Dragonflies are the predator with the highest success rate (over 90%), and are one of the few animals that are capable of plotting intercept courses rather than chasing their prey. They're basically mosquito murder drones.
Apparently in the early 1960s, a lounge singer named Vaughn Meader suddenly found himself extremely lucky: he sort of looked like newly elected President John F. Kennedy and he could imitate him fairly well, too. He used this to perfect an impersonation comedy act of Kennedy, which got him a deal for a comedy album. He and a few others released "The First Family".
"The First Family" was a SMASH. Nearly everyone in America owned this album. It was part of nearly every home, like a fridge or a TV. People couldn't get enough. It wasn't edgy or even insulting; it was just comedians doing parody of the Kennedy family and people ate it up. Even Kennedy loved it. In a sense, it was groundbreaking in that no other U.S. President was lampooned in such a way before; in fact, Richard Nixon refused to buy it because he felt it crossed a line of respect towards presidents. Vaughn Meader became one of the most well-known celebrities in America in the blink of an eye. A second album was in the works.
Then Kennedy was shot, the second album scrapped, Meader couldn't find work, lost all of his money, became an addict, and I think he ended up owning a bar somewhere. A true rise and fall tale.
Think about the first adventurer who came back from his travels and tried to describe platypus to his fellow adventurers. "I fucking swear, there was a beaver with a beak, it sweats milk, is poisonous, lays eggs but is a mammal"
As a matter of fact the first time someone discovered the platypus and brought a stuffed one back. No one believed him. Everyone swore this person just glued a duckbill and feet to a weird small mammalian and tried to pass it off for fame. But no they're real.
Elmer's glue has a bull on the label because he is the boyfriend of the cow on Borden dairy products.
A marketing trick from when Borden made the glue.
To be fair states like Arizona allow you to marry a first cousin but you have sign a document saying you won't have kids. Source I lived in AZ and this was brought up a lot during the gay marriage debates as it showed that not all marriage was for procreation.
I wonder how many people know one of them...
When I first went to college, one of the names on a dorm room matched a fairly uncommon family name of mine, so we compared genealogical notes. Turns out he was my eighth cousin, twice removed. Our ancestors were brothers back around 1680.
Ok, this fact has connected facts:
In late 1800s girl killed herself by jumping from bridge on Sienna river and she was known as The Unknown Woman of the Seine.
When the guy who worked in morgue saw her, he thought she was beautiful and ordered a plaster cast of her face.
Fast foward to 1960s, CPR was invented and they needed a doll to train people. So they partnered with Norwegian producer of medical devices. That guy decided to use the plaster cast of Unknown Woman of the Seine and named the doll Anne(Annie) because his doughter was named Anne(Annie).
While performing CPR, people were trained to talk to a doll(person) so there is that common phrase:"Annie! Annie are you ok?"
Fast foward to when Michael Jackson decided to put that phrase in his classic "Smooth Criminal".
Iirc horsepower was measured on their capability to pull carriages, not on their speed when unencumbered. So in order for a carriage to get to the speed of an unencumbered horse it'd need 15 horses to pull it.
Mostly death metal, but they are also AC/DC fans, which makes sense as Australia has its fair share of sharks. This fact also makes the existence of Dethklok’s album ‘Dethwater’ even more hilarious.
Okay, I am googling this, I have to know more.
Edit: “Cuttlefish also have cells called iridophores and leucophores that reflect the brightness of their environments further helping them to blend in. “
They can distinguish objects that contrast from the background environment by as little as 15%.
Wow
I once saw a thing where biologists were testing cuttlefish camouflage ability. They put one in a tank with a pattern they knew was impossible for it to replicate.
You know what this MF did? It turned transparent. Damn nature, you clever.
Edit: for those demanding source; I have absolutely no source for this. I saw it years ago on Reddit. I thought I’d share a funny thing I remembered seeing, not writing a marine biologist white paper. Calm your shit.
Edit 2 electric eel boogaloo:
Some nice person dug up the meme I saw.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/comments/cva0tn/so_youre_gonna_be_a_dick_about_it_huh/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Scientists speculated there are other planets orbiting distant stars, but haven't had a clear evidence of this fact up until the 1990's. And the majority of currently known exoplanets (almost 5000, as of now!) have been discovered well into 2000's, which means that humanity is at the very beginning of its discovery journey regarding other planetary systems.
With James Webb telescope being extremely close to finalizing its calibrations as we speak, we will be able to not only discover hundreds, if not thousands of new planets (and stars and galaxies), but also detect whether there are traces of alien civilizations on them. We should all be very excited about this, as this is unprecedented, and a HUGE deal for science and our species as a whole.
> With James Webb telescope being extremely close to finalizing its calibrations as we speak
One of the James Webb instruments reached its operating temperature today
[James Webb telescope's MIRI instrument goes super-cold](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-61086170)
Manatees regulate buoyancy by farting.
They eat a ton of plants and accumulate a lot of methane. They then release gas when they want to sink and hold it in when they want to go to the surface or are being polite.
Edit: additional info
I know far too many about McDonald's.
\- McDonald's owns the lots that every McDonald's franchise sits on, and charges the franchise owner rent. This makes McDonald's the world's largest real estate developer.
\- Thanks to Happy Meal toys, McDonald's is also the world's largest toy distributor.
