1. The longest time between two twins being born
is 87 days .
2. The world's deepest postbox is in Susami Bay in
Japan. It's 10 metres underwater.
3. In 2007, an American man named Corey Taylor
tried to fake his own death in order to get out of his
cell phone contract without paying a fee. It didn't
work.
4. The oldest condoms ever found date back to the
1640s (they were found in a cesspit at Dudley
Castle), and were made from animal and fish
intestines.
5. In 1923, jockey Frank Hayes won a race at
Belmont Park in New York despite being dead — he
suffered a heart attack mid-race, but his body
stayed in the saddle until his horse crossed the
line for a 20–1 outsider victory.
6. Everyone has a unique tongue print , just like
fingerprints.
7. Most Muppets are left-handed. (Because most
Muppeteers are right-handed , so they operate the
head with their favoured hand.)
8. Female kangaroos have three vaginas.
9. It costs the U.S. Mint almost twice as much to
mint each penny and nickel as the coins are
actually worth. Taxpayers lost over $100 million in
2013 just through the coins being made.
10. Light doesn't necessarily travel at the speed of
light. The slowest we've ever recorded light
moving at is 38 mph.
11. Casu marzu is a Sardinian cheese that
contains live maggots. The maggots can jump up
to five inches out of cheese while you're eating it,
so it's a good idea to shield it with your hand to
stop them jumping into your eyes.
12. The loneliest creature on Earth is a whale who
has been calling out for a mate for over two
decades — but whose high-pitched voice is so
different to other whales that they never respond.
13. The spikes on the end of a stegosaurus' tail are
known among paleontologists as the "thagomizer"
— a term coined by cartoonist Gary Larson in a
1982 Far Side drawing.
14. During World War II, the crew of the British
submarine HMS Trident kept a fully grown reindeer
called Pollyanna aboard their vessel for six weeks
(it was a gift from the Russians).
15. The northern leopard frog swallows its prey
using its eyes — it uses them to help push food
down its throat by retracting them into its head.
16. The first man to urinate on the moon was Buzz
Aldrin, shortly after stepping onto the lunar surface.
17. Some fruit flies are genetically resistant to
getting drunk — but only if they have an inactive
version of a gene scientists have named
"happyhour" .
18. Experiments show that male rhesus macaque
monkeys will pay to look at pictures of female
rhesus macaques' bottoms.
19. In 1567, the man said to have the longest beard
in the world died after he tripped over his beard
running away from a fire .
20. The Dance Fever of 1518 was a month-long
plague of inexplicable dancing in Strasbourg , in
which hundreds of people danced for about a
month for no apparent reason. Several of them
danced themselves to death.
21. Vladimir Nabokov nearly invented the smiley .
22. In 1993, San Francisco held a referendum over
whether a police officer called Bob Geary was
allowed to patrol while carrying a ventriloquist's
dummy called Brendan O'Smarty. He was.
23. Sigurd the Mighty, a ninth-century Norse earl of
Orkney, was killed by an enemy he had beheaded
several hours earlier. He'd tied the man's head to
his horse's saddle, but while riding home one of its
protruding teeth grazed his leg . He died from the
infection.
24. The Dutch village of Giethoorn has no roads; its
buildings are connected entirely by canals and
footbridges.
25. A family of people with blue skin lived in
Kentucky for many generations. The Fulgates of
Troublesome Creek are thought to have gained
their blue skin through combination of inbreeding
and a rare genetic condition known as
methemoglobinemia.
26. Powerful earthquakes can permanently shorten
the length of Earth's day , by moving the spin of the
Earth's axis. The 2011 Japan earthquake knocked
1.8 microseconds off our days. The 2004 Sumatra
quake cost us around 6.8 microseconds.
27. The first American film to show a toilet being
flushed on screen was Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho .
28. Melting glaciers and icebergs make a
distinctive fizzing noise known as "bergy seltzer" .
29. There is a glacier called "Blood Falls" in
Antarctica that regularly pours out red liquid,
making it look like the ice is bleeding. (It's actually
oxidised salty water.)
30. In 2008 scientists discovered a new species of
bacteria that lives in hairspray.
31. The top of the Eiffel Tower leans away from the
sun , as the metal facing the sun heats up and
expands. It can move as much as 7 inches.
32. Lt. Col. "Mad" Jack Churchill was only British
soldier in WWII known to have killed an enemy
soldier with a longbow. "Mad Jack" insisted on
going into battle armed with both a medieval bow
and a claymore sword.
33. A U.S. park ranger named Roy C. Sullivan held
the record for being struck by lightning the most
times, having been struck — and surviving —
seven times between 1942 and 1977. He died of a
self-inflicted gunshot in 1983.
34. The longest musical performance in history is
currently taking place in the church of St.
Burchardi in Halberstadt, Germany. The
performance of John Cage's "Organ²/ASLSP (As
Slow As Possible)" started on Sept. 5, 2001, and is
set to finish in 2640. The last time the note
changed was October 2013; the next change isn't
due until 2020.
35. There's an opera house on the U.S.–Canada
border where the stage is in one country and half
the audience is in another.
36. The tiny parasite Toxoplasma gondii can only
breed sexually when in the guts of a cat. To this
end, when it infects rats, it changes their behaviour
to make them less scared of cats.
37. The katzenklavier ("cat piano") was a musical
instrument made out of cats. Designed by 17th-
century German scholar Athanasius Kircher, it
consisted of a row of caged cats with different
voice pitches, who could be "played" by a
keyboardist driving nails into their tails.
38. There is a single mega-colony of ants that
spans three continents, covering much of Europe,
the west coast of the U.S., and the west coast of
Japan.
39. The largest snowflake ever recorded reportedly
measured 15 inches across.
40. An epidemic of laughing that lasted almost a
year broke out in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) in
1962. Several thousand people were affected,
across several villages. It forced a school to close.
It wasn't fun, though — other symptoms included
crying, fainting, rashes, and pain.
41. The Romans used to clean and whiten their
teeth with urine . Apparently it works. Please don't
do it, though.
42. There are around 60,000 miles of blood vessels
in the human body. If you took them all out and laid
them end to end, they'd stretch around the world
more than twice. But, seriously, don't do that
either.
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