41 Awesome Little Facts That’ll Rock Your World | Random List #272

Mark Ruffalo had brain cancer when his wife was pregnant with their first child, and he had to fight through facial paralysis and balance problems for months.

2. In 1964, Bell Labs built a large space antenna. Upon testing, two of their scientists encountered ‘interference’, which could not be isolated. After multiple attempts to fix the bug, they determined that the “noise” was in fact, a remnant ‘hum’ from the Big Bang. They went on to win The Nobel Prize.

3. In 1989, a man placed a £30 bet that as of January 1, 2000: U2 would still be active; Cliff Richard would be knighted; EastEnders would still be a weekly BBC show; and Neighbours and Home and Away would still be on British TV. He was given odds of 6,479-1, and in January 2000 collected £194,400.

4. Three hunters found two 6-inch tall cylinders in the woods that emitted enough heat to melt snow a full yard away. They used them to warm themselves overnight. The cylinders were nuclear soviet Strontium-90 sources used in electrical generators to power a communication station that was manned during the construction of a nearby dam, and the nuclear sources were left behind after the project was completed. The hunters suffered severe radiation sickness and long term injuries.

5. In 2004, the father of Professional Golfer Rory McIlroy placed a £200 ($341) bet, at 500-1 odds, that his son would win the British Open within the next 10 years when his son was just 15 years old. In 2014 McIlroy won the tournament earning his father $171,000 from the wager.

Before playing Drago in Rocky IV, Dolph Lundgren earned a master’s degree in chemical engineering and won a Fulbright Scholarship to MIT.

7. The first public call made from an iPhone was made by Steve Jobs. He called a Starbucks and ordered 4,000 lattes; then said ‘just kidding’ and hung up.

8. The “color bars” we see used on TVs are called SMPTE bars. These bars, which were created in 1951 and became widespread in 1978 were used to calibrate color and audio levels for taped recordings.

9. About 2 million Americans can trace their lineage to a Mayflower passenger who fell overboard and survived by grabbing a trailing rope.

10. Spanish porn star Nacho Vidal was born into a very wealthy family. However, most of the family's wealth was lost on Black Monday, the stock market crash of 1987. In 2005, using his porn star income, Vidal bought back the mansion his family used to own.

The first-ever Cell Phone call was in 1973 and it was made by a Motorola researcher. He called his rival at Bell Labs who had also been working on creating a working cell phone.

12. The Black Tom explosion was one of the largest artificial non-nuclear explosions to have ever occurred. German agents set off an explosion in New York Harbor on July 30, 1916, that killed four people, destroyed $20,000,000 worth of military goods and damaged the Statue of Liberty.

13. Comedian Steve Allen once got into a minor car accident when another driver backed into him. Allen joked, “What some people will do to get my autograph” and went about his day, taking a nap at his son’s home. Allen never woke up because the accident had broken his ribs and pierced blood vessels.

14. Peter Jackson shot “The Hobbit” in such a high frame rate, some people experienced nausea watching it in movie theaters.

15. In 2004, a tennis fan went into a coma. 11 years later, he woke up and was shocked to learn that Roger Federer was still among the best in the world.

The people who own the house Breaking Bad was filmed in had to construct 6 feet wrought iron fence to stop people from constantly throwing pizzas on their garage roof.

17. There’s a 460 square miles area in France called the ‘Zone Rouge’ containing so much human and animal remains and millions of items of unexploded classic and chemical ordnance from World War 1 that it’s been legally defined as Impossible to clean and human life impossible.

18. In 1997 the first Astronaut voted from space. Since then every American Astronaut votes from Space as an absentee voter for the state of Texas (where the Johnson Space Center is located), where they list their address as “low-Earth orbit.”

19. In 1965 the future Canadian Prime Minister John Turner was vacationing in Barbados when he noticed someone struggling in rough surf at the beach. Being a strong swimmer, he instinctively entered the water and unknowingly saved the life of former Canadian PM John Diefenbaker.

20. Malariotherapy is the act of intentionally inflicting a person with malaria as a way of curing them of syphilis. Malaria caused fevers which killed off the syphilis bacteria. After a few bouts of high fever, the bacteria would be eradicated and malaria treated with quinine.

Bagpipes were the only musical instrument deemed a weapon of war by the courts because it inspired troops to battle and instilled terror into the enemy.

22. According to a study out of the London School of Economics and Political Science, watching shows like “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” can make you less sympathetic to the plight of the poor.

23. High doses of ketamine can temporarily switch off the brain. This pause in brain activity may correspond to what ketamine abusers describe as the ‘K-hole’ - a state of oblivion likened to a near-death experience, which is followed by a feeling of great serenity.

24. For two decades, 10 percent of all the electricity consumed in the United States came from thousands of decommissioned Russian nuclear warheads.

25. In 1978 eccentric millionaire Dick Smith made world news by towing an enormous iceberg into Sydney Harbor, offering to cut it into ice cubes, or “dicksicles”. This was actually an elaborate April Fools’ Day prank and the “iceberg” was actually made of shaving cream.