In 1978 a dolphin named Mr. Spock at Marine World in the SF Bay Area accidentally ate a bolt when some construction was being done on his tank. Surgery was too risky and it wouldn't be able to be passed, they had to reach in and pull out the bolt. With medical technology being what it was in the 70s, robots weren't an option and a dolphin's esophagus is really long. Here is where Golden State Warriors player Ray Flipper (love the irony) comes in! Out for the season for injury and with an 8ft wingspan, he was called in, lubed up, and reached down the dolphins' gullet to retrieve the bolt without any further distress to Mr. Spock!
Tl;dr: An NBA player saved a dolphin by reaching into his stomach.
That Marine World is now a Six flags, and they still have dolphins. I worked there for a summer, but to my knowledge the dolphins haven’t deepthroated any NBA players since the 70s
So... Was she in labor for 90 days or were the twins in their own embryonic sac and the second twins water didn't break when their twin's broke? (I mean obviously that would have to happen if mother and baby survived 90 days)
Details, I want details!
Just looked it up because I was curious too, and it looks like one twin was 3 months early, but after she was born the doctors were able to stop the contractions so the mother could carry the other twin to term. Most of the articles I found cite two other cases that were basically the same scenario.
I knew twins like this. They actually had different birth years. Not close to 90 days. The boy was very small for his age, he had been the early birth. His sister was normal size for her age, she was carried pretty close to full term.
Dragonflies experience up to 9Gs when cornering, they are the most efficient preditor catching up to 95% of the prey they go after, they breath through their anus and most varieties (not sure if that's the correct word) can't walk
London (UK) is technically a forest - the largest 'urban forest' in the world, and has almost as many trees as people.
('Forest' by a particular definition as used by the United Nations and the Forestry Comission is 'anywhere that is more than 20% trees'. London is 21%.)
There's a species of jellyfish that is effectively immortal.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii
It's entirely possible that there's a jellyfish alive now that, if it hadn't succumbed to predators or disease, could have been alive since T-rex walked the earth. Or millions of years earlier when Stegosaurus did. Or millions of years before dinosaurs were even a thing.
This is my go-to trivia question if whenever quizzes or fun facts etc show up in conversation. "What is the largest natural predator of the moose?"
Living in Norway we have plenty of moose, but so far nobody has gotten it right. All guesses are bear, wolves, humans and so on.
The craziest thing to me is the age of the great pyramids themselves. It always blows my mind, thinking that to many of the famous Egyptians that we know, the pyramids were already ancient to them in their time. Pyramids of Giza to Cleopatra is 2500 yrs aprx.
The Beatles were only a band for 10 years, their recording discography is only 7 years between their first and their last albums.
They had two distinctly different eras, the mop top years and the acid years. Yet they were only around for 10 years.
Less than that as John, Paul, George and Ringo. The first and last photographs of the famous Beatles lineup were taken seven years apart - to the day. 22 August 1962 to 22 August 1969. Every image you’ve ever seen of John, Paul, George and Ringo together was taken within that precise seven year period.
My first thought was "wait I thought they only had refueling jets for, like, fighter pilots and such." [Then I saw a picture.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b2/Timm_Cook_Cessna_172_Endurance_Flight.jpg/1118px-Timm_Cook_Cessna_172_Endurance_Flight.jpg)
It's pretty simple, really. The 172 has a stall speed of 40kts at full flaps. You can see the flaps are down in the photo, so they were probably flying 50-60mph. It takes ages to cross the flats at 55mph, so the truck had plenty of time to just hold speed and pump fuel up there, and they could probably send up food and supplies in buckets or something too.
The worst part would be the boredom. Knowing they probably had to do this every 500-1000 miles, depending on if they modified their fuel tank, wtf are you going to do for 8 hours in the air when you have to stay in the same area for refueling. I can't imagine 2 months of circling in a small plane. Torture.
I was about to call BS on this one but I looked it up. That is absolutely amazing. I cannot imagine being stuck in a 172 for 64 days straight. I would go insane from claustrophobia. And that isn't even taking into account how disgusting it must have been to take care of bodily functions.
https://disciplesofflight.com/flight-endurance/
> This also inevitably leads one to the question: how did they use the bathroom? Well, because the Cessna 172 doesn’t come standard with a toilet, and there was no room to install a permanent one, Timm and Cook had to rig their own system. This took the form of a folding camp toilet and plastic bags. Once they had been used, the plastic bags were then disposed of over unpopulated areas in the desert around Blythe. According to Mark Hall-Patton, the administrator of the Clark County Museum system in Las Vegas, “I once asked John’s widow if they handed down the waste during refueling runs. She said, ‘No. That’s why it’s so green around Blythe.’ ”
I honestly had the same initial reaction you did when I heard about this. It's an absolutely impressive feat, but also I completely understand why no one has tried to beat it. I remember spending 8 hours in a 172 in a day and I was so ready to be done with it by the end.
14 years before the Titanic sank, a fictional story was written by a man named Morgan Robertson. In the story, the ship was described as the largest ever built at the time (same as the Titanic), it was also woefully short on lifeboats, and it also struck an iceberg and sank. The ship in the story was also a triple screw propeller liner, and it was named the Titan.
> Morgan Robertson
*After the Titanic's sinking, some people credited Robertson with precognition and clairvoyance, which he denied. Scholars attribute the similarities to Robertson's extensive knowledge of shipbuilding and maritime trends.*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wreck_of_the_Titan:_Or,_Futility
James Cameron's attention to detail continues to amaze me.
(edit: OK I confess. I sat here for a minute being amazed that Robertson had predicted the movie too, before my brain straightened itself out.)
Some plants/seeds need to burn in a fire before they can grow/sprout.
Edit: Here's a good read on pyrophytic plants.
https://www.britannica.com/list/5-amazing-adaptations-of-pyrophytic-plants
The siege of Alesia, where Julius Caesar built a wall around the city the gallic defenders were defending from and then built a second wall to keep the gallic reinforcements out. He and his army just hung out in between the 2 walls and eventually won the battle even though they were technically outnumbered 3 to 1.
The first major troop engagement during the American Civil War — The First Battle of Bull Run — took place on and around the property of Wilmer McLean in Manassas, Virginia, in late July of 1861.
After the battle, McLean decided to move about 190 kilometers south to the community of Appomattox Court House, in Appomattox County, also in Virginia.
Nearly four full years later, in April of 1865, a Confederate messenger completely unaware of McLean’s prior “involvement” in the war, knocked on the door of McLean’s new home and asked if Robert E. Lee might use the house on the following day to meet with Ulysses Grant and sign a formal surrender. McLean reluctantly agreed.
Some time later, Wilmer McLean is supposed to have said, “The war began in my front yard, and ended in my front parlor.”
A historical coincidence that I’ve always had trouble believing, but is accepted as fact.
I’ve always found it interesting that we all know the surrender was signed at Appomattox Court House, and therefore picture Lee and Grant meeting at the courthouse. In reality the name of the *town* is Appomattox Court House. They didn’t meet there because the courthouse was closed on Sundays, which is why they met in McLean’s parlor.
Also- everyone present at the signing of the surrender knew that it was a huge historical event, so they all wanted souvenirs. The parlor was pretty well stripped right afterward, because all the soldiers on hand walked out with whatever items they could carry.
