26 Atkinson’s McLaren Crash Broke Records
In August 2011, British actor Rowan Atkinson lost control of his rare McLaren F1, struck a tree, and watched the car catch fire. The extensive damage took more than a year to repair. The £910,000 repair bill produced the largest insurance payout in Britain at the time.
27. In 1979, Arnold Schwarzenegger became the Special Olympics International Weight Training Coach. Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who founded Special Olympics, later became his mother-in-law when Schwarzenegger married her daughter, Maria Shriver, in 1986. He remained involved with the organization and later served as a global ambassador.
28. Every lawful promotional sweepstakes in the United States must allow eligible participants to enter without buying anything or paying a fee. Requiring payment combines a prize, chance, and consideration, which can turn the promotion into an illegal lottery unless the law specifically authorizes it. Companies that link entries to purchases must therefore provide a free alternate method of entry, such as an online form, mail-in entry, or free code request. The free route must offer equivalent entries, access to the same prizes, and equal treatment during winner selection.
29. In 1960, Austrian-American scientist Heinz von Foerster and colleagues P. M. Mora and L. W. Amiot published a paper in Science predicting that the world’s population would reach infinity on Friday, November 13, 2026. Their equation fitted historical population data available in 1958 and pushed the total toward a mathematical singularity. They chose the date partly because November 13 was von Foerster’s birthday, making the predicted doomsday his 115th.
30. Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot wrote and recorded “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” before investigators had fully studied the ship’s wreckage, so the song included speculation about its 1975 sinking in Lake Superior. As new findings emerged, Lightfoot updated the lyrics during live performances without changing the official copyrighted version. In 2010, he removed the claim that a main hatchway had caved in and replaced it with wording that simply described darkness falling.
31 Macaque Monkeys Fear Uncanny Faces
In 2009, Princeton University researchers found that macaque monkeys also experience the uncanny valley when shown nearly realistic computer-generated monkey faces. The monkeys quickly looked away and acted frightened by the close but imperfect images, while they examined real faces and less realistic versions more frequently and for longer periods.
32. Contact binaries, often nicknamed “peanut stars,” form when two stars orbit so closely that they touch and share a gaseous outer envelope. Both stars fill their Roche lobes, allowing the more massive star to transfer mass and energy to its companion. Although the shared envelope gives the system a peanut-like shape, the two components remain a binary rather than becoming one star. These arrangements can persist for millions or even billions of years.
33. Extremal Black Holes have the absolute minimum mass allowed for their charge or spin. At that limit, their Hawking temperature falls to absolute zero, so they theoretically emit no Hawking radiation. Without that radiation draining their mass, they could escape the evaporation that eventually destroys ordinary black holes and potentially persist forever. Scientists have never observed one, and physicists still debate whether nature can produce them.
34. Most seismological authorities no longer report major earthquake magnitudes using the original Richter scale. Introduced in 1979, the moment magnitude scale became the preferred method for large earthquakes because the Richter scale saturates and cannot reliably measure the strongest events. The newer scale uses rock rigidity, rupture area, and fault movement, although news reports still often call its values Richter magnitudes. The local magnitude scale remains in use for smaller nearby earthquakes.
35. In 2010, a former Food Network host named Juan-Carlos Cruz, known as the “Calorie Commando,” offered three homeless men $1,000 to murder his wife, Jennifer Campbell. The men reported him, allowing police to arrange a sting and record Cruz discussing the killing. Police arrested him at Cheviot Hills Park in Los Angeles on May 13. Cruz pleaded no contest to murder for hire and received nine years in prison under a plea agreement.
36 Tuatara’s Third Eye Detects Light
The tuatara is a three-eyed reptile found only in New Zealand, and it remains active at temperatures as low as 5 C (41 F). Despite its lizard-like appearance, it is the only living member of Rhynchocephalia, a reptile lineage that first appeared about 244 million years ago. Its third, or parietal, eye has a lens and retina but can detect only light rather than form images. The eye remains visible in hatchlings until scales and pigment cover it after four to six months.
37. In November 1934, American politician Rush Holt Sr. won a US Senate seat from West Virginia at age 29, becoming the youngest person ever popularly elected to the chamber. The Constitution required senators to be at least 30, so Holt could not take his seat when the new term began. He turned 30 on June 19, 1935, and was sworn in two days later, on June 21.
38. In 2019, a Canadian woman named Dee Gallant was walking her dog, Murphy, along a logging road near Duncan, British Columbia, when a cougar began approaching them. Shouting, waving her arms, and calling it a “bad kitty” made the animal pause but did not drive it away. Gallant played “Don’t Tread on Me” by Metallica at full volume, and the cougar fled into the bushes as soon as the first notes sounded. She kept the song playing on a loop for the rest of the hike.
39. Hucuktlis Lake on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, occupies the wettest recorded location in North America. Weather data from its fish hatchery shows an annual average of 6,903 mm (271.8 in) of precipitation. In 1997, the area received 9,307 mm (366.4 in), setting Canada’s all-time annual precipitation record.
