1 Checkers Became An Unbeatable Draw
Checkers has been a solved game for almost 20 years. In 2007, after 18 years of work, University of Alberta computer scientist Jonathan Schaeffer and his team announced that they had solved checkers. Their proof established that perfect play by both opponents always produces a draw, making an optimal strategy unbeatable. At the time, checkers ranked as the most complex popular game ever solved, roughly one million times more complex than Connect Four.
2. When the Eiffel Tower opened in Paris in 1889, French engineer Gustave Eiffel revealed that he had built a small private apartment for himself on the third level. Warm wallpaper, soft furnishings, wooden cabinets, and a grand piano made the space surprisingly comfortable. Members of the Parisian elite reportedly offered enormous sums to spend one night there, but Eiffel refused them and instead entertained select guests such as American inventor Thomas Edison, who gave him a phonograph.
3. During Chicago Bulls games, American basketball star Michael Jordan often bet on Jumbotron cartoon races with one of the team’s security guards. According to teammate Scottie Pippen, Jordan nearly always won because arena staffers told him the predetermined winner in advance.
4. In January 2024, a finance worker in Hong Kong transferred $25.6 million to scammers after joining a video conference where every other participant, including the company’s CFO and several recognized coworkers, was an AI-generated deepfake. The worker had initially suspected that an email requesting a secret transaction was a phishing attempt, but the familiar faces and voices on the call overcame those doubts. Following their instructions, the employee sent HK$200 million through 15 transactions to five local bank accounts. The fraud emerged only after the worker checked with the company’s head office.
5. In 1983, Action Park in Vernon, New Jersey, built the Cannonball Loop, an enclosed water slide with a complete vertical loop. When it briefly opened in 1985, riders suffered bloody noses, back injuries, and lacerations while enduring forces of up to nine Gs. Investigators later traced some of the cuts to teeth that previous riders had lost and left embedded in the slide’s interior walls. New Jersey’s Advisory Board on Carnival Amusement Ride Safety ordered the attraction closed after only one month.
6 Chinese Harry Potter Knockoffs Proliferated
Several unauthorized Harry Potter books written in Chinese appeared under titles including Harry Potter and the Porcelain Doll, Harry Potter and the Golden Turtle, Harry Potter and the Crystal Vase, and Harry Potter and the Big Funnel. Publishers presented these original pastiches or fan fiction as translations of novels by British author J. K. Rowling. The trend had emerged by 2002, when Harry Potter and Bao Zoulong appeared in China before the fifth official novel, while the 2007 publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows inspired another surge of Chinese imitations.
7. American actress Jodie Foster speaks French fluently enough to dub herself in French-language versions of most of her English-language films. She learned the language while attending the Lycée Français de Los Angeles, a French-language preparatory school, and delivered the valedictorian address for its French division when she graduated in 1980. Her fluency has also allowed her to perform in French films.
8. Pope Francis declined the €30,000 monthly salary offered to the leader of the Catholic Church. The payment would have totaled roughly €360,000 a year, or about $405,600 at the exchange rate cited in 2025. Instead, Francis directed the Vatican to donate the money to people in need, continuing the modest lifestyle he had maintained during his decades as a Jesuit.
9. In 1970, Lion Country Safari in Irvine, California, bought Frasier, an 19-year-old lion who was old, toothless, ill, and barely able to walk. The park introduced him to six lionesses, who chewed his food and sometimes supported him while he walked. Frasier fathered 35 cubs, including the first 33 in only 16 months, and his fame increased park attendance by 20 percent. The California State Assembly eventually declared him Father of the Year.
10. The indigenous Khasi people of Meghalaya in northeast India follow a matrilineal system in which children take their mother’s surname and husbands move into their wife’s family home after marriage. The youngest daughter, known as the Ka Khadduh, inherits all ancestral property and assumes responsibility for caring for her aging parents and supporting her siblings’ welfare and education. When a couple has no daughters, the family adopts a girl and transfers its property rights to her.
11 Blob Transfers Knowledge Without Brain
The yellow, single-celled slime mold Physarum polycephalum, nicknamed “the blob,” has almost 720 sexes and can heal itself within two minutes after being cut in half. Despite lacking a brain or central nervous system, it can learn the best route through a maze and overcome barriers, such as salt, to reach food. When scientists fuse a trained blob with an untrained one, the experienced organism transfers what it learned, allowing the other blob to cross the same barrier immediately.
12. During the 1960s and 1970s, American comic books advertised live squirrel monkeys that children could order by mail for $18.95 plus postage. In the early 1970s, a boy named Jeff Tuthill found one such advertisement in a Spider-Man comic and secretly arranged for the monkey to arrive at a friend’s house. After Tuthill took it home and tried to grab it in his basement, the monkey gnawed his arm so severely that he needed 28 stitches. His parents still allowed him to keep the animal, which he named Chipper.
13. In 1871, two Kentucky conmen named Philip Arnold and John Slack bought $20,000 worth of rough diamonds and rubies from a London merchant, then planted many of them on a remote mesa near Rawlins, Wyoming. In June 1872, they guided investors and mining engineer Henry Janin to the site, where the scattered gemstones convinced the group that it had discovered a massive diamond field. Arnold eventually collected $550,000 from the scheme. Government geologist Clarence King exposed the fraud after finding gemstones only in disturbed ground and unnatural clusters, stopping a planned $10 million stock sale and forcing the company to dissolve.