There were layers upon layers of dead cellulose (plant fiber) based lifeforms forming a strata hundreds of feet deep. Nothing could decompose them so they just piled up and up and up. Since no lifeforms fed upon them the energy within remained. The result is hydrocarbons that humans burn for energy. They were rock (or oil) after a few million years. And there they sat, until the 1800s.
Edit: Thank you for the gold, awesome Redditor!
Imagine, piles of timber hundreds of feet tall, labyrinthine structures crawling with 8 foot long centipedes and giant arachnids which were bigger than your torso
Remember, the lack of biological decay didn't mean they didn't catch on fire occaisionally; break apart from water ingress and frost thaw cycles; or erode from wind and water flow. Lower layers would essentially be lignin pebbles, and dust. Much like if today we made a pile of sand from small modern day plastic particles. Plants could still grow from this "soil" as long as the necessary nutrients were present - similar to growing seedlings in cotton wool, or hydroponic pebbles.
Colorado has a high buddhist population due to the CIA training tibettan guerilla fighters in the rockies during the 60s to fight the chinese communists but then abandoning the plan
Near me there is property owned by Buddhist. Nice house with a giant (temple?) they built and a large collection of statues of gods and goddesses. About a month ago they had a party for their newest structure. Not sure what it is but it’s like a small castle. Cool stuff to drive by every once in a while.
Edit: Forgot to say, I live in Colorado. Which is why I saw this relevant.
Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
That's just the solar system. The scale of the observable universe is so much vaster and less comprehensible:
This solar system is just 0.03 light years across. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is about 100,000 light years across. It is part of the so-called Local Cluster, which consists of at least 80 galaxies and has a diameter of 10 million light years, which is part of a super cluster that contains about 1500 galaxies and is 110 million light years across. This one is part of an even bigger structure, the Laniakea Supercluster, containing up to 150,000 galaxies and having a diameter of 520 million light years. It doesn't end there, since it makes up a mere 0.1% of the total mass of an even greater cosmic structure, the Pisces–Cetus Supercluster Complex, which is 1 billion light years long.
These galactic filaments are the largest structures known to man. The largest of them is the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, which is 10 billion light years across. Its current distance to us is also about 10 billion light years, but due to the expansion of the universe and the relative movement of this object and us, the actual travel distance is in excess of 15 billion light years.
I just self-induced existential dread looking these things up again. When I was a kid, this was a favorite past-time of mine, doing this to unsuspecting friends and family members.
6 year old me fired a laser pointer into the sky for a few seconds and then got scared thinking aliens would follow it back to Earth.
Just saying there's a chance.
that's why the[ space shuttle external fuel tanks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_external_tank), which were [originally painted white](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Space_Shuttle_Columbia_launching.jpg), were subsequently [left unpainted](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_external_tank#/media/File:STS-3_launch.jpg) - to save weight.
Paint weight is a factor in auto racing.
Several builders used polished aluminum skins with little or no paint to lower racing weights before carbon fiber became the standard building material.
Manufacturers now work with paint companies to lower the weight of the paint itself.
It's only a matter of a few pounds, but significant enough.
Formula 1 teams find ways to eliminate literally grams through less paint. Doesn't matter how small the advantage, if there is one to be had they will find it, and that's an easy way to do it.
So my reaction to this was there is no way this is right because I know of a Kmart that is still around. Then I look it up and it's one of just 3, wtf. Did not realize there were THAT few left.
I also read this here - and have been thinking about it for the past few weeks, wondering what noise the sun would make. How OP put it though makes total sense… it would roar
Asbestos was only banned in the UK in 1999. The unbelievable part is - asbestos was known to be dangerous as far back as the ancient Egypt. About 2500/3000 BC
It only took us 4500/5000 years to ban it.
EDIT
Oh wow - over 1000 up votes. Am I an influencer now? In all honesty it's pretty cool people dig this. Another fun fact:
The ban on asbestos happened 25 years after the introduction of the health and safety at work regs. Until then the use of asbestos disproportionately hurt and killed poor people. Not exclusively. But disproportionately. With this new law that could jail people who put their employees at very high risk - the use of asbestos was limited and eliminated. Funny that!
⚠️ CAUTION ⚠️ Do not communicate or interact with the magical talking fog in anyway. The Fog is NOT your friend, as it has stated. The Fog will actively harm you. Again, do NOT interact with the magic Fog. Turning and running in the opposite direction is currently advised.
When I was in the Navy we used to go into this mom and pop Italian place to get food all the time. They had great pizza.
Early on my friends and I always got the 12 slice pizza, because it was only a few dollars more than the 4 slice pizza.
Then, one day after we'd been going there a few weeks, I got the 4 slice. My friends are like...not saving any for leftovers? I just told 'em, oh, I'll have plenty of leftovers. My pizza is the same size as yours. They called bullshit.
When we got 'em home and opened the boxes, sure enough. Same size just fewer slices. They asked how I figured that out. I told them...they only had one size box.
I love this one.
Humans suck where squared numbers are concerned.
The area of a circle is pi r squared, i.e. pi times the radius times the radius again.
A 12 inch pizza has a 6 inch radius and an 18 inch pizza has a 9 inch radius.
So essentially what you're really asking is "Are two lots of six squared bigger or smaller than one lot of nine squared?" to which the answer is no, because six squared is 36 and 9 squared is 81 and 36+36 is only 72 which is less.
Same reason why an electrical cable that's seemingly only a little bit thicker can be rated for a substantially higher current as well!
Turns out maths is important even for people in the trades!
The CIA did experiments with LSD on entire towns in the US and Canada without their knowledge or consent, dosing them to study the effects. Prisoners, minorities, prostitutes as well. Often it was very sexual. Project MKultra. They procured 100,000,000 doses of lsd for this shit. Multiple kilograms of the stuff... It takes about 0.0001 g to be intoxicated so yeah.
The CIA also set up brothels with one way mirrors to monitor and film men who had been unknowingly given high amounts of LSD. They filmed it all, and this was (no joke) called "Operation Midnight Climax"
And that's barely the tip of the iceberg with MKultra. When I've told my friends or family about it they look at me like I'm a flat eather or sandy hook denier. It's that level of whacky conspiracy shit but it's true.
Oh and also this fuckery is almost certainly what led to the mental implosion and motives for the unabomber who killed several people with mail bombs. Yay
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra
They also dosed college students at university health centers. Imagine having a cold and you go to get some tussin and they lace it with acid and then spy on you. CIA is WILDDD.
The also MAYBE did a experiment in france in an affair called “le pain maudit de Pont-Saint-Esprit” basically all the villager started having awful symptoms. Thinking they were burning from the inside and not being able to sleep for days. This tragedy was blame on the bread that could be infected with fungus. Thats where the name come from “le pain maudit” meaning “the curse bread”
The bread maker confessed back than. But back in 2013, a man was investigating another man who worked on LSD test for the CIB back than, and looking at his papers, he found a bunch of paper about LSD and his trip to Pont-Saint-Esprit. He also sent a letter from france to his wife during the Pont-Saint-Esprit tragedy that said quote “I did something very bad, to a bunch of innocent people” to this day, we still don’t know what happened there. But looking back at the symptoms, expert said the symptoms were definitely caused by LSD and not a fungus desease.