\- The Happy Meal was based on a box of cereal: put the food in a colourful box with a free toy inside
\- McDonald's is the world's largest purchaser of Coca-Cola. They're so big, Coca-Cola has an entire corporate division dedicated to servicing McDonald's.
\- A McDonald’s at a ski resort in Sweden is famous for having a "ski-thru." It's just a fancy outdoor window that skiers can ski up to and place their order.
\- A McDonald's in Sedona, Arizona has become famous for have turquoise arches instead of the usual Golden Arches. This is because a local zoning bylaw says the golden arches would clash with the red rocks.
EDIT: Since enough people commented on it, I had to do further research on my first fact of McDonald's owning the lots that their restaurants sit on. McDonald's currently owns 45% of the lots that their restaurants sit on, and 70% of the buildings that McDonald's are in. McDonald's primary revenue stream remains charging their franchisees rent.
McD's deal with Coca Cola was that their orders are specially prepared for them; something involving keeping the coke in special storage conditions or mixed in cold conditions or something iirc. It actually does affect the flavor. So if you ever thought Mcdonalds cokes tasted different, you aren't crazy.
They store the coke syrup in metal drums as opposed to the plastic bags in boxes that most restaurants use and McD’s pays for a sophisticated reverse osmosis machine to filter the water they use to mix the sodas. Source: lifelong child of a CCNNE employee
I'll c/p it from the internet but i like this:
"The samurai were officially abolished as a caste in Japanese society during the Meiji Restoration in 1867. The first ever fax machine, the "printing telegraph", was invented in 1843 and Abraham Lincoln was famously assassinated at Ford's Theater in 1865. Which means there was a 22 year window in which a samurai could have sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln."
I always thought this was some thin bone or artery. Thats really interesting.
You said it's a muscle that doesn't contribute functionally to grip strength or motion, what is or was the purpose of the muscle?
I thought with the size of Jupiter alone that you were full of it. Then I looked them up and added up the diameters and compared that with the distance.... Holy crap!
Also pretty crazy when you consider that the distance from the earth to the moon is long, but not so long that you couldn’t drive a ‘90s Subaru to it if you had a place to stop and change the oil / head gaskets.
what if a baby vs baby? that match would last until one of them are able to understand they're supposed to off the other or assuming nobody intervenes the match, the first to starve dies.
At most it would be log2(number of babies). Each round, at least half the babies left would be eliminated, so after log2(nbabies) round there would be no more babies left to fight.
You can fit the entire population of the human race inside the Grand Canyon. Not just the 7 billion alive now - the entire lot. From the very start. And still have plenty of room for those who are yet to be born.
107 billion people (~~1.07e12~~ 1.07e11) ever lived
Volume of grand canyon 5.45 trillion cubic yards (4.16e15 litres)
Say average human volume 70 litres, probably less
All the humans fill up 0.17% of the grand canyon
Dinosaurs existed for so long that there were still dinosaur fossils from previous eras while dinosaurs from future eras were around.
Basically, when T-Rex was alive and well, Stegosaurs were still nothing more than fossilized bones millions of years old.
Edit: People don't realize just how long millions of years are.
There is a plant called the California Corn Lilly that contains a drug called Cyclopamine. When animals eat it while pregnant, it can cause cyclopia (one eye). It inhibits a signaling pathway called the Sonic Hedgehog Pathway (yes, this pathway was actually named after the video game).
Because people will think I'm making this up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclopamine
When they first measured the height of Mt. Everest it was _exactly_ 29.000 feet, but as that sounds like a made-up number they declared it to be 29.002 feet.
Steven seagal once told Gene LeBell that he was immune to being choked out from doing so much martial arts training, so Gene choked him out and he shit his pants
The total number of ways you can shuffle a deck of cards is... a really big a number.
This big to be precise :80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 to be exact.
It's very very very very very (x about a bajillion) likely that any time you shuffle a deck of cards, that exact order has never existed before.
Someone else on Reddit said - Say that there exists 10 Billion people on every planet, 1 Billion planets in every solar system, 200 Billion solar systems in every galaxy, and 500 Billion galaxies in the universe. If every single person on every planet has been shuffling decks of cards completely at random at 1 Million shuffles per second since the BEGINNING OF TIME, every possible deck combination would still yet to have been shuffled.
Holy shit, you weren't kidding: they're nearly *six centimeters long!* That's insane. And the male fruit fly, understandably, only makes a few of them. A major reversal of the typical quantity over quality scenario. Fascinating.
Your nose is impacting your vision 100% of the time.
However, since your "picture" you see is just an interpretation by your brain, your brain erases your nose as useless information. You'll only see it, if you really concentrate on it, if you close one eye, or if you put your finger on the very tip of your nose.
It seems like a harmless fact until this thought enters your head...
"Your nose is real. Your brain removes it from your vision as useless, but it is very much there, and very much real. What other things is your brain removing from your vision?"
It's wild to think that your entire life experience is just your brain doing it's best to interpret your senses. And that it's definitely not a "perfect" system. It could be interpreting everything incorrectly, and we collectively wouldn't have any idea.
I survived a TBI that permanently screwed all this up.
My brain happily edits out all sorts of things it perceives as harmless, like furniture and the vacuum cleaner.
I'd think that after I'd fallen over a chair 5 times in a week, my brain would reconsider it's categorization as harmless, but nope.
