Did You Know These 44 Random Facts We Selected For You? – Part 130

Anti-margarine Senator Gordon Roselip incorrectly identified margarine as butter in a blind taste test. His wife later confessed that she had been feeding him margarine and telling him that it was butter.

2. Tears in your eyes often drain through small drain ways called “punctum” that are situated near the middle of your lower eyelid. They then drain into your nose, contributing to runny noses. When you choke on food, your eyes water because the nasal pressure is reversed sending tears back to your eyes the same way.

3. Ferret means "little thief" and a group of them is called a "business". Also, if excited, they perform a behavior called the "weasel war dance".

4. U.S Space Command has existed since 1982 as part of the U.S Airforce. It has approximately 22,000 military personnel and 9,000 civilian employees.

5. The numbers we write today are all upper case. Lowercase numbers exist and some include ascenders and descenders. For example, the ascending six and descending nines are minted on this 1996 U.S. penny.

Shortly after George H. W. Bush vomited and fainted at a meeting with the Japanese Prime minister in 1992, a man named James Edward Smith, called CNN posing as the president's physician claiming Bush had died. CNN was within seconds of publishing the story but stopped the anchor mid-sentence.

7. For years after CD players hit the market, they remained unpopular and were mostly limited to fans of classical music. When British rock band Dire Straits released "Brothers in Arms", the first totally digital album in 1985, they sold 30 million copies and are credited with launching CD players into the mainstream.

8. In Texas, two parties can legally settle a dispute by fighting as long as they don't kill or seriously injure one another.

9. In one survey, 56% of pilots have admitted to sleeping on the job, with 29% waking up to find the other pilot asleep as well.

10. Fire can't burn in a zero-gravity environment. Without gravity to create convection, the combustion byproducts become trapped around the flame and quickly deprive it of oxygen, thus snuffing it.

Back in 1984, religious fanatics in Iran sent children marching over minefields to clear them. The children were given plastic keys that would “open the gates of heaven for them”. Later, they were also given blankets so that body parts wouldn't be blown everywhere.

12. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut would've got an NC-17 rating had they used more than 400 swear words in the movie. They intentionally used only 399 swear words.

13. In the year 2000, a new type of ant named Martialis heureka was found in the Amazon. It was so unlike anything previously recorded that it was not only recognized as a new species, it also became the sole member of a new genus and subfamily.

14. The femur bone can support 30 times the weight of your body; ounce for ounce. It is stronger than steel.

15. Red and yellow cards in FIFA were introduced after a referee got the idea when he was at a traffic light and thought “Yellow, take it easy; red: stop, you're off.” This also helped address the communication issues referees face due to various languages players speak on the field.

In 1922, Nikola Tesla imagined that his favorite pigeon told him she was dying. When she actually did die shortly after, he said “something went out of his life and he knew his life’s work was finished.”

17. Uruguay's world cup player Luis Suárez has bitten three opponents under high-pressure situations. He doesn't know why he does it.

18. “The Dirty Dozen” movie was inspired by a World War 2 paratrooper squadron called ‘The Filthy Thirteen’, who wore warpaint and mohawks into war. They were also famous for disregarding military rules and laws.

19. In the Bazoule village in Africa's Burkina Faso, crocodiles and humans have lived side-by-side in peace for over 600 years.

20. In 1969, upon request from Richard Nixon, NASA made 250 display plaques for the 50 US states, 135 countries, and the UN. Flags from all the countries and states were flown on board Apollo 11 to the moon and back and were gifted to each respective state along with fragments of the lunar surface.

German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine once wrote in a play from 1821, "Wherever they burn books, in the end, will also burn human beings." Over a century later, copies of Heine's books were among the many burned in Berlin's Opernplatz.

22. Larry Bird once got bored halfway through a game and decided to challenge himself by only shooting left handed. He scored 20 points using only his left hand.

23. Earth has had 5 mass extinctions, and we are currently in the 6th.

24. Researchers at IBM made a stop-motion movie from the world’s smallest characters with the canvas measuring just 45x25 nanometers. They achieved this by rearranging individual atoms to create images.

25. In the early days of film and television, filmmakers thought nothing about painting a white stuntman with black makeup to double for a black actor, until Bill Cosby refused to let a white man with black face double for him. His actions paved way for the Black Stuntmen's Association.