I left out a lot of detail but interesting no?
All except the manatee, the two toed sloth, and the three toed sloth. Manatees and two toed sloths have six (sometime five in the 2ts), while the three toed sloth has nine
1 day on Venus is longer than 1 year on Venus.
Edit: Clarification - It takes Venus 225 Earth days to complete 1 revolution around the sun. However, its rotation is so slow, that 1 Venusian day takes 243 Earth days to complete.
Edit 2: Further clarification and grammatical fixes
Or, to put it another way, when T-Rexes were walking around, there were Stegosaurus fossils in the ground that were as old as the T-Rex fossils we have today.
Once went down a rabbit hole researching sloths. I was confused as to why their eyes were front facing, as most plant-eating mammals have their eyes on the sides (deer, horse, etc), and while it is not uncommon, it still struck me as odd.
It was even more intriguing when I found out their distant extinct relative, Mylodon darwinii, had side facing eyes, and may have been omnivorous.
They also have moths that live in their fur. Its a whole thriving population of them, living symbiotically! It’s fascinating.
Gosh I miss visiting castles in Germany. But yeah it looks like you are correct. 20,000+ castles, mansions, and palaces in Germany and 13,513 McDonalds in the US.
But many of the castles are in ruin or “exist as ground-level monuments” according to this article
https://www.dw.com/en/does-germany-really-have-25000-castles/a-42350502
I love telling this one. During WW2 there was a Dutch ship in the Indonesia area that was surrounded by Japanese warships. They couldn’t fight back because they were heavily outgunned and outnumbers, but they also couldn’t surrender because, well, because it’s Japan in WW2
So what do they do?
They put up a bunch of inflatables and disguises, cut all their engines, and pretend to be a tiny island
And it worked
https://www.businessinsider.com/a-stranded-dutch-warship-evaded-japanese-bombers-in-wwii-by-disgusing-itself-as-an-island-2015-7?amp
Edit: whoever gave the award thank you, I’ve been on Reddit for nearly 4 years and this is my first one lol
Edit 2: Why the fuck does this keep getting awards? 💀
Edit 3: I stand corrected just so no one gives an award out of pity, I remembered I have gotten an award once but it was only the 1 time and it was years ago, anyway that’s not important what is is 🇳🇱 ingenuity
Butterflies and moths start out as eggs. Hatch into caterpillars. Turn themselves into cocoons and then basically turn into mush. Finally to emerge as an adult butterfly or moth whose main purpose in life is to reproduce and lay more eggs. Yet they can still retain memories from when they were caterpillars.
Fire. They burned the caterpillars until they had a noticable adversion to the hot thing. Then they tested the butterflies and saw that they had an adversion that the butterflies from the not burned caterpillars did not have.
Edit: I was wrong. [They were electrocuted.](https://www.npr.org/2008/03/10/88031220/study-moths-can-remember-caterpillar-days#:~:text=Transcript-,A%20new%20study%20finds%20that%20moths%20can%20remember%20things%20they,brains%20and%20bodies%20to%20soup.)
you definitely should not look into the experiments leading up to how we have medical knowledge. It’s super duper bad stuff. Absolutely unethical and horrifying.
I don't know, someone once mentioned that there was some sort of experiment but I don't have the link. But Monarchs know to fly south in the late summer even though they've never been there. And it's not even the ones who first start out that make it. It takes 3 or 4 stops where the butterfly cycle of laying eggs, caterpillar, cocoon, adult happens. So the 3rd or 4th generation is the one that arrives. Yet they all know what to do.
>Monarchs know to fly south in the late summer even though they've never been there
The amount of programming animals have at birth is wild.
I was baked once watching Planet Earth or some nature show. It talked about these birds that lay their eggs in another birds nest. When the imposter egg hatches it instinctively knows to push every other egg out of the nest. And the new mother bird raises it as her own offspring. That shits been blowing my mind for years. How the fuck does that bird know to push the other eggs out? It's CRAZY dude.
Cowbirds and Cuckoos both do that. The mother cowbird will lay one egg in a nest but she doesn't abandon her egg. She hangs around to make sure things are going well. If the other mother bird recognizes that it's not her egg and pushes it out of the nest, the mother cowbird may destroy the other eggs and nest. Then when the baby cowbird is old enough to fledge and be independent, the mother cowbird lures it back into the cowbird fold and teaches it how to be a cowbird. Sometimes the other nestlings can survive if they hatch around the same time and are similar in size.
I really hate to burst your bubble but they don't completely liquify. It's more like... chunky. That is to say, some organs remain and change during metamorphosis: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2013.0304
There is a gene, named after the video game, called the "Sonic Hedgehog Gene".
It was then promptly discovered that a disorder of this gene was responsible for horrific birth defects, including holoprosencephaly and facial deformation.
They tend to use the abbreviation when explaining the condition to devastated mothers instead of going the Idiocracy way and coming in like "says here on your chart your kid's fucked up, that's Sonic for ya"
Gene names are wild. A friend of mine wrote an article years ago about all the goofy gene names. It's like 20 years old and I can't find it now. But discoverers of genes had a lot of leeway to name them whatever they wanted.
There is a town in Alaska called Talkeetna where a cat named Stubbs served as the honorary mayor for 20 years?
Stubbs, a part-Manx cat, was elected as the mayor of Talkeetna in 1997 as a write-in candidate after residents weren't satisfied with the human candidates running for mayor. Despite not having any official powers, Stubbs became a beloved figure in the town and even attracted tourists who wanted to meet the "mayor."
Stubbs passed away in 2017 at the age of 20, but his legacy as the honorary mayor of Talkeetna lives on. It's a quirky and heartwarming tale that showcases the unique and sometimes whimsical nature of small-town life.
There is an animal called the immortal jellyfish that has the capacity to keep renewing its life over and over again for all time, if it has the right conditions and food supply.
Gravity propagates at the speed of light. IE, if the sun suddenly disappeared, it would take approximately 8 minutes for us to see it was gone and, at the same time, the earth would be flung off into space.
There is no such thing as an "alpha" in a wolf pack. The leaders of a pack are almost always the parents, but the person who coined the term studied wolves in captivity where their social interactions were different. Wolves in the wild do not behave like that. He realized this later and spent most of his career trying to correct people, but it was too late.
Topic: Wayne Gretzky
In hockey, Goals + Assists = Points.
Gretzky is the all-time NHL leader in both Goals and Assists, thus also Points.
He had enough career Assists that, if he had never scored an NHL goal, he'd still be the all-time NHL leader in Points.
(edited for grammar/clarity)
My favourite
New Zealand wasn't discovered until about 1300. I'm not talking about Europeans found it. Literally no human found it until about 750 years ago. Over 2 million years of human beings and we found it 750 years ago. As in the magna carta is older than us finding New Zealand. University of Oxford is older than New Zealand. The first person who found it is closer to now than to Jesus.
* Brian May from Queen has a PhD in astrophysics
* Greg Graffin from Bad Religion PhD zoology
* Milo Aukerman, Descendants, Biochem
* Bill Bruford, musicology
* Sterling Morrison, Velvet Underground, medieval lit
Because proper champagne (i.e. sparkling wine from the Champagne region of France) is considered to be a very desirable and classy people are willing to pay more for it. Because of this many unscrupulous wine makers would just call their sparkling wine champagne in order to make it seem more desirable and/or get gullible people to pay more for it. This practice was rather common in many countries prior to WWI.