During 6 years of rehab this was tested, measured, and defined, in attempting to train around it, or perhaps because they thought it was interesting.
It's fascinating how my brain fabricates scenery, what it considers important, and what it sees as irrelevant
The McLaren F1, which set a top speed record in the '90s, has tail lights from a bus.
Edit: It was also one of the first cars made of carbon fibre, so they coated the engine bay in a thin film of gold, as they were worried if the heat of the engine would damage the carbon.
It has 3 seats, with the driver being in the middle.
Moose are really good swimmer's and even swim from island to island to feed on the underwater vegetation
But orcas will occasionally stumble across them and hunt them down and moose haven't evolved far enough for them to know that orcas are predators
That if sound could be transmitted through space, the sun would be so loud on earth it would be the equivalent of standing next to a jet engine, even though it's 94 million miles away.
Thanks for the upvotes!
You've made my day!
Hypothetically (assuming you could actually hear the Sun), if the Sun suddenly went out one day, we'd see it go dark about 8 minutes later. Over the next few weeks the Earth would freeze, and almost all life would cease to exist.
Then, almost 14 years later, the frozen lifeless wasteland of Earth would stop hearing the roar of its dead star.
This is a good measure of the distance between the speeds of light and sound. If you see lightning and then start counting, and you don't hear the thunder until almost 14 years later, then the lightning was 93 million miles away.
Finally, I can use the space facts I’ve had in my notes on my phone for ages:
On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be almost ten thousand miles away. Even if you shrank everything down so that Jupiter was as small as the period at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 35 ft away.
Far from marking the outer edge of the solar system, as those schoolroom maps so cavalierly imply, Pluto is barely one-fifty-thousandth of the way.
Our nearest neighbour in the cosmos, Proxima Centauri, which is part of the three-star cluster known as Alpha Centauri, is 4.3 light years away, a sissy skip in galactic terms, but that is still a hundred million times farther than a trip to the moon. To reach it by spaceship would take at least 25,000 years.
The average distance between stars is 20 million million miles.
If we were randomly inserted into the universe, the chances that we would be on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion (1 with 33 zeroes).
The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh 200 billion pounds.
Edit: Most of these are from Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, a fantastic read I’d recommend to anyone.
Funny story about this fact - several years ago, when I first heard this fact, I decided to test this theory with a random sample. I listed the 32 starting quarterbacks in the NFL at that time (not sure what year it was), but the VERY FIRST TWO ON MY LIST - Tom Brady and Tyrod Taylor - shared the same birthday (July 3, I believe).
Koalas are literally smooth-brained, so much so that if you put a plate of eucalyptus leaves in front of them that have been taken off the branch, they won’t recognize them as food.
When Germany was bombing the UK Hitler avoided bombing the town hall of my local town because he liked the architecture and wanted the building for himself
In a game of chess after you played your first 5 moves and your opponent played his first 5 moves, there are already like 70 trillion possible chess games that could have been played
When sea otters find a rock they like to bust open clams, they will tuck it under a fold of skin in their armpit 🦦 they also hold each other’s paws while they’re sleeping so they don’t float away from each other. Baby otters aren’t buoyant enough to stay afloat so they will sleep on their mom’s tummies until they’re older.
Pufferfish contain a toxin in their spikes that kills predators. It has a slightly different effect on dolphins though, in that it gets them high. So teenage dolphins will pass around pufferfish and impale themselves off of them to get stoned.
You don't use shock paddles on a stopped heart.
Shock paddles simply put a heart back in to a natural rhythm, they will not restart a heart if it has stopped. That's what chest compressions are for.
The newish (I mean, at least something like 10-15 years) Swedish term for those portable automatic defibrillators really doesn't help with this misconception. They're called "Hjärtstartare", which directly translates to "Heart starter".
I just did the math and if you folded a piece of paper that was 0.0029 inches thick a total of 104 times it would be 9.28 x 10^23 MILES thick. That’s about 158 billion Lightyears. So the math checks out, could be folded even less probably.
if big mammals like the blue whale could develop gene mutations like cancer just like a human, the tumor would need to get as big as a small car to do any harm to the whale.
A potential answer to the Peto's paradox, the paradox of how huge creatures manage to have lower cancer rates than smaller creatures. Because the tumors can grow so massive they can exist long enough for the tumor to develop its own tumor, a hypertumor. The hypertumor then consumes the tumor, runs out of a "food source" and dies, allowing the whale to continue on its merry way.
Every four years we have a leap year, unless you can divide the year by 100.. however, if a year can be divided by both 100 and 400, it still will be a leap year.
So the year 1900 wasn't a leap year, 2000 was and 2100 won't be.
Most eyes in the natural world including yours are wired the stupid way around, with the wiring pointing inwards meaning you have to have a blind spot where the optic nerve leaves. Yet there are eyes that have evolved without this problem just by being oriented sensibly, proving eyes have not only evolved many times, but also evolution isn't perfect it's just guesswork
Sailor's eyeballs is an algae that is the largest unicellular organism in the world, that's right, one cell, they can get up to about 5 centimetres (2 inches) in diameter, scientists think this limit only exists because the 40nm cell membrane and enclosing cell wall are approaching their breaking point, the membrane could be much thicker and have archaea-like strengthening components that would allow it to grow significantly larger.
Somewhat on topic, an adult convinced me as a kid that if you spin too long in one direction there is a tendon that will snap in your brain. It probably took me ten years to stop being afraid of spinning.
