26Edward the Black Prince
Edward the Black Prince (1330-1376) was regarded by his English contemporaries as a model of chivalry and one of the greatest knights of his age. He is, on the other hand, remembered in France for his well-documented brutality and the massacres he ordered.
27. Japan has a shrine for hemorrhoids called the Kunigami Shrine. Visitors can point their butts towards the butt-washing stone and recite a chant to cure or prevent hemorrhoids.
28. A study showed that plants have the potential to store memory. A plant species that would close up when touched was repeatedly dropped. At first, the plants closed on every drop but over time remained open because the drops did not harm them. They retained this memory even a month later.
29. Singapore Changi Airport has been rated the World's Best Airport by Skytrax for 8 consecutive years, the first airport to ever do so. It contains an indoor slide, butterfly garden, movie theater, and the world's tallest indoor waterfall.
30. Eugene Schieffelin hoped to introduce into North America every bird mentioned by Shakespeare. He imported starlings from England and released them in Manhattan in 1890 and 1891. Starlings soon started to drive native birds out of their habitats, ate massive amounts of crops, and spread disease.
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31Royal coat of arms
The reason why the unicorn on the UK's royal coat of arms is chained, but the lion isn't, is that according to legend a free unicorn was a very dangerous animal.
32. A stowaway named Kiddo the Cat became the first feline to attempt to cross the Atlantic in an airship. His eventual howling led to chief engineer Melvin Vaniman making the first radio message from an aircraft in flight: “Roy, come and get this ---damn cat.”
33. Alexander Grothendieck, the greatest mathematician of the 20th century, became obsessed with the devil who he thought orchestrated any turmoil in the world. One such conviction was that Devil corrupted the numerically beautiful speed of light, from 300,000 km/sec to the irrational 298,779 km/sec.
34. Old books smell like vanilla due to the decomposition of a class of organic polymers called lignin into vanillin.
35. In 1930, the Indiana Bell telephone company shifted its eight-story Headquarters in downtown Indianapolis 152 feet and rotated it 90º over 34 days without interrupting any services in the building.
36Feculent Vomiting
Vomiting up fecal contents is known as feculent vomiting. It is can occur when the bowel is obstructed and as the intestines try to contract, it pushes the feces back up the esophageal tract.
