|
No.
|
Interesting Fact
|
|
253
|
A handful of people have fallen out of a plane without a parachute and survived.
|
|
358
|
Flying is extremely safe. In the entire world, just 44 people died from commercial aviation accidents in the year 2017.
The fatality rate per passenger is more than 99% lower than it was in the 1970s.
|
|
262
|
The Patagonian toothfish was rebranded as "Chilean sea bass" to make it more appealing in the American
seafood market. This is probably the worst thing that has ever happened to the Patagonian toothfish.
|
|
127
|
Queen Elizabeth I was known as the Virgin Queen. It is likely that the U.S. state of Virginia was named in her honor.
|
|
252
|
Iron is the heaviest element that any star can make via fusion. So how did elements like gold come to be?
It is thought that they are created in supernovas or in the collision of neutron stars.
|
|
194
|
Spaghetti is plural. A single strand of spaghetti is a spaghetto.
|
|
363
|
Seventeen U.S. Presidents didn't have a Vice President at some point in their term. Four Presidents never had
a Vice President at all. Why? Prior to the passage of the 25th Amendment in 1973, there was no
established procedure for filling a vacancy in the office of the Vice President.
|
|
34
|
Elephant birds from Madagascar weighed up to 1,000 pounds, with eggs weighing as much as 22 pounds.
They were driven to extinction by humans before 1700 AD.
|
|
342
|
Antonio López de Santa Anna served twelve non-consecutive terms as
President of Mexico. Grover Cleveland eat your heart out.
|
|
344
|
The facial hair style known as “sideburns" is named after U.S. Civil War general Ambrose Burnside.
|
|
302
|
Since tracking began in 2005, only three Major League home runs have been measured at over 500 feet in distance.
But that distance was easily exceeded by Babe Ruth many times in his career. Why was Babe Ruth able
to hit so much harder than current players? Perhaps it was a difference in equipment.
Or maybe Babe Ruth was simply stronger than current players.
|
|
333
|
Peter the Great of Russia was extremely tall. At 6'8'' (203 cm) in height, he would
have been more than a foot taller than the average man of the time.
|
|
236
|
The Venus flytrap is not a tropical plant. It is native to coastal regions of North and South Carolina.
|
|
294
|
Don't trust low numbers in poll data. A certain percent of people will give a nonsensical response to polls just for fun.
This phenomenon has been called "Lizardman's Constant", so called because one poll suggested that
4% of Americans believe that the U.S. government is secretly run by lizard people.
|
|
308
|
The California condor ceased to exist in the wild in 1987 when all 27 remaining condors were captured for
the purpose of saving the species. The intervention worked. After a few years of captive breeding, condors were
re-released into the wild. Today the total population is over 500 and growing quickly.
|
|
351
|
People used to be bad at running the marathon. The gold medalist at the 1948 Olympics won with a time of
2:34:51, a time regularly bested by modern high school athletes.
|
|
323
|
Four elements are named after the tiny village of Ytterby, Sweden. They are yttrium, ytterbium, erbium, and terbium.
|
|
48
|
Ceres is the largest asteroid in the solar system. For fifty years, it was considered to be the eighth planet.
Today, it is one of the five known dwarf planets in the Solar System, along with Pluto, Eris, Makemake, and Haumea.
|
|
89
|
Lie detector tests are not very reliable. According to the National Academy of Sciences, the polygraph
"may have some utility" but there is "little basis for the expectation
that a polygraph test could have extremely high accuracy".
|
|
104
|
People with Williams Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder, tend to be extremely outgoing - even with strangers.
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