Astronauts Cast Ballots From Low-Earth Orbit
26. When astronauts vote from space, they list their address as “low-Earth orbit” on their absentee ballots. The phrasing keeps the process practical while reflecting exactly where they are when they cast their vote.
27. Sleep helps clean the brain. As the journal Science put it, “Observations showed that when mice sleep, channels between neurons in their brains expand, allowing cerebrospinal fluid to flush out detritus, such as proteins that in human beings are associated with Alzheimer’s disease.”
28. The small town of Swastika, Ontario, faced pressure during WW2, when the provincial government tried to change the town’s name. Residents رفض? No. Residents rejected the change, saying, “To hell with Hitler, we came up with our name first.”
29. In the 17th century, a man named Lazarus Colloredo was convicted of murder. Lazarus had a parasitic conjoined twin, and he successfully argued that his death would kill his twin, an innocent man, so he was pardoned.
30. The word “utopia” is a pun. It comes from the Greek word for “good place” but also “no place,” so it describes something that is good, but it doesn’t exist.
31. Researchers have found that stressed pregnant mothers are twice as likely to have girls because male fetuses are more fragile and die off while females survive the harsh conditions. In one study, physically stressed women had only 31% boys, compared with 56% in healthy mothers.
32. An oil exploration company dug up seamonkey cysts in the 1990’s while drilling near the Great Salt Lake. Radiocarbon dating showed the cysts were 10,000 years old, and when they were placed in water, some of them hatched.
33. Walt Disney created multiple fake companies, including M.T. Lott Real Estate, to buy Florida land in the 1960s. This allowed him to acquire what is now Disney World while avoiding suspicion and keeping prices low, and the stores on Main Street shop windows are named after those original companies.
34. Shortly after Bill Gates left Harvard to start Microsoft, one of his professors remarked, “He had moved to Albuquerque to run a small company writing code for microprocessors, of all things. I remember thinking, ‘Such a brilliant kid. What a waste.'”
35. Doctor Who briefly featured Kamelion, an android who was “played” by an actual robot. Unfortunately, the writers had to kill off the character when the robot’s inventor, the only one who knew how to control it, died in a boating accident.
Bat Songs Carry a Social Script
36. Bats do more than make high-pitched sounds for echolocation, and many species also sing. After analyzing one species’ song, a team of scientists translated it as a sequence that opens with a hello, then a gender identification, then some geographic information, and then a “let’s talk” section.
37. In 1999, a British man was angered after being charged £20 for going £10 overdrawn, so he legally changed his name to “Yorkshire Bank plc are Fascist Bastards.” He did it just to receive a return cheque in that name and settle the account.
38. Six people who lived in an apartment over a period of 9 years died from leukemia. An investigation revealed a capsule containing caesium-137 embedded in the wall, believed to have gotten mixed up with construction supplies.
39. Payless set up a fake luxury store called “Palessi” to prank social media influencers. The stunt turned the discount retailer into a convincing high-end showcase before the reveal.
40. Nic Cage proposed to Patricia Arquette on the day they met, and she played along by requesting a list of impossible things to “win her,” such as J.D. Salinger’s autograph. She got spooked when he started acquiring many of the items, so she avoided him, but they met again years later and went on to marry.
41. Disney secretly bought 10,000 acres of land around Washington, DC to build a new theme park. The project was eventually abandoned because its American history theme would have been too controversial.
42. Red Bull described one man’s plan to cross the Atlantic in a 1m boat as “inspirational, but mad” and declined to sponsor him. The company did not back the attempt.
43. The word “Good” replaced an old Germanic word, “Bat,” which is why its comparative forms are “better” and “best.” The change left those forms as traces of the older language.
44. The Can-Can was originally considered scandalous when it became popular in the mid-19th century. Many women at the time wore pantalettes with an open crotch, so a high kick could be unintentionally revealing.
45. In 2003, Marvel convinced a US court that Mutants are not human to save on taxes. X-Men action figures had been imported as humanlike “dolls,” but Marvel wanted the lower tariff for “toys,” so it argued that Mutants were “nonhuman creatures.” To the chagrin of their own fanbase, they won.
A Businessman Chartered a 747 to Rescue Orphaned Children
46. When a US cargo plane crashed while moving children from Vietnam, American businessman Robert Macauley heard that it would take over a week to evacuate the survivors. He chartered a Boeing 747 and arranged for 300 orphaned children to leave the country, paying for the trip by mortgaging his house.
47. “E.T.”, “Blade Runner”, “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn”, “Poltergeist”, and “The Thing” were all released in the same month. They ended up competing with each other at the box office.
48. The band Hootie and the Blowfish was named after two college buddies of singer Darius Rucker. One friend wore huge, round glasses that made him look like an owl, while the other had big, puffy cheeks that made him look like a blowfish.
49. When Christopher Columbus heard that one of his men had sighted land in the Americas and earned a lifetime pension for it, he claimed that he had seen it the day before but simply had not bothered to mention it. He was given the pension instead.
50. At its height in the early 00s, Blockbuster Video earned nearly $800 million through late fees alone. Those fees made up 16% of its revenue.
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