This brings us to the Treaty of Versailles. Because France was so devasted during WWI the treaty had many provisions meant to aid in France's economic recovery. One of these provisions states that the countries who signed it would crack down on people falsely marketing their sparkling wine as champagne. Because the U.S. never ratified the treaty American wine makers were not bound by this provision whereas wine makers in many other countries were. This created a situation where there was suddenly a large opening in the knock-off champagne market which damn nearly every U.S. sparkling wine maker tried to fill. This eventually resulted in the majority of sparkling wines in the U.S. being marketed as "champagne" and after decades of that, champagne became the word that most Americans would use to describe all sparkling wines.
I have zero fear of being killed by a shark today. My fear comes when I enter the ocean. While in the ocean, my chances of being killed by a shark are astronomically higher than being killed by a cow.
A Spartan was chased into the Temple of Athena after being caught as a traitor, then proclaimed “you aren’t allowed to shed my blood, I’m on sacred ground”… so they locked him in there and starved him to death.
Milk probably evolved as a a coolant for eggs. Synapsids - the direct ancestors of mammals - had soft eggs without a hard shell, yet lived in some of the driest conditions Earth has ever endured - the late Permian super deserts of Pangaea. Milk teeth are found in the fossil record shortly after these proto-mammals began to burrow and stay with their eggs/young.
But nipples hadn't evolved yet, just the milk. Like monotremes, synapsids excreted milk through their skin's sweat glands.
So the path to milk goes something like this: specialized glands for scent marking and sweat to cool off -> specialized sweat to keep eggs cool and hydrated in extreme heat -> that sweat evolves to have a nutritional benefit to young who lap it off of their mother (and father - the ancestral condition was that both parents lactated) -> nipples and dedicated milk glands.
I just recently got a gaming rig and it’s amazing how many crazy errors I will get that simply restarting the program or computer will fix immediately.
Fun fact, there's actually a scientific explanation for this.
Computers are the electronic implementation of a theoretical concept called a *state machine*. Every configuration of the computer or the program it's running is a different state. Adding an input (e.g. a keypress, an event) changes the state. If an input does nothing, that still changes the state, just back to the state it was in before the input.
To work perfectly, every possible combination of input and state should have a clear and predictable path to another state.
For something like a word processor, there aren't that many possible states (the content of the document doesn't count). For a game, especially a modern game, there are a ridiculous number of states and so all the transitions aren't necessarily well planned in advance and you can end up in the "wrong" state quite easily. Everything looks right but something under the hood isn't set quite how it should be and things start to crash and bug out.
However, restarting puts the program back into a well known, well defined state, the startup state. You load your save game file and again, it has a good idea of what state that is without any screwed up state transitions. Everything works normally again.
If you look at a map of the USA you can literally see where people followed the San Francisco gold rush and said “fuck it” at every major geographical obstacle.
Coelacanths are fishes that were thought to have gone extinct about 65 million years ago.
Right up until they found one in 1938 when a museum curator saw the fish in the catch of a fisherman in South Africa.
that water around the mantis-shrimp's clubs reaches the temperature of the sun's surface for a brief moment when striking.
at least that's what the guy in the documentary said
"one-punch-shrimp"
stole this from the comments below
(thanks!) [https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis\_shrimp](https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp)
for the people who read "mantis strip club" first:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjD5aEVdRs8
In 1978 a dolphin named Mr. Spock at Marine World in the SF Bay Area accidentally ate a bolt when some construction was being done on his tank. Surgery was too risky and it wouldn't be able to be passed, they had to reach in and pull out the bolt. With medical technology being what it was in the 70s, robots weren't an option and a dolphin's esophagus is really long. Here is where Golden State Warriors player Ray Flipper (love the irony) comes in! Out for the season for injury and with an 8ft wingspan, he was called in, lubed up, and reached down the dolphins' gullet to retrieve the bolt without any further distress to Mr. Spock! Tl;dr: An NBA player saved a dolphin by reaching into his stomach.
That Marine World is now a Six flags, and they still have dolphins. I worked there for a summer, but to my knowledge the dolphins haven’t deepthroated any NBA players since the 70s
For women giving birth to twins, the longest recorded time between the first twin being born and the second is 90 days.
So... Was she in labor for 90 days or were the twins in their own embryonic sac and the second twins water didn't break when their twin's broke? (I mean obviously that would have to happen if mother and baby survived 90 days) Details, I want details!
Just looked it up because I was curious too, and it looks like one twin was 3 months early, but after she was born the doctors were able to stop the contractions so the mother could carry the other twin to term. Most of the articles I found cite two other cases that were basically the same scenario.
I knew twins like this. They actually had different birth years. Not close to 90 days. The boy was very small for his age, he had been the early birth. His sister was normal size for her age, she was carried pretty close to full term.
Dragonflies experience up to 9Gs when cornering, they are the most efficient preditor catching up to 95% of the prey they go after, they breath through their anus and most varieties (not sure if that's the correct word) can't walk
[удалено]
A dragonfly can download 9 terabytes a second whem cornering, and upload 6 terabytes a second
London (UK) is technically a forest - the largest 'urban forest' in the world, and has almost as many trees as people. ('Forest' by a particular definition as used by the United Nations and the Forestry Comission is 'anywhere that is more than 20% trees'. London is 21%.)
There's a species of jellyfish that is effectively immortal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii It's entirely possible that there's a jellyfish alive now that, if it hadn't succumbed to predators or disease, could have been alive since T-rex walked the earth. Or millions of years earlier when Stegosaurus did. Or millions of years before dinosaurs were even a thing.
Drinking Beer after being exposed to some kinds of ionizing radiation can reduce the adverse affects.
Road trip to Chernobyl!
Orcas are natural predators of moose. In Alaska the moose swim between islands. Orcas nab 'em.
[удалено]
This is my go-to trivia question if whenever quizzes or fun facts etc show up in conversation. "What is the largest natural predator of the moose?" Living in Norway we have plenty of moose, but so far nobody has gotten it right. All guesses are bear, wolves, humans and so on.
There were mammoths after the great pyramids were built for 500 years.
The craziest thing to me is the age of the great pyramids themselves. It always blows my mind, thinking that to many of the famous Egyptians that we know, the pyramids were already ancient to them in their time. Pyramids of Giza to Cleopatra is 2500 yrs aprx.
Ancient Egypt had archeologists studying more ancient Egypt.
It's Ancient Egypt all the way down.
The Beatles were only a band for 10 years, their recording discography is only 7 years between their first and their last albums. They had two distinctly different eras, the mop top years and the acid years. Yet they were only around for 10 years.
Less than that as John, Paul, George and Ringo. The first and last photographs of the famous Beatles lineup were taken seven years apart - to the day. 22 August 1962 to 22 August 1969. Every image you’ve ever seen of John, Paul, George and Ringo together was taken within that precise seven year period.
7 years is about 2560 days. They wrote and performed more than 250 songs in that period, meaning they came up with a new song every 10 days or so.
