50 Random Facts List #171

Flight hijacking from the USA to Cuba during the 60s/70s was so common, pilots were equipped with detour flight plans and building a fake “Havana airport” in south Florida was seriously considered.

27. ‘Super-banana’ is a genetically modified fruit from Australia that contains increased levels of vitamin A. It could help prevent thousands of Ugandan children from going blind and dying from Vitamin A deficiencies.

28. Researchers at Cornell analyzing Youtube videos of heavy metal concerts found that mosh pits model the behavior of gas particles in equilibrium.

29. Despite the odds seeming very low, 93% of lost dogs are reunited with their owner, and even after 24 hours of being lost, 55 to 65% are found and brought back.

30. A New York couple named Matthew and Maria Emanuel dug up a safe with $52,000 of cash and jewelry in their backyard but didn't keep it. Inside they found wet money, lots of jewelry and also a paper with their neighbor's address. Eight years earlier their neighbors were robbed, so the couple returned everything.

All U.S. aircraft carriers are nuclear powered, meaning they can continuously sail for up to 25 years without needed to refuel.

32. In the Japanese departmental stores, the staff will offer to put a plastic cover on your shopping bag when it rains. The staff knows it is raining outside without looking because of a special BGM is played only when it rains.

33. The Rose Parade in Pasadena, California was started in 1890 as a way to convince East Coast residents to move to California by "showcasing California's mild weather" by proving the "flowers are still blooming and oranges are about to bear."

34. The reason beans actually give you gas is because of sugar found in beans called oligosaccharide that the body cannot fully break down. When these sugars move into the small intestine, they produce excess gas.

35. There is a service named Ossan in Japan where you can rent middle-aged men for ¥1000 ($9) an hour. The men, who have previous or current experience in a range of professions from engineers to marketing or management, meet up in person to offer everything from life advice to music lessons.

A Danish artist named Thomas Dambo creates giant wooden sculptures and hides them in the forests of Copenhagen.

37. In 1955, evangelist Jack Coe claimed to have divinely healed a 3-year-old of polio and told the boy's parents to remove his leg braces. This caused the boy constant pain, but Coe never faced jail time as medical malpractice did not cover divine healing. The next year, Coe died of polio.

38. Shaquille O'Neal left college early to join NBA, but later in his life he went back to school and earned his bachelor's degree, then a master's degree and now has a doctorate in education.

39. Ed Sheeran removed curse words from his album X following a conversation with a taxi driver. The cab driver told him he wouldn’t allow his daughter to listen to his songs if he swore in them, so Ed went back and cut out all of the obscenities from the album.

40. Nazi commander Walter Rauff escaped justice for the deaths of nearly 100,000 people during World War 2. He was instrumental in the implementation of the Nazis' genocide by a mobile gas chamber. He died in 1984 from a heart attack as a free man in Chile. His MI5 file said he never showed any remorse.

If you are born over the United States, in a foreign plane with foreign parents, you can still claim U.S. citizenship.

42. A British inventor named Barnes Wallis created an earthquake bomb, which was used in World War 2 to great effect to destroy bomb-proof installations such as submarine pens. The same inventor later invented a bouncing bomb, which would skip across water to avoid torpedo nets and destroy dams.

43. One of the highest paid jobs in USA is a Harbor Pilot, who specializes in piloting large cargo ships into shipping ports with precision. They can earn over $400,000 a year.

44. Printed circuit boards are green because green color can relieve visual fatigue and it aids in inspections. Cone cells in the human eyes are most sensitive to green light.

45. The BibleWalk Wax Museum in Ohio is made up of discarded wax figures and their Jesus figure was and still is unmistakably Tom Cruise.

Jeff Goldblum's distinctive delivery of dialogue—usually a melodic kind of stammering peppered with “uhs” and pregnant pauses—began while filming 1978's Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

47. A ticket seller at a Japanese garden named Shinjuku-Gyoen-national-garden stopped collecting admission fees from foreign tourists after one of them yelled at him and he became too scared to ask them to pay. He let about 160,000 people enter the garden free in 2 and a half years causing a $220,000 damage.

48. Pope John Paul ll and Pope Francis are honorary members of the Harlem Globetrotters.

49. The cheapest toll ever paid to cross the Panama Canal was 36 cents. It was paid by Richard Halliburton in 1928 so that he could swim the length of the canal.

50. There is a functioning mailbox located 10 meters underwater off the coast of Japan, that receives hundreds of mail items every day.