of the most influential physicists in history, had little formal education. In particular, his knowledge of maths extended only to the simplest algebra, and he was unaware of trigonometry.

Anton syndrome is a type of blindness where individuals deny being blind. The blindness occurs in the brain’s vision area rather than the eyes. Doctors theorize sufferers deny being blind because their eyes still work. Their brains just no longer can process the visual information their eyes take in.

37. Doctors used to prescribe ‘Obecalp,’ a sugar pill that is literally ‘placebo’ spelled backward, for various illnesses such as psychosomatic disorders and chronic ailments.

38. In Tang Dynasty China (600s-900s A.D.), women wearing men's clothing was a fashion trend. Normally a taboo in China, it was made acceptable by the Li Clan's (the Imperial Family's) women- notably Princess Pingyang- who actually commanded armies during the Dynasty's foundational wars.