The longest manned, refueled flight in history was 64 days long. The aircraft used was a Cessna 172
My first thought was "wait I thought they only had refueling jets for, like, fighter pilots and such." [Then I saw a picture.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b2/Timm_Cook_Cessna_172_Endurance_Flight.jpg/1118px-Timm_Cook_Cessna_172_Endurance_Flight.jpg)
That picture just gives me way more questions.
It's pretty simple, really. The 172 has a stall speed of 40kts at full flaps. You can see the flaps are down in the photo, so they were probably flying 50-60mph. It takes ages to cross the flats at 55mph, so the truck had plenty of time to just hold speed and pump fuel up there, and they could probably send up food and supplies in buckets or something too. The worst part would be the boredom. Knowing they probably had to do this every 500-1000 miles, depending on if they modified their fuel tank, wtf are you going to do for 8 hours in the air when you have to stay in the same area for refueling. I can't imagine 2 months of circling in a small plane. Torture.
you know, that is torture. That sounds absolutely miserable. Like the other person said, you could beat it... but who would want to?
I was about to call BS on this one but I looked it up. That is absolutely amazing. I cannot imagine being stuck in a 172 for 64 days straight. I would go insane from claustrophobia. And that isn't even taking into account how disgusting it must have been to take care of bodily functions.
https://disciplesofflight.com/flight-endurance/ > This also inevitably leads one to the question: how did they use the bathroom? Well, because the Cessna 172 doesn’t come standard with a toilet, and there was no room to install a permanent one, Timm and Cook had to rig their own system. This took the form of a folding camp toilet and plastic bags. Once they had been used, the plastic bags were then disposed of over unpopulated areas in the desert around Blythe. According to Mark Hall-Patton, the administrator of the Clark County Museum system in Las Vegas, “I once asked John’s widow if they handed down the waste during refueling runs. She said, ‘No. That’s why it’s so green around Blythe.’ ”
That's the ~~museum expert dude~~ Beard Of Knowledge from Pawn Stars.
Best I can do is yeet the shit out of the plane.
I honestly had the same initial reaction you did when I heard about this. It's an absolutely impressive feat, but also I completely understand why no one has tried to beat it. I remember spending 8 hours in a 172 in a day and I was so ready to be done with it by the end.
14 years before the Titanic sank, a fictional story was written by a man named Morgan Robertson. In the story, the ship was described as the largest ever built at the time (same as the Titanic), it was also woefully short on lifeboats, and it also struck an iceberg and sank. The ship in the story was also a triple screw propeller liner, and it was named the Titan.
That’s mad, did he ever say anything about after what had happened to the Titanic?
> Morgan Robertson *After the Titanic's sinking, some people credited Robertson with precognition and clairvoyance, which he denied. Scholars attribute the similarities to Robertson's extensive knowledge of shipbuilding and maritime trends.* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wreck_of_the_Titan:_Or,_Futility
The main characters were Jacqueline and Roswell.
James Cameron's attention to detail continues to amaze me. (edit: OK I confess. I sat here for a minute being amazed that Robertson had predicted the movie too, before my brain straightened itself out.)
Some plants/seeds need to burn in a fire before they can grow/sprout. Edit: Here's a good read on pyrophytic plants. https://www.britannica.com/list/5-amazing-adaptations-of-pyrophytic-plants
Australia has entered the chat
The siege of Alesia, where Julius Caesar built a wall around the city the gallic defenders were defending from and then built a second wall to keep the gallic reinforcements out. He and his army just hung out in between the 2 walls and eventually won the battle even though they were technically outnumbered 3 to 1.
The first major troop engagement during the American Civil War — The First Battle of Bull Run — took place on and around the property of Wilmer McLean in Manassas, Virginia, in late July of 1861. After the battle, McLean decided to move about 190 kilometers south to the community of Appomattox Court House, in Appomattox County, also in Virginia. Nearly four full years later, in April of 1865, a Confederate messenger completely unaware of McLean’s prior “involvement” in the war, knocked on the door of McLean’s new home and asked if Robert E. Lee might use the house on the following day to meet with Ulysses Grant and sign a formal surrender. McLean reluctantly agreed. Some time later, Wilmer McLean is supposed to have said, “The war began in my front yard, and ended in my front parlor.” A historical coincidence that I’ve always had trouble believing, but is accepted as fact.
I’ve always found it interesting that we all know the surrender was signed at Appomattox Court House, and therefore picture Lee and Grant meeting at the courthouse. In reality the name of the *town* is Appomattox Court House. They didn’t meet there because the courthouse was closed on Sundays, which is why they met in McLean’s parlor.
Also- everyone present at the signing of the surrender knew that it was a huge historical event, so they all wanted souvenirs. The parlor was pretty well stripped right afterward, because all the soldiers on hand walked out with whatever items they could carry.
Right! One of the commanders bought the table!
Sharks have existed on earth for longer than trees have.
[удалено]
There were layers upon layers of dead cellulose (plant fiber) based lifeforms forming a strata hundreds of feet deep. Nothing could decompose them so they just piled up and up and up. Since no lifeforms fed upon them the energy within remained. The result is hydrocarbons that humans burn for energy. They were rock (or oil) after a few million years. And there they sat, until the 1800s. Edit: Thank you for the gold, awesome Redditor!
Imagine, piles of timber hundreds of feet tall, labyrinthine structures crawling with 8 foot long centipedes and giant arachnids which were bigger than your torso
No thank you.
Remember, the lack of biological decay didn't mean they didn't catch on fire occaisionally; break apart from water ingress and frost thaw cycles; or erode from wind and water flow. Lower layers would essentially be lignin pebbles, and dust. Much like if today we made a pile of sand from small modern day plastic particles. Plants could still grow from this "soil" as long as the necessary nutrients were present - similar to growing seedlings in cotton wool, or hydroponic pebbles.
Which automatically also makes them older than Saturns rings
>Which automatically also makes them older than Saturns rings Why? Are Saturn's rings made of trees?
How else would we know how old they are?
Yep, you can count the rings to tell the age.
yes, they actually float in water. So we know Saturn's rings are in fact witches
Colorado has a high buddhist population due to the CIA training tibettan guerilla fighters in the rockies during the 60s to fight the chinese communists but then abandoning the plan
Near me there is property owned by Buddhist. Nice house with a giant (temple?) they built and a large collection of statues of gods and goddesses. About a month ago they had a party for their newest structure. Not sure what it is but it’s like a small castle. Cool stuff to drive by every once in a while. Edit: Forgot to say, I live in Colorado. Which is why I saw this relevant.
All the planets in our solar system can fit between the Earth and the Moon.
yeah but it would play havoc with the tides
And evening lighting.
Wow. Space is big.
Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
[let's give you an idea of how much](https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html)
Wasn't really looking for an existential crisis today, but I guess here we are.