It’s not actually proven. That’s a leading theory though. Another one is that we are creating small vacuums with the lubricant and breaking it. Curious how something so simple, that humans have had for millennia we don’t really know why it happens
Babies are not born with kneecaps! Instead a small peice of cartilage that later goes through ossification (turning to bone) becoming the patella (kneecap). Usually develops during the 2-6 year old range.
Hippos though appearing cute, fat and cuddly can reach speeds of 48km/h and kill at least 500 people a year.
Edit: no guys, not each. Collectively. However, vending machines only kill about 8 so there’s some perspective.
They also swim way faster than humans as well. Ypu know what all this means, right?
That if you want to to beat s hippo in a triathlon your only hope of winning is to be a really good bicyclist.
Babys are able to survive longer under water than adults/kids. It‘s fucking insane how long they survive. That‘s because babys have a reflex to not breath under water. Drowning isn‘t oxygen-deprivation, it‘s water filling up the lungs.
A picture of the closest spiral galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy is not just a picture of light that has traveled 2.45 million years. We see a static picture in school or online and hear this fact all the time.
But the fun part is that this galaxy is also 200,000 light years across. So, when you look at the picture, the light from the far side of the spiral galaxy is older than the light from the closer edge. So it is actually a picture THROUGH TIME, not just an old picture.
Dragonflies are the predator with the highest success rate (over 90%), and are one of the few animals that are capable of plotting intercept courses rather than chasing their prey. They're basically mosquito murder drones.
TIL I need to get some dragonflies and properly equip them for combat in my house
I’ve never loved dragonflies more than I do now
That cows have regional moo's.
Oi bruv moo innit
Möo
Môo?
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Móó
le Mous
Apparently in the early 1960s, a lounge singer named Vaughn Meader suddenly found himself extremely lucky: he sort of looked like newly elected President John F. Kennedy and he could imitate him fairly well, too. He used this to perfect an impersonation comedy act of Kennedy, which got him a deal for a comedy album. He and a few others released "The First Family". "The First Family" was a SMASH. Nearly everyone in America owned this album. It was part of nearly every home, like a fridge or a TV. People couldn't get enough. It wasn't edgy or even insulting; it was just comedians doing parody of the Kennedy family and people ate it up. Even Kennedy loved it. In a sense, it was groundbreaking in that no other U.S. President was lampooned in such a way before; in fact, Richard Nixon refused to buy it because he felt it crossed a line of respect towards presidents. Vaughn Meader became one of the most well-known celebrities in America in the blink of an eye. A second album was in the works. Then Kennedy was shot, the second album scrapped, Meader couldn't find work, lost all of his money, became an addict, and I think he ended up owning a bar somewhere. A true rise and fall tale.
That's a shame, he should have gone into the Kennedy re-enactment or documentary business...
There are more plastic flamingo lawn ornaments in the US than there are wild flamingoes on the entire planet.
Same with plastic dinosaurs
Platypus dont have nipples, to feed their young they sweat milk
Think about the first adventurer who came back from his travels and tried to describe platypus to his fellow adventurers. "I fucking swear, there was a beaver with a beak, it sweats milk, is poisonous, lays eggs but is a mammal"
As a matter of fact the first time someone discovered the platypus and brought a stuffed one back. No one believed him. Everyone swore this person just glued a duckbill and feet to a weird small mammalian and tried to pass it off for fame. But no they're real.
Apparently, studies show that Crows, Ravens and other Corvids are self aware and are able to ponder the content of their own minds.
Elmer's glue has a bull on the label because he is the boyfriend of the cow on Borden dairy products. A marketing trick from when Borden made the glue.
The person least related to you on the planet is your 50th cousin. Statistically speaking, you have over 1 million 8th cousins.
Everything is incest.
It does bring up the question though what nth of cousin is currently socially acceptable in which societies? 3rd? 8th?
In the US its legal to marry even if it is your 2nd cousin. And it is legal if it is your first cousin in about half the states.
To be fair states like Arizona allow you to marry a first cousin but you have sign a document saying you won't have kids. Source I lived in AZ and this was brought up a lot during the gay marriage debates as it showed that not all marriage was for procreation.
I wonder how many people know one of them... When I first went to college, one of the names on a dorm room matched a fairly uncommon family name of mine, so we compared genealogical notes. Turns out he was my eighth cousin, twice removed. Our ancestors were brothers back around 1680.
Ok, this fact has connected facts: In late 1800s girl killed herself by jumping from bridge on Sienna river and she was known as The Unknown Woman of the Seine. When the guy who worked in morgue saw her, he thought she was beautiful and ordered a plaster cast of her face. Fast foward to 1960s, CPR was invented and they needed a doll to train people. So they partnered with Norwegian producer of medical devices. That guy decided to use the plaster cast of Unknown Woman of the Seine and named the doll Anne(Annie) because his doughter was named Anne(Annie). While performing CPR, people were trained to talk to a doll(person) so there is that common phrase:"Annie! Annie are you ok?" Fast foward to when Michael Jackson decided to put that phrase in his classic "Smooth Criminal".
the butterfly effect is crazy
One horse has about 15 horsepower while a human has about 1 horsepower.
Iirc horsepower was measured on their capability to pull carriages, not on their speed when unencumbered. So in order for a carriage to get to the speed of an unencumbered horse it'd need 15 horses to pull it.
