26Fort Drum
The Americans leveled an island in the Philippines to build a concrete battleship, Fort Drum. Captured by the Japanese during World War 2, the Americans retook it by pouring gasoline inside and setting it aflame, killing every Japanese soldier inside.
27. Dragonflies have one of the highest hunting success rates in the animal kingdom at 97% (compared to a lion's mere 20%).
28. The earliest written record of the Finnish language is an early 13th century travel journal log stating, “I want to speak Finnish, [but] I am not able.”
29. In 2017, cops in the small Dutch town of Nijmegan-Zuid arrested a 99-year-old woman named Annie just so that she could cross it off her bucket list.
30. During the Vioxx scandal, an arthritis drug produced by Merck & Co. resulted in the death of approximately 60,000 people. The company allegedly was aware of the side effects and did not withdraw the drug from the market until FDA caught on. The company still exists to this day.
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31Tuckaleechee Caverns
Tuckaleechee Caverns in Tennessee are used to detect if any underground nuclear tests have been conducted anywhere in the world, through reading seismic activity in its dense limestone.
32. The 2002 Scooby-Doo movie featured allusions to popular fan theories of the cartoon, such as Shaggy being high, Velma being lesbian and Fred and Daphne having hidden sex. The scenes were all cut to give the movie a PG-rating
33. The crime of “upskirting” is taken seriously in Japan, with manhunts common, primarily due to a shortage of crime and an abundance of police officers in the nation.
34. Blueprints are blue because the photosensitive chemicals used to make copies of the documents turn blue when exposed to light.
35. Tibetans have more than twice the amount of forearm blood flow due to sharing more than 6% of their genes from Denisova hominins.
36Pontevedra
The Spanish city of Pontevedra banned all but essential car traffic in 1999, resulting in a 70% decrease in CO2 emissions and zero traffic-related deaths since 2009.
37. Agriculture was not invented by humans: Fijian ants began farming fruits millions of years ago. They gathered seeds, sought out cracks in tree bark to plant them in before fertilizing them with their own poop.
38. In 2007, Paris Hilton was banned from attending Oktoberfest because locals felt she would cheapen the event as they did not appreciate how she was trying to promote her canned wine.
39. John Wayne said that there was nothing wrong with the fact that colonists took land away from Native Americans, because the early settlers were "people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves."
40. President Ronald Reagan revealed he wore a hearing aid in 1983, leading to greater acceptance and increased sales of the devices among seniors. At the age of 72, he said that his hearing loss dated to his early Hollywood days when a .38-caliber blank was fired close to his right ear on a film set.