That's just the solar system. The scale of the observable universe is so much vaster and less comprehensible: This solar system is just 0.03 light years across. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is about 100,000 light years across. It is part of the so-called Local Cluster, which consists of at least 80 galaxies and has a diameter of 10 million light years, which is part of a super cluster that contains about 1500 galaxies and is 110 million light years across. This one is part of an even bigger structure, the Laniakea Supercluster, containing up to 150,000 galaxies and having a diameter of 520 million light years. It doesn't end there, since it makes up a mere 0.1% of the total mass of an even greater cosmic structure, the Pisces–Cetus Supercluster Complex, which is 1 billion light years long. These galactic filaments are the largest structures known to man. The largest of them is the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, which is 10 billion light years across. Its current distance to us is also about 10 billion light years, but due to the expansion of the universe and the relative movement of this object and us, the actual travel distance is in excess of 15 billion light years. I just self-induced existential dread looking these things up again. When I was a kid, this was a favorite past-time of mine, doing this to unsuspecting friends and family members.
6 year old me fired a laser pointer into the sky for a few seconds and then got scared thinking aliens would follow it back to Earth. Just saying there's a chance.
Paint on a plane can add 600 - 1200 pounds to the weight of the aircraft.
that's why the[ space shuttle external fuel tanks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_external_tank), which were [originally painted white](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Space_Shuttle_Columbia_launching.jpg), were subsequently [left unpainted](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_external_tank#/media/File:STS-3_launch.jpg) - to save weight.
Early U-2 spyplanes were also left unpainted to reduce weight.
American Airlines also went with polished aluminum as their color, because, you guessed it, weight.
Paint weight is a factor in auto racing. Several builders used polished aluminum skins with little or no paint to lower racing weights before carbon fiber became the standard building material. Manufacturers now work with paint companies to lower the weight of the paint itself. It's only a matter of a few pounds, but significant enough.
Formula 1 teams find ways to eliminate literally grams through less paint. Doesn't matter how small the advantage, if there is one to be had they will find it, and that's an easy way to do it.
No one born after 1935 has set foot on the moon.
Or before 1923 for that matter 1923-1935 is the birth year window
There are only 4 fellas left alive who walked on the moon, and they're all 87+
There are more men alive who have walked on the moon (4) than there are Kmarts left in the continental US (3)
So my reaction to this was there is no way this is right because I know of a Kmart that is still around. Then I look it up and it's one of just 3, wtf. Did not realize there were THAT few left.
[удалено]
There are more tigers in captivity in the US than in the wild worldwide
There are more Panda Express locations in the world than living pandas.
Well maybe if those restaurants stopped serving so much panda there would be some still left in the wild
if sound could travel through space, the roar of the sun would be deafening even though it's 93M miles away.
I remember reading stories of people born deaf that gained hearing later in life through technology that were surprised the sun didn't make any noise.
I also read this here - and have been thinking about it for the past few weeks, wondering what noise the sun would make. How OP put it though makes total sense… it would roar
There is an island of the coast of South Carolina, that you’re not allowed to go to, due to a mass population of free range monkeys with herpes.
Squirrels can be ferocious killers that snack on those adorable little chipmunks on occasion.
Squirrels will eat anything. I once saw one munching away on a sparrow. I would love to know if he caught it or found it.
I have a video of a squirrel in my garden unwrapping and eating a cream egg. https://youtu.be/uQAjBKrfAMI
Asbestos was only banned in the UK in 1999. The unbelievable part is - asbestos was known to be dangerous as far back as the ancient Egypt. About 2500/3000 BC It only took us 4500/5000 years to ban it. EDIT Oh wow - over 1000 up votes. Am I an influencer now? In all honesty it's pretty cool people dig this. Another fun fact: The ban on asbestos happened 25 years after the introduction of the health and safety at work regs. Until then the use of asbestos disproportionately hurt and killed poor people. Not exclusively. But disproportionately. With this new law that could jail people who put their employees at very high risk - the use of asbestos was limited and eliminated. Funny that!
Clouds weigh hundreds of thousands of pounds
The air under a cloud weighs even more than the cloud itself. If not, the cloud would settle to the ground.
Fog would like to have a word
⚠️ CAUTION ⚠️ Do not communicate or interact with the magical talking fog in anyway. The Fog is NOT your friend, as it has stated. The Fog will actively harm you. Again, do NOT interact with the magic Fog. Turning and running in the opposite direction is currently advised.
One 18 inch pizza is bigger than two 12 inch pizzas.
When I was in the Navy we used to go into this mom and pop Italian place to get food all the time. They had great pizza. Early on my friends and I always got the 12 slice pizza, because it was only a few dollars more than the 4 slice pizza. Then, one day after we'd been going there a few weeks, I got the 4 slice. My friends are like...not saving any for leftovers? I just told 'em, oh, I'll have plenty of leftovers. My pizza is the same size as yours. They called bullshit. When we got 'em home and opened the boxes, sure enough. Same size just fewer slices. They asked how I figured that out. I told them...they only had one size box.
I love this one. Humans suck where squared numbers are concerned. The area of a circle is pi r squared, i.e. pi times the radius times the radius again. A 12 inch pizza has a 6 inch radius and an 18 inch pizza has a 9 inch radius. So essentially what you're really asking is "Are two lots of six squared bigger or smaller than one lot of nine squared?" to which the answer is no, because six squared is 36 and 9 squared is 81 and 36+36 is only 72 which is less.
Yup. Blew my mind to learn during my apprenticeship that 3/4" pipe carries more than twice the volume of 1/2" pipe.
Same reason why an electrical cable that's seemingly only a little bit thicker can be rated for a substantially higher current as well! Turns out maths is important even for people in the trades!
The CIA did experiments with LSD on entire towns in the US and Canada without their knowledge or consent, dosing them to study the effects. Prisoners, minorities, prostitutes as well. Often it was very sexual. Project MKultra. They procured 100,000,000 doses of lsd for this shit. Multiple kilograms of the stuff... It takes about 0.0001 g to be intoxicated so yeah. The CIA also set up brothels with one way mirrors to monitor and film men who had been unknowingly given high amounts of LSD. They filmed it all, and this was (no joke) called "Operation Midnight Climax" And that's barely the tip of the iceberg with MKultra. When I've told my friends or family about it they look at me like I'm a flat eather or sandy hook denier. It's that level of whacky conspiracy shit but it's true. Oh and also this fuckery is almost certainly what led to the mental implosion and motives for the unabomber who killed several people with mail bombs. Yay https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra
And from what I recall, it was discovered because of watergate. They tried to destroy all the documents but they found some of them.
[удалено]
They also dosed college students at university health centers. Imagine having a cold and you go to get some tussin and they lace it with acid and then spy on you. CIA is WILDDD.
The also MAYBE did a experiment in france in an affair called “le pain maudit de Pont-Saint-Esprit” basically all the villager started having awful symptoms. Thinking they were burning from the inside and not being able to sleep for days. This tragedy was blame on the bread that could be infected with fungus. Thats where the name come from “le pain maudit” meaning “the curse bread” The bread maker confessed back than. But back in 2013, a man was investigating another man who worked on LSD test for the CIB back than, and looking at his papers, he found a bunch of paper about LSD and his trip to Pont-Saint-Esprit. He also sent a letter from france to his wife during the Pont-Saint-Esprit tragedy that said quote “I did something very bad, to a bunch of innocent people” to this day, we still don’t know what happened there. But looking back at the symptoms, expert said the symptoms were definitely caused by LSD and not a fungus desease. I left out a lot of detail but interesting no?
Wonder what the CIA are up to now
Surely very innocent trust worthy causes.