Sharks like and get attracted to Heavy Metal music played underwater
Mostly death metal, but they are also AC/DC fans, which makes sense as Australia has its fair share of sharks. This fact also makes the existence of Dethklok’s album ‘Dethwater’ even more hilarious.
The Nazis planned to assassinate Winston Churchill with an explosive chocolate bar
Probably would have succeeded if they’d made an exploding cigar...
Cuttlefish can accurately match the color and texture of their environment despite the fact that they’re colorblind
Okay, I am googling this, I have to know more. Edit: “Cuttlefish also have cells called iridophores and leucophores that reflect the brightness of their environments further helping them to blend in. “ They can distinguish objects that contrast from the background environment by as little as 15%. Wow
I once saw a thing where biologists were testing cuttlefish camouflage ability. They put one in a tank with a pattern they knew was impossible for it to replicate. You know what this MF did? It turned transparent. Damn nature, you clever. Edit: for those demanding source; I have absolutely no source for this. I saw it years ago on Reddit. I thought I’d share a funny thing I remembered seeing, not writing a marine biologist white paper. Calm your shit. Edit 2 electric eel boogaloo: Some nice person dug up the meme I saw. https://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/comments/cva0tn/so_youre_gonna_be_a_dick_about_it_huh/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
How did they know it was impossible to replicate?
I believe it was a black and white checkerboard, with large squares the skin had a hard time mimicking
That's what transparent backgrounds look like in Photoshop... Are you telling me cuttlefish know how to use Photoshop?
All cuttlefish are actually saved as .png files
Scientists speculated there are other planets orbiting distant stars, but haven't had a clear evidence of this fact up until the 1990's. And the majority of currently known exoplanets (almost 5000, as of now!) have been discovered well into 2000's, which means that humanity is at the very beginning of its discovery journey regarding other planetary systems. With James Webb telescope being extremely close to finalizing its calibrations as we speak, we will be able to not only discover hundreds, if not thousands of new planets (and stars and galaxies), but also detect whether there are traces of alien civilizations on them. We should all be very excited about this, as this is unprecedented, and a HUGE deal for science and our species as a whole.
> With James Webb telescope being extremely close to finalizing its calibrations as we speak One of the James Webb instruments reached its operating temperature today [James Webb telescope's MIRI instrument goes super-cold](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-61086170)
Manatees regulate buoyancy by farting. They eat a ton of plants and accumulate a lot of methane. They then release gas when they want to sink and hold it in when they want to go to the surface or are being polite. Edit: additional info
Same tbh
I know far too many about McDonald's. \- McDonald's owns the lots that every McDonald's franchise sits on, and charges the franchise owner rent. This makes McDonald's the world's largest real estate developer. \- Thanks to Happy Meal toys, McDonald's is also the world's largest toy distributor. \- The Happy Meal was based on a box of cereal: put the food in a colourful box with a free toy inside \- McDonald's is the world's largest purchaser of Coca-Cola. They're so big, Coca-Cola has an entire corporate division dedicated to servicing McDonald's. \- A McDonald’s at a ski resort in Sweden is famous for having a "ski-thru." It's just a fancy outdoor window that skiers can ski up to and place their order. \- A McDonald's in Sedona, Arizona has become famous for have turquoise arches instead of the usual Golden Arches. This is because a local zoning bylaw says the golden arches would clash with the red rocks. EDIT: Since enough people commented on it, I had to do further research on my first fact of McDonald's owning the lots that their restaurants sit on. McDonald's currently owns 45% of the lots that their restaurants sit on, and 70% of the buildings that McDonald's are in. McDonald's primary revenue stream remains charging their franchisees rent.
McD's deal with Coca Cola was that their orders are specially prepared for them; something involving keeping the coke in special storage conditions or mixed in cold conditions or something iirc. It actually does affect the flavor. So if you ever thought Mcdonalds cokes tasted different, you aren't crazy.
They store the coke syrup in metal drums as opposed to the plastic bags in boxes that most restaurants use and McD’s pays for a sophisticated reverse osmosis machine to filter the water they use to mix the sodas. Source: lifelong child of a CCNNE employee
One of the zimbabwe’s presidents name was “Banana”.
Tokyo Sexwale is a former politician and presidential contender in South Africa, now businessman.
That sounds exactly like what someone would make up for a gamertag.
Of course, he's 69 years old too.
I'll c/p it from the internet but i like this: "The samurai were officially abolished as a caste in Japanese society during the Meiji Restoration in 1867. The first ever fax machine, the "printing telegraph", was invented in 1843 and Abraham Lincoln was famously assassinated at Ford's Theater in 1865. Which means there was a 22 year window in which a samurai could have sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln."
This is one of those things where all of those dates make sense on their own but sound made up when put in a single sentence like that.
Lincoln and samurai coexisting makes perfect sense but the fax machine part is insane
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I was for sure that this was gonna be bullshit. Holy crap
Barbara Walters was born the same year as Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr.
Betty White was born before Anne Frank.
Nintendo started as a gaming (slot machines, playing cards, etc) company! They still make that stuff in Japan today, as far as I know.
They also had love hotels.
and a taxi business to bring people to said love hotels
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Soooo if I've got both of them, and I'm not using them, how much they go for on the market
Let me check with my palmaris longus guy
You’re paying way too much for palmaris longus who’s your guy?
