50 Interesting and Random Facts List #131

A 60-year-old British woman who is known only as KH can’t recognize voices, not even her own daughter’s. Unless she sees the face of the person speaking, she has no idea who is talking to her. After university research, she was found to recognize only one voice, that of actor Sean Connery.

2. U.S. Air Force has found that by flying its C-17s in a large V formation similar to geese, they can save more than 10 percent of fuel or millions of dollars.

3. Breastfeeding invokes in the mother the neurochemical oxytocin, which is otherwise known as the “love drug.” It helps her to focus her attention and affection on her baby. It has now been theorized that men who do nipple foreplay and stimulation during sex can make themselves more desirable.

4. The New Jersey Forest Fire Service can summon any person aged 18 to 50 in their jurisdiction to help fight a wildfire or for use of their property in assisting, and it is a crime to refuse.

5. Due to human interaction, domestic sheep have evolved to require humans to shear them. Their wool never sheds.

Homosexual black swans form temporary threesomes with females to obtain eggs and then drive them away.

7. Before 2100, scientists estimate that there is an 80% chance a “megadrought” lasting more than 35 years will hit the American West.

8. Discarded pet goldfish can grow very large in the wild. They will basically keep growing as long as water temperatures and food resources support it. They are already a serious cause of environmental problems in some areas.

9. After the “The Walkie-Talkie” building in London was finished, due to its weird concave design, it unintentionally melted cars and changed weather patterns. It focused a beam of light that was 6 times brighter than sunlight on to the pavement below which heated to nearly 250°F at certain spots.

10. Tech companies often test new products in New Zealand because they’re an ethnically diverse, tech-savvy, and English-speaking nation, yet still relatively isolated. If a product is a flop there, the news is unlikely to spread quickly to the rest of the world and damage a company’s reputation.

In 1982, a South Korean man named Woo Bum-kon snapped and went on a murder rampage. He ended up killing 56 people. He snapped after his girlfriend woke him up trying to swat a fly on his chest when he was asleep.

12. The phrase “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” isn’t a line from Shakespeare. It’s a paraphrase from a play by William Congreve. The full line is, “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.”

13. Continually getting promoted until you reach the point of incompetence compared to your peers is called the Peter Principle.

14. Microwaves use the 2.4 GHz frequency to cook your food which is the same frequency that WIFI uses. This is why microwaves can sometimes cause WIFI interference.

15. In China, if you hit someone with your car you pay for their medical care. Killing someone, however, is a onetime fine. For this reason, people have gone back to kill someone they accidentally hit.

The word “Nonchalant” has no opposite. There’s no “chalant,” just “nonchalant.” This is the only word that only has a negative form in the English language.

17. Walt Disney often visited Disneyland in disguise; wearing old clothes and a straw farmer’s hat to avoid attention to himself. He would sit on rides and time them to make sure operators didn’t rush Disneyland visitors.

18. Senator Hugo Black who originally drafted ‘The Fair Labor Standards Act’ in 1932, which is responsible for the 40-hour workweek, originally proposed 30-hour workweek but was met with stiff resistance.

19. There has been a Raisin Cartel managed by the US federal government since 1949. It would steal raisins, by force even, from farmers to keep the prices high. It finally got taken down by the Supreme Court in 2015.

20. Moscow street dogs display specialized behaviors that differentiate them from domesticated dogs and wolves. The street dog pack leaders tend to be the most intelligent rather than the strongest, and they tend to deploy their cuter members first, as they are more successful in begging for food from people.

In 2012, rumors began circulating on the Iranian Internet that Pepsi planned to use powerful lasers to shine the image of their logo on the Moon’s surface. Thousands of Iranians climbed onto their roofs to stare at the Moon. When nothing happened, some bought Coca-Cola out of spite.

22. Japan has the largest organized crime group in the world called Yamaguchi Gumi that is worth $80 billion. By contrast, Sinaloa, Mexico’s largest drug cartel, was worth $3 billion.

23. The iPhone didn't work when they demonstrated it for the first time, but Steve Jobs made it look like it did by doing things in the right order. The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn’t play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not. Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called “the golden path,” a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order that made the phone look as if it worked.'

24. A study conducted by the University of Queensland has concluded that “extreme” music such as Heavy Metal can positively influence those experiencing anger by regulating sadness and enhancing positive emotions.

25. When Pablo Escobar’s daughter wanted a unicorn, he bought her a horse and stapled a cone to its head and wings to its back. The horse died from an infection.