1 Giant Squid May Number Millions
Scientists estimate that millions of giant squid (Architeuthis dux) inhabit Earth’s oceans, despite their rarity in live sightings. Estimates based on squid beaks found inside dead sperm whales suggest that the whales consume between 4.3 million and 131 million giant squid each year. Such enormous annual consumption implies that the global population must extend well into the millions, although scientists cannot determine its size accurately.
2. When Harambe (the gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo who was shot and killed in 2016) was two years old, his mother, Kayla, his 11-month-old brother, Makoko, and his two-year-old half-sister, Uzuri, died of chlorine gas poisoning. In 2002, a container of chlorine solution left too close to a space heater released gas into their enclosure at the Gladys Porter Zoo. Harambe survived the accident, although he may also have been injured.
3. American serial killer Israel Keyes buried buckets containing “kill kits” across the United States years before he planned to use them. The caches held guns, silencers, zip ties, Drano, lye, and other tools, allowing him to fly into an area without a weapon, recover a hidden kit, and target a stranger. He used one such cache, buried several years earlier, before murdering Bill and Lorraine Currier in Vermont in 2011. The FBI has said that several more caches may remain buried and could contain evidence connected to unsolved murders.
4. IMAX 70mm screens remain extremely rare because many projector parts are no longer manufactured, and IMAX has lost the original plans needed to build new machines. For Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, the company searched for broken or retired projectors and restored as many as possible. Despite that effort, the worldwide number of theaters showing the format increased by only 11, from 30 for Oppenheimer in 2023 to 41 for The Odyssey in 2026.
5. Madonna helped reshape a sequence in Deadpool & Wolverine after actor Ryan Reynolds and director Shawn Levy met her personally to secure permission to use her 1989 hit “Like a Prayer.” After they showed her how the song would accompany the scene, she offered one specific note, although the filmmakers never revealed what it was. They entered a new recording session within 48 hours to implement her suggestion, and Levy said it improved the sequence.
6 Electric Eels Cluster Organs Forward
An electric eel’s vital organs are tightly packed into the front of its body, immediately behind its head. About 80 percent of the fish consists of three specialized electrical organs called the main organ, Hunter’s organ, and Sachs’ organ. These generate strong and weak charges for hunting, defense, navigation, and communication.
7. In 2017, University of Washington researchers successfully hacked a computer using a physical strand of synthetic DNA. They encoded malicious instructions into its A, C, G, and T bases and passed the strand through a DNA sequencer. When a vulnerable analysis program processed the resulting genetic data, the code exploited the software and gave the researchers full remote control of the connected computer. The team stressed that the experiment was a controlled proof of concept made possible by a specific software weakness, not evidence of an active real-world threat.
8. According to guitarist Herman Li, DragonForce earned only about $3,000 in royalties from the inclusion of “Through the Fire and the Flames” in the Guitar Hero series. The song first appeared as a notoriously difficult unlockable track in 2007’s Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock and later returned in other installments. Despite the small payment, its appearance helped turn the song into the band’s best-known recording.
9. Frank McWorter, born enslaved in South Carolina in 1777, earned money by hiring out his labor and mining saltpeter. He bought his pregnant wife Lucy’s freedom before purchasing his own in 1819. In 1835, he paid $100 for 80 acres in Illinois and used 42 acres to establish New Philadelphia, the first U.S. town platted and registered by an African American. Income from farming and selling its 144 lots helped him secure freedom for 16 relatives, including himself, at a combined cost of $14,000.
10. Female turkeys can reproduce without sperm through parthenogenesis, a phenomenon sometimes called a “virgin birth,” although the offspring are not exact clones of their mother. Their unfertilized eggs can spontaneously develop into embryos, and the few that successfully hatch are always male. USDA researcher M. W. Olson found that only about 1 percent survived long enough to become chicks, although selective breeding raised the rate to roughly 8 percent in one line.
11 Jay-Z Chooses Super Bowl Headliners
Since 2019, Jay-Z has made the final decision on who headlines the Super Bowl halftime show through Roc Nation’s partnership with the NFL. Halftime producer Jesse Collins said in 2024 that Jay-Z had selected the performer every year since the partnership began. The agreement appointed Jay-Z as the NFL’s live music entertainment strategist while also involving Roc Nation in the league’s social justice initiatives.
12. Prominent British book collector and dealer Thomas J. Wise tore pages from rare 17th-century plays in the British Museum Library and used them to complete books he kept or sold as “perfect” copies. During the 1950s, librarians D. F. Foxon and Fannie Ratchford exposed his thefts by matching distinctive woodworm patterns and impressions left by folds and flaws in adjoining pages. Their bibliographic detective work connected leaves in Wise’s books to the exact gaps left in the museum’s copies.
13. A 40-year-old Japanese man developed generalized dissociative amnesia amid severe stress caused by his bookstore’s bankruptcy and his inability to find new employment. He suddenly lost his autobiographical and episodic memories, even forgetting his own name, although tests found no structural brain damage. After 6 years and 10 months, his memories returned naturally when he secured stable new employment, while previously reduced blood flow in his right medial temporal lobe also returned to normal. The researchers linked his recovery to relief from the psychological conflict that had triggered his amnesia.