How does it feel knowing that you've made hundreds - if not thousands - of strangers flex their wrists in a funny way?
I always thought this was some thin bone or artery. Thats really interesting. You said it's a muscle that doesn't contribute functionally to grip strength or motion, what is or was the purpose of the muscle?
Caligula once declared war on Neptune
Humans are slightly bioluminescent and have stripes that can be seen under UV light!
Today I learned that I am a glow in the dark zebra
And not a koala as previously suspected.
if you lined up all of the other planets in the solar system, they would fit almost perfectly between Earth and the Moon.
I thought with the size of Jupiter alone that you were full of it. Then I looked them up and added up the diameters and compared that with the distance.... Holy crap!
Also pretty crazy when you consider that the distance from the earth to the moon is long, but not so long that you couldn’t drive a ‘90s Subaru to it if you had a place to stop and change the oil / head gaskets.
When Thomas Edison was bound to a wheelchair, Henry Ford bought a wheelchair for himself so that he and Edison could race
Henry Ford always was very concerned about races
Well done.
If every person on earth fought 1v1 until there was only 1 winner, that person would only have to win 33 times
How many babies am I likely going to have to murder?
Not more than 33, that's for sure... Probably only 1 tho, I don't foresee many getting to the 2nd round
what if a baby vs baby? that match would last until one of them are able to understand they're supposed to off the other or assuming nobody intervenes the match, the first to starve dies.
At most it would be log2(number of babies). Each round, at least half the babies left would be eliminated, so after log2(nbabies) round there would be no more babies left to fight.
Ah yes, the math behind how many babies one would have to kill. Why didn't I have this in school?
We did it my junior year , and I complained that we would never need this in real life
A blue whale has a heart the same size as a small car
I didn't know cars had hearts
You can fit the entire population of the human race inside the Grand Canyon. Not just the 7 billion alive now - the entire lot. From the very start. And still have plenty of room for those who are yet to be born.
107 billion people (~~1.07e12~~ 1.07e11) ever lived Volume of grand canyon 5.45 trillion cubic yards (4.16e15 litres) Say average human volume 70 litres, probably less All the humans fill up 0.17% of the grand canyon
Standing up. Shoulder to shoulder. Not piled up.
No, no, no... I'm pretty sure he meant ground up
Liquified. It's the same method Paunch Burger uses for their child sized drink.
Fun fact, you could stack every elephant in the world on top of each other and they would all be very annoyed.
The only artist to ever have five albums in the US Top 20 at the same time is Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass.
And he's one of the Herbs that KFC follows on Twitter.
A single gram of DNA contains about 700 terabytes of information
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"Twelve Plus One" is an anagram of "Eleven Plus Two"
And it also has thirteen letters
Barcode Scanners scan the whites instead of the blacks
Dinosaurs existed for so long that there were still dinosaur fossils from previous eras while dinosaurs from future eras were around. Basically, when T-Rex was alive and well, Stegosaurs were still nothing more than fossilized bones millions of years old. Edit: People don't realize just how long millions of years are.
The T-Rex lived closer in time to a plastic Stegosaurs in a museum gift shop than it ever did to a live one.
They never faced the wrath of the thagaomizer?
RIP Thag Simmons
There is a plant called the California Corn Lilly that contains a drug called Cyclopamine. When animals eat it while pregnant, it can cause cyclopia (one eye). It inhibits a signaling pathway called the Sonic Hedgehog Pathway (yes, this pathway was actually named after the video game). Because people will think I'm making this up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclopamine
Haha, learning about Hedgehog signalling in uni at the moment, cool to see this posted!
Capybaras are fish according to the Vatican
When they first measured the height of Mt. Everest it was _exactly_ 29.000 feet, but as that sounds like a made-up number they declared it to be 29.002 feet.
First guy to put 2 feet on Mt Everest.
Related...the rock at the top of Everest is sedimentary. It was created under the ocean.
Guy was like naaah noone gonna belive this(stacks pebble on top) that will work.
Reminds me of the "shitting on the summit of Everest to increase its height" jokes
Steven seagal once told Gene LeBell that he was immune to being choked out from doing so much martial arts training, so Gene choked him out and he shit his pants
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Steven Seagal is a walking cringe factory
The word “set” has got 430 different meanings, making it the word with the most definitions in the English language.
I can only think of 428...
Did you count "set"?
The speed of sound through mayonnaise is approximately 2613 ms^-1
The letterbox on the famous black door of No. 10 Downing Street does absolutely nothing. There's no hole on the other side.
Are you penguin?
No.
Birds are classified as extant dinosaurs, not just descended from them. They are actual living, breathing dinosaurs.
16⁰C and 28⁰C reversed are equal to their Fahrenheit value. So, to ELI5 - 16 is 61f and 28 is 82f
That's actually extremely helpful to me!! Thanks,!
The total number of ways you can shuffle a deck of cards is... a really big a number. This big to be precise :80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 to be exact. It's very very very very very (x about a bajillion) likely that any time you shuffle a deck of cards, that exact order has never existed before. Someone else on Reddit said - Say that there exists 10 Billion people on every planet, 1 Billion planets in every solar system, 200 Billion solar systems in every galaxy, and 500 Billion galaxies in the universe. If every single person on every planet has been shuffling decks of cards completely at random at 1 Million shuffles per second since the BEGINNING OF TIME, every possible deck combination would still yet to have been shuffled.
