46 Unusual Random Facts From Around the Globe – Part 152

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26MIT lawyers

MIT lawyers

MIT lawyers did not patent turn-by-turn in-car navigation in 1989 because "This will never happen.. because the insurance companies won't allow it."


27. A Filipino diver from the Badjao tribe can descend 65 feet to the sea floor and stay underwater for up to 5 minutes. Even without weights, he is negatively buoyant and can 'walk' across the bottom of the sea as if like hunting on land.


28. The most expensive Mega-Project ever was Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System, costing $500 billion, spanning 48,181 miles, and dwarfing the cost of every other Mega-Project in history.


29. In 2011, a U.S. marine called customer support for help in the middle of a firefight to get help with his M107 sniper rifle which wasn’t firing consistently. The armorer instructed the marine on how to correct the problem and within 45 seconds, the weapon was firing properly.


30. Elephants are very good swimmers. Once an elephant was rescued from the ocean 10 miles off the Sri Lankan coast. It got caught in a current off the coast near Kokkilai but it was still swimming.


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31Fort Drum

Fort Drum

The Americans leveled an island in the Philippines to build a concrete battleship, Fort Drum. Captured by the Japanese during World War 2, the Americans retook it by pouring gasoline inside and setting it aflame, killing every Japanese soldier inside.


32. Dragonflies have one of the highest hunting success rates in the animal kingdom at 97% (compared to a lion's mere 20%).


33. The earliest written record of the Finnish language is an early 13th century travel journal log stating, “I want to speak Finnish, [but] I am not able.”


34. In 2017, cops in the small Dutch town of Nijmegan-Zuid arrested a 99-year-old woman named Annie just so that she could cross it off her bucket list.


35. During the Vioxx scandal, an arthritis drug produced by Merck & Co. resulted in the death of approximately 60,000 people. The company allegedly was aware of the side effects and did not withdraw the drug from the market until FDA caught on. The company still exists to this day.


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36Tuckaleechee Caverns

Tuckaleechee Caverns

Tuckaleechee Caverns in Tennessee are used to detect if any underground nuclear tests have been conducted anywhere in the world, through reading seismic activity in its dense limestone.


37. The 2002 Scooby-Doo movie featured allusions to popular fan theories of the cartoon, such as Shaggy being high, Velma being lesbian and Fred and Daphne having hidden sex. The scenes were all cut to give the movie a PG-rating


38. The crime of “upskirting” is taken seriously in Japan, with manhunts common, primarily due to a shortage of crime and an abundance of police officers in the nation.


39. Blueprints are blue because the photosensitive chemicals used to make copies of the documents turn blue when exposed to light.


40. Tibetans have more than twice the amount of forearm blood flow due to sharing more than 6% of their genes from Denisova hominins.


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41Pontevedra

Pontevedra

The Spanish city of Pontevedra banned all but essential car traffic in 1999, resulting in a 70% decrease in CO2 emissions and zero traffic-related deaths since 2009.


42. Agriculture was not invented by humans: Fijian ants began farming fruits millions of years ago. They gathered seeds, sought out cracks in tree bark to plant them in before fertilizing them with their own poop.


43. In 2007, Paris Hilton was banned from attending Oktoberfest because locals felt she would cheapen the event as they did not appreciate how she was trying to promote her canned wine.


44. John Wayne said that there was nothing wrong with the fact that colonists took land away from Native Americans, because the early settlers were "people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves."


45. President Ronald Reagan revealed he wore a hearing aid in 1983, leading to greater acceptance and increased sales of the devices among seniors. At the age of 72, he said that his hearing loss dated to his early Hollywood days when a .38-caliber blank was fired close to his right ear on a film set.


46Japanese train

Japanese train

A Japanese train barks like a dog and snorts like a deer in order to prevent collisions with animals on the railway.

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