14. Collections of recordings are called “albums” because early 78-rpm records usually held only one short song or recording per side. Longer works or groups of songs therefore required several discs, which were placed in individual sleeves bound together like pages in a photograph album. After LPs arrived in the late 1940s and allowed an entire collection to fit on one disc, the music industry retained the term. It later carried over to cassettes, CDs, and digital releases.
15. In 1936, 10-year-old Rayner Unwin reviewed the manuscript of The Hobbit for his father, publisher Sir Stanley Unwin. Rayner served as a test reader for George Allen & Unwin and earned one shilling for each written report. He summarized Bilbo Baggins’s adventure and concluded that the book was good and would appeal to children aged five to nine. Rayner later recalled that his recommendation led the firm to publish J. R. R. Tolkien’s book in September 1937, without the need for a second opinion.
16 Andy Grant’s Tattoo Lost Alone
British Royal Marine Andy Grant, a Liverpool FC supporter, had the club’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” motto tattooed beside a Liver bird near his knee. After he stepped on a mine while serving in Afghanistan, surgeons amputated his leg and removed only the word “alone,” leaving the tattoo reading “You’ll Never Walk.” Grant embraced the irony after learning to walk and run again, winning gold medals at the Invictus Games and completing 10 kilometers in 40 minutes. He later incorporated the altered tattoo into his motivational speeches.
17. In 1974, Stan Lee made an offhand remark while reviewing Iron Man pages, asking Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas why the hero’s mask did not have a nose. The question sent the office scrambling, and by Iron Man #68, artists had added a prominent nose to the faceplate. About a year and a half later, Lee saw the redesign, asked why the nose was there, and said it looked strange. Marvel removed it by Iron Man #85.
18. After a Japanese man named Shoji Morimoto was fired from an office job in 2018 for supposedly “doing nothing,” he turned the criticism into a career. He began renting himself out as a “person who does nothing,” offering clients his quiet presence at meals, outings, and events without performing any particular task. Morimoto later reported earning roughly $80,000 a year from the service.
19. In 1994, Red Bull ran an unusual guerrilla marketing campaign in London by filling rubbish bins with empty cans of its energy drink. The company also left cans outside nightclubs and gave free samples to DJs, creating the illusion that the unfamiliar brand was already widely popular. This manufactured social proof encouraged consumers to assume everyone else was drinking Red Bull, increasing curiosity and influencing their purchasing decisions.
20. A man named David Goggins transformed himself from a 297-pound exterminator into an elite servicemember by losing 106 pounds in less than three months to qualify for Navy training. He endured SEAL Hell Week three times, once passing it with a fractured kneecap, before earning his SEAL trident in 2001. Goggins also graduated from U.S. Army Ranger School as Honor Man and is reported to be the only U.S. servicemember to complete Navy SEAL training, Ranger School, and Air Force Tactical Air Controller training.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
21 Captain America’s Airport Became Digital
The airport battle in Captain America: Civil War (2016) was almost entirely digital, despite appearing to unfold at a real German airport. ILM visual effects supervisor Russell Earl said his team replaced 99% of what had been filmed, generally isolating the actors and placing them inside a digitally reconstructed environment. ILM produced about 625 shots for the 20-minute sequence and created between 600 and 700 digital assets, including the airport, vehicles, and several superheroes.
22. In the 1994 The Simpsons episode “Lisa on Ice,” school bully Dolph wrote “Beat up Martin” on an Apple Newton, only for its poor handwriting recognition to produce “Eat up Martha.” More than a decade later, engineers developing the iPhone keyboard were still haunted by the joke that “Eat Up Martha” became their shorthand for a text-input failure.
23. After Elvis Presley died in 1977, about 80,000 people lined the route to Forest Hill Cemetery in Memphis, where he was buried beside his mother, Gladys. An attempt to steal his body occurred in late August, less than two weeks after his funeral. On October 2, the remains of both Presley and his mother were exhumed and reburied in Graceland’s Meditation Garden.
24. In 1998, the life-saving HIV drug ritonavir faced a manufacturing crisis not because its original Form I became insoluble, but because a newly discovered Form II was more stable and far less soluble. Microscopic Form II crystals caused new batches of Form I to crystallize into the medically ineffective form, and staff who had encountered it appeared capable of contaminating entire manufacturing plants. As it spread, any manufacturing plant that made contact with Form II couldn’t make Form I anymore.
25. During the middle third of the 19th century, tea clippers (merchant ships) carrying each season’s new tea crop from China to Britain competed in informal races to be the first to dock in London. Merchants offered premiums for the first arrival because early cargoes could command high prices, while a reputation for speed helped ships secure better freight rates. In the Great Tea Race of 1866, Taeping beat Ariel by just 28 minutes after traveling more than 14,000 miles in 99 days, and the two ships ultimately shared the prize.