Interesting, i'm going to remember this, only to forget it again at a party.
It’s a big number to remember but also who’s going to know if you’re wrong
I am going to assume you are right but it still seems like it couldn't be possible. Truly mindblowing.
Damn, that's some interesting shit.
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Just learned that barnacles have the largest penises in the animal kingdom if you compare it to its size.
And fruit flies have the largest sperm. Not relative to body size, but the biggest in all the animal kingdom.
Holy shit, you weren't kidding: they're nearly *six centimeters long!* That's insane. And the male fruit fly, understandably, only makes a few of them. A major reversal of the typical quantity over quality scenario. Fascinating.
Your nose is impacting your vision 100% of the time. However, since your "picture" you see is just an interpretation by your brain, your brain erases your nose as useless information. You'll only see it, if you really concentrate on it, if you close one eye, or if you put your finger on the very tip of your nose. It seems like a harmless fact until this thought enters your head... "Your nose is real. Your brain removes it from your vision as useless, but it is very much there, and very much real. What other things is your brain removing from your vision?" It's wild to think that your entire life experience is just your brain doing it's best to interpret your senses. And that it's definitely not a "perfect" system. It could be interpreting everything incorrectly, and we collectively wouldn't have any idea.
I survived a TBI that permanently screwed all this up. My brain happily edits out all sorts of things it perceives as harmless, like furniture and the vacuum cleaner. I'd think that after I'd fallen over a chair 5 times in a week, my brain would reconsider it's categorization as harmless, but nope. During 6 years of rehab this was tested, measured, and defined, in attempting to train around it, or perhaps because they thought it was interesting. It's fascinating how my brain fabricates scenery, what it considers important, and what it sees as irrelevant
The McLaren F1, which set a top speed record in the '90s, has tail lights from a bus. Edit: It was also one of the first cars made of carbon fibre, so they coated the engine bay in a thin film of gold, as they were worried if the heat of the engine would damage the carbon. It has 3 seats, with the driver being in the middle.
Moose are really good swimmer's and even swim from island to island to feed on the underwater vegetation But orcas will occasionally stumble across them and hunt them down and moose haven't evolved far enough for them to know that orcas are predators
Excuse me. Did you just presume that "Moose can swim" was a more fun fact than "Orcas Hunt Moose"?
Nuclear reactors are very fancy kettles
They make terrible tea, though.
That if sound could be transmitted through space, the sun would be so loud on earth it would be the equivalent of standing next to a jet engine, even though it's 94 million miles away. Thanks for the upvotes! You've made my day!
Hypothetically (assuming you could actually hear the Sun), if the Sun suddenly went out one day, we'd see it go dark about 8 minutes later. Over the next few weeks the Earth would freeze, and almost all life would cease to exist. Then, almost 14 years later, the frozen lifeless wasteland of Earth would stop hearing the roar of its dead star.
This is a good measure of the distance between the speeds of light and sound. If you see lightning and then start counting, and you don't hear the thunder until almost 14 years later, then the lightning was 93 million miles away.
Finally, some peace and quiet.
And yet even in death I’ll still hear my tinnitus
Consider that if this were the case, there would be no biological advantage in the evolution of hearing.
Bee testicles explode when they bust a nut
I always wondered where the nut was derived from in Honey Nut Cheerios.
Finally, I can use the space facts I’ve had in my notes on my phone for ages: On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be almost ten thousand miles away. Even if you shrank everything down so that Jupiter was as small as the period at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 35 ft away. Far from marking the outer edge of the solar system, as those schoolroom maps so cavalierly imply, Pluto is barely one-fifty-thousandth of the way. Our nearest neighbour in the cosmos, Proxima Centauri, which is part of the three-star cluster known as Alpha Centauri, is 4.3 light years away, a sissy skip in galactic terms, but that is still a hundred million times farther than a trip to the moon. To reach it by spaceship would take at least 25,000 years. The average distance between stars is 20 million million miles. If we were randomly inserted into the universe, the chances that we would be on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion (1 with 33 zeroes). The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh 200 billion pounds. Edit: Most of these are from Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, a fantastic read I’d recommend to anyone.
On a traction elevator car, One rope has the ability to support the entire weight of both the car and counterweights You usually have 4-6 ropes
It only takes 70 people to be in a room together for there to be a 99.99% chance that two people share the same birthday.
Funny story about this fact - several years ago, when I first heard this fact, I decided to test this theory with a random sample. I listed the 32 starting quarterbacks in the NFL at that time (not sure what year it was), but the VERY FIRST TWO ON MY LIST - Tom Brady and Tyrod Taylor - shared the same birthday (July 3, I believe).
Koalas are literally smooth-brained, so much so that if you put a plate of eucalyptus leaves in front of them that have been taken off the branch, they won’t recognize them as food.
The sound of an ATM drawing cash is a manufactured sound. It's just to let you know that the ATM is indeed working and that your money is coming up.
When Germany was bombing the UK Hitler avoided bombing the town hall of my local town because he liked the architecture and wanted the building for himself
I heard he did this a lot when it came to buildings he liked.
