Random Fact Sheet #49 – 35 Fun Facts to Impress Your Friends (and Maybe Even Yourself)

There is enough residual blood in illegally dumped syringes to get positive DNA identification and it was used to successfully trace needles ditched on school property in Darien, Connecticut in the USA.

27. Shipping children through parcel post service was initially legal in the United States. The U.S. Post Office banned the practice in 1920.

28. In 2001, Charles Ingram won the grand prize (£1,000,000) on "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" by having a friend in the audience cough on the right answer. He was suspected of cheating, and after review of the recordings, the accusation was confirmed. He was charged for deception.

29. Frances Gabe, in the 1980s, built and patented the world's only self-cleaning home. The patent contained 68 inventions. She died in obscurity last year at 101 years old.

30. A poem by Simon Armitage removed more than 2 tonnes of pollution from the environment. The poem In Praise Of Air, on display at Sheffield University, was printed on a specially treated material capable of purifying the air around it through catalytic oxidation.

The flavor Blue Raspberry is based on a real fruit, the whitebark Raspberry. Although the fruit's actual color is a deep purple, the fruit provided a way for candy makers to use blue dye.

32. A recently discovered fearsome Jurassic crocodile has been named Lemmysuchus, after Motorhead frontman Lemmy.

33. The Soviet KGB fabricated evidence linking the Central Intelligence Agency to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and passed the material to unwitting conspiracy theorists in the United States, according to the Mitrokhin Archive based on KGB files brought to the West by a defector.

34. Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West in Wizard of Oz, had a guest appearance on Sesame Street which scared so many children it was never aired again.

35. The most deadly mammal in the world other than humans is the dog with about 30,000 deaths a year, but the majority of these dogs are infected with rabies.