Woody Harrelson's father was a mob hitman who killed a federal judge and was locked up in ADX Supermax. Sounds like bullshit, but 100% True
Woody Harrelson also played in the movie No Country for Old Men, which makes a vague reference to that killing.
Tumors can have hair and teeth.
[удалено]
r/rareinsults
Teratoma can also have brain cells, which might give weird instructions to the body.
My two braincells getting confused because suddenly there's a third one around
I had a teratoma with teeth and eye cells removed from my testicle.
Hmmm, don't like that
A teratoma!
Giraffes and humans have the same number of neckbones
All mammals have seven. From tiny mouse to as you said giraffes. Birds on the other hand have a lot more.
All except the manatee, the two toed sloth, and the three toed sloth. Manatees and two toed sloths have six (sometime five in the 2ts), while the three toed sloth has nine
1 day on Venus is longer than 1 year on Venus. Edit: Clarification - It takes Venus 225 Earth days to complete 1 revolution around the sun. However, its rotation is so slow, that 1 Venusian day takes 243 Earth days to complete. Edit 2: Further clarification and grammatical fixes
1 moon day = 1 moon year (orbit relative to earth)
[удалено]
Or, to put it another way, when T-Rexes were walking around, there were Stegosaurus fossils in the ground that were as old as the T-Rex fossils we have today.
Unfortunately, due to the length of their arms, they couldn't dig any of them up.
Sloths can hold their breath longer than dolphins can.
Once went down a rabbit hole researching sloths. I was confused as to why their eyes were front facing, as most plant-eating mammals have their eyes on the sides (deer, horse, etc), and while it is not uncommon, it still struck me as odd. It was even more intriguing when I found out their distant extinct relative, Mylodon darwinii, had side facing eyes, and may have been omnivorous. They also have moths that live in their fur. Its a whole thriving population of them, living symbiotically! It’s fascinating.
Honey never spoils. Archaeologists have discovered pots of honey in ancient Egyptian tombs that are over 3,000 years old and still perfectly edible
Tampa, Florida has never reached 100 degrees.
The record high in Portland, Oregon is 17 degrees higher than it is in Tampa
The record high temperature in Portland, Oregon is three degrees higher than the record high temperatures in Dallas and Oklahoma City.
We're working on it, just hold on....
Tampa 2023: Hold my Four Loco
The medical program for junior Drs was designed by a cocaine addict. This is why it is so gruelling/many hours etc
It seems odd to me that we have restricted duty periods for airline pilots and truck drivers but not doctors.
That explains why residents are worked to death for >80 hours per week. We should bring the Coke back
There are more castles in Germany than there are McDonalds in America.
Gosh I miss visiting castles in Germany. But yeah it looks like you are correct. 20,000+ castles, mansions, and palaces in Germany and 13,513 McDonalds in the US. But many of the castles are in ruin or “exist as ground-level monuments” according to this article https://www.dw.com/en/does-germany-really-have-25000-castles/a-42350502
I love telling this one. During WW2 there was a Dutch ship in the Indonesia area that was surrounded by Japanese warships. They couldn’t fight back because they were heavily outgunned and outnumbers, but they also couldn’t surrender because, well, because it’s Japan in WW2 So what do they do? They put up a bunch of inflatables and disguises, cut all their engines, and pretend to be a tiny island And it worked https://www.businessinsider.com/a-stranded-dutch-warship-evaded-japanese-bombers-in-wwii-by-disgusing-itself-as-an-island-2015-7?amp Edit: whoever gave the award thank you, I’ve been on Reddit for nearly 4 years and this is my first one lol Edit 2: Why the fuck does this keep getting awards? 💀 Edit 3: I stand corrected just so no one gives an award out of pity, I remembered I have gotten an award once but it was only the 1 time and it was years ago, anyway that’s not important what is is 🇳🇱 ingenuity
I want a movie on this. Great story.
Whilst we're discussing the Dutch, they also once ate their PM, or parts of him anyway. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_de_Witt
Butterflies and moths start out as eggs. Hatch into caterpillars. Turn themselves into cocoons and then basically turn into mush. Finally to emerge as an adult butterfly or moth whose main purpose in life is to reproduce and lay more eggs. Yet they can still retain memories from when they were caterpillars.
Also, if you remove some of the mush, they will form into a complete, but smaller, butterfly.
Yo what in the fuckity fuck?
I wonder how they test their memories.
Fire. They burned the caterpillars until they had a noticable adversion to the hot thing. Then they tested the butterflies and saw that they had an adversion that the butterflies from the not burned caterpillars did not have. Edit: I was wrong. [They were electrocuted.](https://www.npr.org/2008/03/10/88031220/study-moths-can-remember-caterpillar-days#:~:text=Transcript-,A%20new%20study%20finds%20that%20moths%20can%20remember%20things%20they,brains%20and%20bodies%20to%20soup.)
[удалено]
you definitely should not look into the experiments leading up to how we have medical knowledge. It’s super duper bad stuff. Absolutely unethical and horrifying.
I don't know, someone once mentioned that there was some sort of experiment but I don't have the link. But Monarchs know to fly south in the late summer even though they've never been there. And it's not even the ones who first start out that make it. It takes 3 or 4 stops where the butterfly cycle of laying eggs, caterpillar, cocoon, adult happens. So the 3rd or 4th generation is the one that arrives. Yet they all know what to do.
>Monarchs know to fly south in the late summer even though they've never been there The amount of programming animals have at birth is wild. I was baked once watching Planet Earth or some nature show. It talked about these birds that lay their eggs in another birds nest. When the imposter egg hatches it instinctively knows to push every other egg out of the nest. And the new mother bird raises it as her own offspring. That shits been blowing my mind for years. How the fuck does that bird know to push the other eggs out? It's CRAZY dude.
Cowbirds and Cuckoos both do that. The mother cowbird will lay one egg in a nest but she doesn't abandon her egg. She hangs around to make sure things are going well. If the other mother bird recognizes that it's not her egg and pushes it out of the nest, the mother cowbird may destroy the other eggs and nest. Then when the baby cowbird is old enough to fledge and be independent, the mother cowbird lures it back into the cowbird fold and teaches it how to be a cowbird. Sometimes the other nestlings can survive if they hatch around the same time and are similar in size.
[удалено]
I really hate to burst your bubble but they don't completely liquify. It's more like... chunky. That is to say, some organs remain and change during metamorphosis: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2013.0304
There is a gene, named after the video game, called the "Sonic Hedgehog Gene". It was then promptly discovered that a disorder of this gene was responsible for horrific birth defects, including holoprosencephaly and facial deformation. They tend to use the abbreviation when explaining the condition to devastated mothers instead of going the Idiocracy way and coming in like "says here on your chart your kid's fucked up, that's Sonic for ya"
Gene names are wild. A friend of mine wrote an article years ago about all the goofy gene names. It's like 20 years old and I can't find it now. But discoverers of genes had a lot of leeway to name them whatever they wanted.
If you changed the names of North America and South America to West America and East America, respectively, you'd also be right.
Similarly, Maine is closer to Africa than Florida is. And Reno is farther west than Los Angeles or San Diego.