14. In 1943, the U.S. Navy destroyer USS William D. Porter accidentally fired a live torpedo at the USS Iowa, which was secretly carrying U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt toward the Tehran Conference. During a practice attack, a sailor named Lawton Dawson forgot to remove the primer from torpedo tube three, causing a simulated firing command to launch the weapon. The destroyer’s crew first used signal lamps to preserve radio silence, but its bungled warnings indicated the wrong direction and then told the Iowa to reverse at full speed. Commander Wilfred Walter finally broke radio silence, allowing the Iowa to take evasive action before the torpedo struck a heavy wave and exploded harmlessly.
15. American writer Mark Twain was also a guitarist and singer, although he apparently never discussed this side of his life in his public writings or speeches. His older sister Pamilla, who taught guitar and piano to supplement the family income, introduced him to music. In 1861, Twain acquired a used Martin 2 1/2-17 guitar made in 1835, the same year he was born. He carried it on his travels and played for newspapermen, California miners, and ship passengers before parting with it shortly before his death in 1910.
16 Louisiana Purchase Financed Napoleon’s Invasion
In 1803, France spent the entire 50 million francs it received from the Louisiana Purchase on preparations for French military leader Napoleon Bonaparte’s planned invasion of Britain. The money helped France gather and train a 200,000-man army at camps along the English Channel and build a fleet of invasion barges. The United States had partly financed the purchase through a loan from Baring Brothers of London, meaning a British bank indirectly funded an invasion of its own country. Napoleon abandoned the plan in 1805 and marched the invasion army east to begin the Ulm campaign.
17. When exercise stops abruptly, blood vessels in the worked muscles remain dilated while the loss of rhythmic muscle contractions allows blood to pool in the legs. Walking during recovery keeps the calf muscle pump active, squeezing the leg veins and helping return blood to the heart. This active recovery can reduce the risk of post-exercise hypotension and fainting, which most often occur when someone stands motionless during the first 5 to 10 minutes after exercise.
18. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt is featured on the dime due to his strong association with the March of Dimes campaign against polio. After contracting polio in 1921, Roosevelt helped found and strongly supported the organization that funded research and assisted patients with the disease. Following his death in 1945, the U.S. Mint replaced the Mercury dime with a coin bearing his portrait. Officials released the new dime in 1946 on Roosevelt’s birthday and during that year’s March of Dimes fundraising campaign.
19. Mushrooms and crabs build important structures from the same base material: chitin, a long-chain polymer found in fungal cell walls and arthropod exoskeletons. Pure, unmodified chitin is pliable, resilient, and tough. Crustaceans combine it with calcium carbonate, creating a composite that is much harder and stiffer than pure chitin but tougher and less brittle than pure calcium carbonate.
20. In 1847, a rescue party found a man named Lewis Keseberg alone at the Donner Party’s Truckee Lake camp, surrounded by human bones and beside a pot that appeared to contain human organs. Keseberg admitted eating people who had died, including rescuer William Eddy’s young son, but denied murdering anyone. Rescuers accused him of killing Tamsen Donner after discovering that he had hidden her money, while Keseberg claimed she died from the cold and had asked him to deliver it to her children. He later sued rescuer Edward Coffeemeyer for defamation and won, but the court awarded him only $1.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
21 Peacemaker Inspired Watchmen’s Comedian Character
During the early development of Watchmen, British writer Alan Moore and British artist Dave Gibbons planned to use superheroes that DC Comics had purchased from Charlton Comics. When DC incorporated the Charlton heroes into its multiverse and planned to use them elsewhere, Moore and Gibbons created original counterparts for their 1986-1987 series. Peacemaker became the model for the Comedian, just as the Question inspired Rorschach and Captain Atom inspired Doctor Manhattan.
22. American politician John Randolph of Roanoke, born in Virginia in 1773, never went through puberty and retained a beardless face and prepubescent soprano voice throughout his life. An autopsy after his death in 1833 revealed underdeveloped male genitalia, leading to speculation that he had Klinefelter syndrome. Another theory suggests that tuberculosis, which Randolph apparently contracted as a youth and eventually died from, settled in his genital tract and permanently prevented puberty.
23. In early 1996, Van Halen’s involvement with the Twister soundtrack turned existing tensions with Sammy Hagar into open conflict. The band pressured Hagar to leave his pregnant wife in Hawaii, return to 5150 Studios, revise his lyrics, and extend “Humans Being” by another 90 seconds. Despite the rushed sessions, the song became Van Halen’s 11th consecutive No. 1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart. Following a heated June telephone argument with guitarist Eddie Van Halen, Hagar left the band just weeks after the film’s premiere.
24. The first television rerun was an episode of I Love Lucy in 1952; before that, TV episodes were aired just once, and never again. In 1952, CBS began rebroadcasting popular first-season episodes of I Love Lucy while Lucille Ball was pregnant. Producer Desi Arnaz and head writer Jess Oppenheimer used the repeats to reduce the number of new episodes Ball had to film and give her time to recover after giving birth. Because Desilu had recorded the sitcom on 35 mm film with three cameras, CBS could return completed episodes to its schedule. The repeats became ratings winners and helped establish the profitable television syndication market.
25. Although lasers often heat materials during processes such as cutting, carefully tuned laser light can also cool atoms, molecules, and small mechanical systems toward absolute zero. In Doppler cooling, opposing beams make moving atoms absorb more photons traveling against their motion, gradually reducing their momentum, speed, and kinetic energy. In 1978, teams at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Washington first demonstrated laser cooling on magnesium and barium ions. The technique now supports precise atomic clocks, spectroscopy, and atom-based quantum computing.
