Some facts feel especially suited to late-night reading: the kind that start out interesting and end somewhere between unsettling, fascinating, and completely unexpected. This mixtape pulls together history, science, crime, pop culture, and strange true stories that are hard to stop thinking about once you know them.
Deaths After Opening Royal Tomb
1. After the 1973 opening of the burial vault of Casimir IV of Lithuania and Poland, four of the twelve attendees died within several days, and six more died shortly thereafter. Subsequent analysis by a microbiologist detected fungal traces on the royal insignia removed from the vault; he identified three species: Aspergillus flavus, Penicillium rubrum, and Penicillium rugulosum. These fungi are known to produce aflatoxins that can be lethal if they contact the skin or are inhaled into the lungs.
2. At one time the U.S. military created the M65, a recoilless nuclear rifle that fired nuclear rockets.
3. The letter ‘A’ represents an upside-down ox head derived from an ancient Egyptian ox symbol, and it ‘leads’ the alphabets.
4. Dan Shechtman was publicly ridiculed for his ideas on quasicrystals. A Nobel laureate commented, ‘there is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists’. In 2011, Dan Schechtman was awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of quasicrystals.
5. A service called Phrostie hand-delivers alcoholic beverages anonymously to people of any age in the NYC region within three hours, all arranged through Instagram.
6. A vacuum flask provides very effective thermal insulation by creating a partial vacuum between two walls. Because there is almost no air or other matter present, there is nothing to transfer heat away (aside from the container itself). Large vacuum-insulated vessels using the same principle are used to store rocket fuel.
7. On the Antarctic Peninsula there are two prominent peaks called Una’s Tits, named for a woman who worked in the British Antarctic office.
8. The most powerful magnet ever built is located at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. It stands 22 feet tall, weighs 34 tons, and generates a field of 45 tesla.
9. In Osaka, American prisoner of war Glenn D. Frazier narrowly avoided execution by saying, “He can kill me, but he will not kill my spirit, and my spirit will lodge inside him and haunt him for the rest of his life.” The Japanese officer backed off.
10. On October 26, 1999, 21-year-old university student Shiori Ino was stabbed to death outside Okegawa Station in Japan by a hired killer named Yoshifumi Kubota, who had been employed by her abusive ex-boyfriend, Kazuhito Komatsu, and his associates. For months before the murder Komatsu stalked and threatened her, and Ino and her family repeatedly begged the police for help, only to be brushed off and later smeared in the media as if she were a promiscuous flirt. After journalists exposed the stalking campaign and police inaction the public reacted with outrage. In November 2000 Japan passed its first national anti-stalking law, and several police officers were eventually disciplined and criminally convicted for falsifying documents and mishandling her case.
Band Played Every Continent
11. In 2013 Metallica became the first musical group to play on every continent when they performed a live, unamplified set in Antarctica to protect the environment.
12. Prior to the Civil War some physicians labeled enslaved people with ‘drapetomania,’ described as a mental disorder in which the enslaved person had an irrational craving for freedom and a tendency to try to escape.
13. Hussain al-Shahristani, an Iraqi, spent eight years in solitary confinement under Saddam Hussein and maintained his sanity by inventing mathematical problems and attempting to solve them; he later served as Iraq’s minister of higher education and scientific research.
14. Canadian nurse and serial killer Elizabeth Wettlaufer confessed to her pastor that she had murdered four people between 2011 and 2013, and he kept his promise not to report her. She also told a lawyer, a priest, and a sponsor from Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous, none of whom came forward. Wettlaufer went on to kill two more people before her arrest in 2016.
15. The SnackWell effect describes people overindulging in items they perceive as having a free pass. Named for low-fat cookies that led consumers to eat more, the phenomenon appears in other areas as well; for example, people who use low-energy light bulbs tend to leave them on for longer.
16. At 23, French con artist Frédéric Bourdin posed as a 16-year-old missing Texas boy and lived with the boy’s family for months despite keeping a French accent and having different colored eyes than the missing teen.
17. During filming of The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese suggested Margot Robbie’s character Naomi seduce Jordan while wearing a robe; Margot refused and insisted on being nude, later saying, “The whole point of Naomi is that her body is her only form of currency in this world.”
18. American actor Yaphet Kotto, who played a James Bond villain, said the spy should not be played by a black man: “Political correctness be damned, we have to stay with what is literally correct. These roles are not written for black men” and “We have pens to create roles that no one else has established.”
19. European Starlings are a highly invasive species introduced to the U.S. by Eugene Schieffelin. Convinced America needed every bird mentioned in Shakespeare, he released about 100 starlings in New York City in 1890. They are now among the most numerous birds in North America, with populations exceeding 200 million.
20. AlphaGo, the AI that defeated the world’s top human Go player in 2016, consumed one megawatt of power while playing, roughly enough to power about 100 homes for a day.
Mechanical Sharks All Called “Bruce”
21. The mechanical sharks used in the film Jaws were collectively called “Bruce” as an homage to Steven Spielberg’s lawyer, and Bruce the Fish Friendly Shark in Finding Nemo was also a reference to Jaws.
22. The sole unsolved airline hijacking in U.S. history involved a man known as D.B. Cooper, who parachuted from the plane after his demands were met, and whose hostage described him as “thoughtful and polite.”
23. Halle Berry used to sign into AOL chatrooms anonymously so she could have ordinary conversations online without people reacting to her fame; when she eventually told other users she was Halle Berry, they refused to believe her.
24. Life most likely emerged on Earth almost immediately after the planet became habitable: the first oceans formed 4.4 billion years ago, while current evidence places the earliest life at about 4.28 billion years ago, with “instantaneous” meant on a geological timescale.
25. Freshwater snails are among the world’s most deadly animals because they transmit the organism that causes schistosomiasis (aka bilharzia), which itself is one of the planet’s most lethal parasites; nearly 230 million people were infected in 2014 and there are approximately 200,000 deaths annually.
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