50 Interesting and Random Facts List #131

When Marco Polo passed through Sumatra, he saw an animal, which he thought was a unicorn. He said it was a combination of a wild boar, a buffalo, and an elephant. The animal he was describing was actually a rhinoceros.

27. When Segway, the American company which manufactures self-balancing personal transportation devices, sued a Chinese company named Ninebot for selling knockoff units and patent infringement, Ninebot acquired Segway in 2015.

28. Budapest was once two cities, Buda and Pest. They merged in 1873.

29. Hitler did not learn of the allied D-day landings as they happened but only when he woke up at noon the next day. His staff did not dare wake him up because he had been up till 3 am chatting with friends at his residence.

30. The four vultures in Disney’s ‘The Jungle Book’ were both designed after and originally supposed to be voiced by ‘The Beatles.’

Ron Jeremy was a teacher before going into Porn and holds a Master’s Degree in Special Education.

32. Research has found that dye in blue M&M's repairs rats' spinal injuries when injected into them. It also turns them blue.

33. Special buses were used by Nazi’s to transport mentally disabled people. The buses had their exhaust fed directly into the passenger compartment, in order to kill the occupants.

34. When Florida suffered catastrophic wildfires in 1995, Florida’s Division of Forestry discovered that the underlying problem was the cessation of controlled burning, which was stopped at the behest of homeowners.

35. Pacman was designed to be a never-ending game. The variable that holds the level was only an 8-bit integer though, so at level 256, the game goes bonkers, and level 256 is impossible to beat.

The Apollo program had a massive effect on the atmosphere of the Moon, with each landing potentially doubling the Moon’s atmospheric mass.

37. The black-footed cat, which is Africa's smallest feline predator, has been known to kill sheep by hanging on to their throats until they have bitten through the jugular. They only grow to a maximum size of roughly 5 lbs.

38. At least six air traffic controllers who dealt with two of the hijacked airliners on September 11, 2001, made a tape recording that same day describing the events, but the tape was destroyed by a supervisor without anyone making a transcript or even listening to it.

39. Left-spiraling snails are generally as rare as left-handed humans, especially because left and right spiraled snails can't mate together easily, but in Japan, snakes gobble up righties easily but can't bite into the lefties, so there are way more lefties.

40. The first cloned pet was a cat and it was aptly named Copy Cat.

Professional ballet dancers can go through 4 pairs of pointe shoes in a week.

42. There is a Justice League comic out there in which a superhero assassinates Saddam Hussein in order to end the atrocities of his regime. This ends up actually destabilizing the country, making the quality of life for citizens much worse than it was before. The comic came out in 1999.

43. During a visit to Boeing, Soviet scientists secretly applied adhesive to the bottom of their shoes in order to covertly collect metal samples from the floor.

44. Lolita is a killer whale that has been kept in Miami Seaquarium since 1970. The orca is 20 feet long, and her tank measures 60 ft x 80 ft x 20 ft deep. Her only company for 10 years was Hugo, who died after a brain aneurysm caused by repeatedly banging his head on the tank windows.

45. In EverQuest, the sale of valuable items for both in-game platinum and for actual money allows exchange rates to be worked out. The BBC reported in 2002 that EQ was the 77th richest country in the world, between Russia and Bulgaria, with a higher GDP per capita than both China and India.

The first ‘moving staircase’ or escalator was built in 1898 at a Harrods store in London. Riders found the escalator ride so nerve wrecking that an employee stood at the top offering brandy so that they could recover from the ordeal.

47. The bobtail Squid stores bioluminescent bacteria in its underbelly that emits the same amount of light that shines on top of it, making its shadow disappear and rendering it invisible to predators below.

48. The Los Zetas cartel was formed by a group of commandos who defected from the Mexican army in the late 1990s. It is considered by the U.S. government to be the “most technologically advanced, sophisticated, and dangerous cartel operating in Mexico.”

49. Shrek was known as the “gulag” of DreamWorks, where animators would be sent if their work on “The Prince of Egypt” was not satisfactory.

50. Like Homo Sapiens, Tasmanian Devils are the last surviving species of their genus.