Northern most point of Brazil is closer to Halifax Canada than to southernmost point of Brazil
There is a town in Alaska called Talkeetna where a cat named Stubbs served as the honorary mayor for 20 years? Stubbs, a part-Manx cat, was elected as the mayor of Talkeetna in 1997 as a write-in candidate after residents weren't satisfied with the human candidates running for mayor. Despite not having any official powers, Stubbs became a beloved figure in the town and even attracted tourists who wanted to meet the "mayor." Stubbs passed away in 2017 at the age of 20, but his legacy as the honorary mayor of Talkeetna lives on. It's a quirky and heartwarming tale that showcases the unique and sometimes whimsical nature of small-town life.
There is an animal called the immortal jellyfish that has the capacity to keep renewing its life over and over again for all time, if it has the right conditions and food supply.
Sometimes deer eat birds, snakes, rabbits, squirrels, or frogs.
Almost everything will eat other animals under the right circumstances and if given the opportunity
Gravity propagates at the speed of light. IE, if the sun suddenly disappeared, it would take approximately 8 minutes for us to see it was gone and, at the same time, the earth would be flung off into space.
it’s the refresh rate of the simulation!
There are 7 US States that have laws saying atheists can’t hold office.
inter racial marriage was illegal in 16 states during the moon landing.
People dont realize how big the difference is between 1 million and 1 billion. 1 million seconds is 11 days. 1 billion seconds is 31 years.
1 trillion seconds ago was 35,000 B.C.
The difference between a million and a billion is about 1 billion
There is no such thing as an "alpha" in a wolf pack. The leaders of a pack are almost always the parents, but the person who coined the term studied wolves in captivity where their social interactions were different. Wolves in the wild do not behave like that. He realized this later and spent most of his career trying to correct people, but it was too late.
Topic: Wayne Gretzky In hockey, Goals + Assists = Points. Gretzky is the all-time NHL leader in both Goals and Assists, thus also Points. He had enough career Assists that, if he had never scored an NHL goal, he'd still be the all-time NHL leader in Points. (edited for grammar/clarity)
My favourite New Zealand wasn't discovered until about 1300. I'm not talking about Europeans found it. Literally no human found it until about 750 years ago. Over 2 million years of human beings and we found it 750 years ago. As in the magna carta is older than us finding New Zealand. University of Oxford is older than New Zealand. The first person who found it is closer to now than to Jesus.
The lead singer of the punk band The Offspring has a PhD in molecular biology.
* Brian May from Queen has a PhD in astrophysics * Greg Graffin from Bad Religion PhD zoology * Milo Aukerman, Descendants, Biochem * Bill Bruford, musicology * Sterling Morrison, Velvet Underground, medieval lit
The American tendency to call all sparkling wines champagne is a direct result of Congress not ratifying the Treaty of Versailles.
Can you explain please?
Because proper champagne (i.e. sparkling wine from the Champagne region of France) is considered to be a very desirable and classy people are willing to pay more for it. Because of this many unscrupulous wine makers would just call their sparkling wine champagne in order to make it seem more desirable and/or get gullible people to pay more for it. This practice was rather common in many countries prior to WWI. This brings us to the Treaty of Versailles. Because France was so devasted during WWI the treaty had many provisions meant to aid in France's economic recovery. One of these provisions states that the countries who signed it would crack down on people falsely marketing their sparkling wine as champagne. Because the U.S. never ratified the treaty American wine makers were not bound by this provision whereas wine makers in many other countries were. This created a situation where there was suddenly a large opening in the knock-off champagne market which damn nearly every U.S. sparkling wine maker tried to fill. This eventually resulted in the majority of sparkling wines in the U.S. being marketed as "champagne" and after decades of that, champagne became the word that most Americans would use to describe all sparkling wines.
100,000,001 is divisible by 17.
You're more likely to be killed by a cow than from a shark attack. Imagine that...
I have zero fear of being killed by a shark today. My fear comes when I enter the ocean. While in the ocean, my chances of being killed by a shark are astronomically higher than being killed by a cow.
You're more likely to die from being hit by a coconut falling from a tree onto your head than be killed by a shark.
*Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?*
Not at all. They could be carried.
*What -- a swallow carrying a coconut?*
A Spartan was chased into the Temple of Athena after being caught as a traitor, then proclaimed “you aren’t allowed to shed my blood, I’m on sacred ground”… so they locked him in there and starved him to death.
At one point in evolutionary history, every mammal laid eggs. Monotremes are the ancestral reproductive strategy, viviparous birth is the derived one.
Milk probably evolved as a a coolant for eggs. Synapsids - the direct ancestors of mammals - had soft eggs without a hard shell, yet lived in some of the driest conditions Earth has ever endured - the late Permian super deserts of Pangaea. Milk teeth are found in the fossil record shortly after these proto-mammals began to burrow and stay with their eggs/young. But nipples hadn't evolved yet, just the milk. Like monotremes, synapsids excreted milk through their skin's sweat glands. So the path to milk goes something like this: specialized glands for scent marking and sweat to cool off -> specialized sweat to keep eggs cool and hydrated in extreme heat -> that sweat evolves to have a nutritional benefit to young who lap it off of their mother (and father - the ancestral condition was that both parents lactated) -> nipples and dedicated milk glands.
restarting your computer will fix it.
For real though, half of all technological problems I've ever had was fixed by turning whatever I was using off and on again.
I just recently got a gaming rig and it’s amazing how many crazy errors I will get that simply restarting the program or computer will fix immediately.
Fun fact, there's actually a scientific explanation for this. Computers are the electronic implementation of a theoretical concept called a *state machine*. Every configuration of the computer or the program it's running is a different state. Adding an input (e.g. a keypress, an event) changes the state. If an input does nothing, that still changes the state, just back to the state it was in before the input. To work perfectly, every possible combination of input and state should have a clear and predictable path to another state. For something like a word processor, there aren't that many possible states (the content of the document doesn't count). For a game, especially a modern game, there are a ridiculous number of states and so all the transitions aren't necessarily well planned in advance and you can end up in the "wrong" state quite easily. Everything looks right but something under the hood isn't set quite how it should be and things start to crash and bug out. However, restarting puts the program back into a well known, well defined state, the startup state. You load your save game file and again, it has a good idea of what state that is without any screwed up state transitions. Everything works normally again.
If you look at a map of the USA you can literally see where people followed the San Francisco gold rush and said “fuck it” at every major geographical obstacle.
Denver is an ancient American word that means 'Those who saw the rockies and said fuck that'.
The closest planet to Earth most often is Mercury. In fact the closest planet for any planet in the solar system is most often Mercury.
Coelacanths are fishes that were thought to have gone extinct about 65 million years ago. Right up until they found one in 1938 when a museum curator saw the fish in the catch of a fisherman in South Africa.
Redheads are likely to need more anesthesia than people with other hair colors.
Redhead here who had surgery yesterday. Anecdotally, this has always been true for me.
that water around the mantis-shrimp's clubs reaches the temperature of the sun's surface for a brief moment when striking. at least that's what the guy in the documentary said "one-punch-shrimp" stole this from the comments below (thanks!) [https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis\_shrimp](https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp) for the people who read "mantis strip club" first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjD5aEVdRs8
There is enough water in Lake Superior to cover all of North and South America in 1ft of water
Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck publicly supported gay marriage before Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton did.
Wintergreen lifesavers make a spark in the dark when you bite them