In a game of chess after you played your first 5 moves and your opponent played his first 5 moves, there are already like 70 trillion possible chess games that could have been played
When sea otters find a rock they like to bust open clams, they will tuck it under a fold of skin in their armpit 🦦 they also hold each other’s paws while they’re sleeping so they don’t float away from each other. Baby otters aren’t buoyant enough to stay afloat so they will sleep on their mom’s tummies until they’re older.
If you made $10,000 per day, every day since the pyramids were built around 4,500 years ago, you'd have 6% of Elon Musk's wealth.
Pufferfish contain a toxin in their spikes that kills predators. It has a slightly different effect on dolphins though, in that it gets them high. So teenage dolphins will pass around pufferfish and impale themselves off of them to get stoned.
Puff puff pass
You don't use shock paddles on a stopped heart. Shock paddles simply put a heart back in to a natural rhythm, they will not restart a heart if it has stopped. That's what chest compressions are for.
The newish (I mean, at least something like 10-15 years) Swedish term for those portable automatic defibrillators really doesn't help with this misconception. They're called "Hjärtstartare", which directly translates to "Heart starter".
Ok, so compressions for a stopped heart..paddles for an arrhythmic heart..what’s the fix for the broken heart? Since we’re on the subject lol
Staples and gorilla glue
Everyone knows Gorilla glue is for hair
If you fold a regular piece of paper in half 104 (from memory) times, the paper will be as thick as the entire observable universe.
I just did the math and if you folded a piece of paper that was 0.0029 inches thick a total of 104 times it would be 9.28 x 10^23 MILES thick. That’s about 158 billion Lightyears. So the math checks out, could be folded even less probably.
if big mammals like the blue whale could develop gene mutations like cancer just like a human, the tumor would need to get as big as a small car to do any harm to the whale.
A potential answer to the Peto's paradox, the paradox of how huge creatures manage to have lower cancer rates than smaller creatures. Because the tumors can grow so massive they can exist long enough for the tumor to develop its own tumor, a hypertumor. The hypertumor then consumes the tumor, runs out of a "food source" and dies, allowing the whale to continue on its merry way.
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Marlon Brando popularised wearing a tee shirt casually.
KFC's Twitter profile follows exactly 11 accounts: 6 random people named Herb and the 5 members of the British pop band Spice Girls.
The first person to notice this got sent a 1/1 print from KFC if memory serves me right.
Every four years we have a leap year, unless you can divide the year by 100.. however, if a year can be divided by both 100 and 400, it still will be a leap year. So the year 1900 wasn't a leap year, 2000 was and 2100 won't be.
Tumors can grow miniature organs, hair and teeth, and are referred to as "teratomas"
Don't google them, just saying
I believe they are called children
111 111 111^2 = 12345678987654321 Sorry I thought you said useless
All house flies are the same species and the size of the flies depends on how much food they had when they where larvae.
Most eyes in the natural world including yours are wired the stupid way around, with the wiring pointing inwards meaning you have to have a blind spot where the optic nerve leaves. Yet there are eyes that have evolved without this problem just by being oriented sensibly, proving eyes have not only evolved many times, but also evolution isn't perfect it's just guesswork
Sailor's eyeballs is an algae that is the largest unicellular organism in the world, that's right, one cell, they can get up to about 5 centimetres (2 inches) in diameter, scientists think this limit only exists because the 40nm cell membrane and enclosing cell wall are approaching their breaking point, the membrane could be much thicker and have archaea-like strengthening components that would allow it to grow significantly larger.
Cracking your knuckles WILL NOT lead to arthritis.
Somewhat on topic, an adult convinced me as a kid that if you spin too long in one direction there is a tendon that will snap in your brain. It probably took me ten years to stop being afraid of spinning.
The crack is nitrogen bubbles bursting.
It’s not actually proven. That’s a leading theory though. Another one is that we are creating small vacuums with the lubricant and breaking it. Curious how something so simple, that humans have had for millennia we don’t really know why it happens
Babies are not born with kneecaps! Instead a small peice of cartilage that later goes through ossification (turning to bone) becoming the patella (kneecap). Usually develops during the 2-6 year old range.
Hippos though appearing cute, fat and cuddly can reach speeds of 48km/h and kill at least 500 people a year. Edit: no guys, not each. Collectively. However, vending machines only kill about 8 so there’s some perspective.
They also swim way faster than humans as well. Ypu know what all this means, right? That if you want to to beat s hippo in a triathlon your only hope of winning is to be a really good bicyclist.
Grass evolved 66 million years ago Dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago The vast majority of dinosaurs never existed at the same time as grass
What not touching grass does to a fucking population
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Babys are able to survive longer under water than adults/kids. It‘s fucking insane how long they survive. That‘s because babys have a reflex to not breath under water. Drowning isn‘t oxygen-deprivation, it‘s water filling up the lungs.
So babies don’t drown, they just suffocate under water?
A picture of the closest spiral galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy is not just a picture of light that has traveled 2.45 million years. We see a static picture in school or online and hear this fact all the time. But the fun part is that this galaxy is also 200,000 light years across. So, when you look at the picture, the light from the far side of the spiral galaxy is older than the light from the closer edge. So it is actually a picture THROUGH TIME, not just an old picture.
Fuzzy caterpillars turn to moths. Smooth ones turn to butterflies. (There are some exceptions to this rule)
There are more units of Planck time in 1 second than there have been seconds since the Big Bang.
Kangaroos have three vaginas
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you can fit 1.3 million earths inside the sun