40. American surgeon Dr. Mary Edwards Walker remains the only woman ever to receive the Medal of Honor. During the Civil War, she became the first female surgeon employed by the US Army, treated wounded people in battle, and crossed enemy lines to care for civilians. Confederate troops captured her in 1864 after she helped perform an amputation and imprisoned her in Richmond until a prisoner exchange. She received the medal in 1865, and although the Army removed her name from the Medal of Honor Roll in 1917, it restored her honor in 1977.
41 Pangium Seeds Need Forty-Day Detox
The pangium tree, native to Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia, produces large fruits and seeds containing deadly hydrogen cyanide. To make the seeds edible, cooks boil them and then bury them in ash, banana leaves, and earth for 40 days. Boiling and fermentation release the water-soluble cyanide so it can be washed away, turning the kernels from creamy white to dark brown or black. The processed kernels become a spice in Indonesian dishes such as rawon beef stew.
42. The Code of the US Fighting Force gives members of the US Armed Forces six articles governing their conduct in combat, while evading capture, as prisoners, and during escape attempts. The Korean War revealed that American troops lacked a clearly defined code for resisting enemy pressure after capture. President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the code through Executive Order 10631 in 1955. It directs troops to resist surrender, aid escape attempts, protect fellow prisoners, and limit information given to captors, although it serves as military doctrine rather than formal military law.
43. Brazilian football legend Pele filled in as goalkeeper during four official matches for Santos without conceding a single goal. He regularly stayed after training to practice goalkeeping, and his teammates said Santos sometimes carried no backup because Pele served as their second choice. His most famous appearance came during a 1964 Taca Brasil semifinal against Gremio, when he scored a hat-trick before replacing the dismissed goalkeeper Gilmar in the 84th minute. Pele kept the ball out as Santos held on for a 4-3 victory.
44. Rocks mistakenly identified as meteorites have earned the joking name “meteorwrongs.” The term covers terrestrial rocks and human-made objects that people believe or claim came from space. Common impostors include hematite concretions and industrial slag, whose unusual shapes, metal grains, or bubbled surfaces can resemble meteorite features. Some cases require chemical or mineralogical testing before researchers can rule them out, and scientists sometimes call ambiguous examples pseudometeorites.
45. On September 14, 2015, LIGO made the first direct observation of gravitational waves when two black holes about 36 and 29 times the Sun’s mass spiralled together and merged 1.4 billion light-years away. The collision created a 62-solar-mass black hole, converting roughly three Suns’ worth of mass into gravitational-wave energy. During the final 20 milliseconds, its power output peaked at 3.6 x 10^49 watts, about 50 times the combined power of all light radiated by every star in the observable universe. The 0.2-second signal, named GW150914, confirmed a major prediction of general relativity and launched gravitational-wave astronomy.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
46 Kentucky Bend Lies Beyond Tennessee
Kentucky Bend forms a corner of Kentucky completely detached from the rest of the state. Anyone entering by road must travel through Tennessee, while reaching it from Missouri requires crossing the Mississippi River because no road or ferry connects the two. The exclave formed because early surveyors could only estimate where the Kentucky-Tennessee boundary would meet the river, and later surveys revealed that the line crossed one of the Mississippi’s looping bends. Only nine people lived there during the 2020 census.
47. In 1990, American actress Lycia Naff briefly appeared in Total Recall as Mary, a three-breasted mutant sex worker. The small role made her instantly famous and brought a flood of interview and talk-show requests, including an invitation from American television host Johnny Carson. Young and embarrassed, Naff rejected every offer. She later regretted not embracing the attention and making fun of the situation.
48. Nine months before British rock band Queen performed at Live Aid in July 1985, it played 12 shows at Sun City in apartheid-era South Africa. The resort stood inside Bophuthatswana, one of the government’s nominally independent Black homelands, and the performances violated a United Nations cultural boycott. Queen defended its decision by claiming it remained nonpolitical and played wherever fans wanted to hear it. The British Musicians’ Union fined the band, while the United Nations placed it on a blacklist that lasted until apartheid ended.
49. Crystal the Monkey, a female tufted capuchin born in 1994, accumulated more than 30 acting credits between 1997 and 2024. She began as a baby monkey in Disney’s George of the Jungle before appearing in American Pie, Malcolm in the Middle, The Big Bang Theory, and Community. Moviegoers may recognize her as Dexter from the Night at the Museum films and the drug-dealing monkey from The Hangover Part II & Part III.
50. Thunderstorms can trigger sudden asthma attacks, a phenomenon known as thunderstorm asthma. Although scientists do not fully understand the mechanism, the leading theory holds that pollen absorbs moisture, bursts into microscopic fragments, and spreads on storm winds. These pieces slip past nose hairs and enter the lungs, sometimes affecting people who have never experienced an asthma attack before. In November 2016, the worst recorded outbreak overwhelmed Melbourne’s ambulance system, increased emergency asthma cases tenfold, and killed ten people.
