Australia once lost a prime minister. As in straight up
couldn't find him. They have yet to find him. ( Harold Holt
)
The Champawat Tiger was a female Bengal tiger responsible for an estimated 430 deaths in Nepal and India.
There was once a war between Honduras and El Salvador started by a soccer game.
It rains diamonds on Saturn, and Jupiter.
When I tell people that Bob Marley's father was white, oh the nonbelievers!
People completely shave orangutans and force them into prostitution.
The Mongolian Navy consists of a tugboat with a seven man crew. Only one of them can swim.
The Who's first drummer, Keith Moon, was the godfather of The Who's current drummer, Zak Starkey, who is also the son of Ringo Starr, The Beatles' drummer.
More people are killed each year by vending machines than by sharks.
Warner Bros was founded a few months before the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Even crazier is that Nintendo was founded 34 YEARS before it fell.
Humans share 50% of their DNA with... bananas.
France has more time zones than USA or Russia. (For those wondering, it's because France owns a lot of island nations on Earth.)
Maine is the closest US state to Africa.
The current United States flag was designed by then 17 years old Robert G. Heft, as part of a school project. He received a grade of B-
Fortune cookies were invented in America and are seen in China as an american symbol.
Gravity propagates at the speed of light. So if the sun were to suddenly disappear, we would continue orbiting for 8 minutes.
If there're 23 people in a room, there's a 50% chance two of them share a birthday. edit: google "birthday paradox" for more information.
Blue whales don't have enough blood in their body to get an erection, they would pass out from lack of blood in the brain. To compensate - female blue whale vaginas are the size of an average living room. edit: I'm getting lots of questions about this one. I believe that they just ejaculate while semi-flaccid so it's not very accurate and that's why the large vaginas are there. They cum over 5 gallons at a time though, now you know.
There are more ways to shuffle a deck of cards then there are atoms in our solar system.
Cleopatra lived closer in time to the moon landing than she did to the building of the Great Pyramids.
There are more public libraries than McDonald’s in the US.
7 out of 8 battle deaths in WWII were between the Russians and the Germans - this includes the entire world at the time.
The grandsons of tenth US President John Tyler (born 1790) are still living.
A day on venus is longer than a year on venus.
Hippo milk is pink. That's right, pink.
Your body is creating and killing 15 million red blood cells per second.
Shaq only ever hit one 3 point shot.
Photographs taken of the Eiffel Tower at night are subject to copyright law.
Most toilets flush in E Flat.
Reno is west of L.A. Also, six US Capitals are west of L.A.
Cosmic rays from outer space cause glitches in your electronics. In some electronics, cosmic rays are the primary source of soft errors. Cosmic rays are one of the main reasons that servers and high reliability computers use error correcting RAM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_error#Cosmic_rays_creating_energetic_neutrons_and_protons
There were people who were killed by the Atom bombs who were born during Japan's Samurai era.
Japans military went from swords, spears and bows to
planes, tanks and aircraft carriers in a single humans
lifetime. And people say Civilization is unrealistic.
The United States in World War 2 created a bomb that used bats. The bats would be carrying small incendiary charges and would be released from the bomb in mid air, causing them to fly and scatter to different buildings in the area. The charges would then detonate and set all the buildings on fire. It was tested and proven to be very effective.
This was actually APPROVED by the government for development and production, and then cancelled because of the atomic bomb. The idea was thought up by a Dentist who was friends with Eleanor Roosevelt.
If every star in our galaxy had a trillion planets, each with a trillion people living on them, and each of these people has a trillion packs of cards and somehow they manage to make unique shuffles 1,000 times per second, and they'd been doing that since the Big Bang, they'd only just now be starting to repeat shuffles.
That was copied from this QI article.
The number of ways to shuffle a deck of cards is
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,
975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000.
If you had one rubik's cube for every possible permutation of the cube, and laid them out end to end.... it would stretch out for 261 light years.
The cube is often advertised as having "billions" of possible permutations, because the general public is considered unable to comprehend the real number, which is 43,252,003,274,489,856,000.
The current world record for solving a rubik's cube is
5.55 seconds.
A little single celled parasite called Toxoplasma Gondii rewires a rats brain to seek out cat urine. This essentially gives the rat suicidal tendencies so that it will be killed and consumed by its natural predator, transmitting the metal as fuck parasite on to its new host.
Did I mention that it's the most common parasite in the human
population? And that it's effects may
not be limited to rats?