28 Random Facts to Entertain You

1. A giant tortoise species was believed to be extinct for 113 years, only for it to be discovered again in Galápagos, 2019.

2. Jim Carey used to get to do stand up in his 7th grade class. He used humor to fit in and his teacher made a deal with him – if he was quiet all day he would get 15 minutes at the end of class where he did stand up using material from life, the class, or doing impressions of faculty members.

3. Sri Lanka only became an island in 1480, when a cyclone destroyed the land bridge connecting it to mainland India.

4. After losing her position in her university’s anatomy department in 1938, Rita Levi-Montalcini set up a laboratory in her bedroom and studied the growth of nerve fibers in chicken embryos. This work led to her discovery of nerve growth factor, for which she was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1986.

5. A man named Göran Kropp from Sweden rode his bicycle to Nepal, climbed Mount Everest alone without Sherpas or bottled oxygen, then cycled back to Sweden again.

6. Today I learned about the symbiotic relationship of wolves and ravens. Ravens will lead wolves to prey so that they can take a portion of the leftovers, play games of tail chasing with each other, and develop individual friendships.

7. For a while in the 2010s, you could rent the country of Liechtenstein on Airbnb for $70,000 a night. This included hanging out with the monarch, temporary currency, the ability to rename streets and a key to country.

8. A study from Yale found that kids who watched ‘Mr. Rogers Neighborhood’ retained more information than children who watched ‘Sesame Street.’ They also had a higher ‘tolerance of delay’, meaning they were more patient

9. There are otter gangs in Singapore who fight for territories. It is well followed by the locals and the press. Each gang has names and reputations.

10. The reason snow is able to absorb sound is because it is porous. Snowflakes are six-sided crystals, and they are filled with open spaces.Those spaces absorb sound waves, creating a quieting effect over a blanket of snow.

11. In 1935, in a newly built Sydney aquarium, a tiger shark vomited a human arm that belonged to a man that went missing recently, which sparked a murder mystery when it was discovered the arm was severed with a knife instead of being bitten off.

12. Kathy Sullivan was the first American woman to space walk and became in June 2020 the only person to have visited both space and the deepest place on Earth, the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench.

13. When filming the TV series “The Mandalorian” in 2019, the crew ran out of Stormtrooper costumes, so they reached out to the local branch of a Star Wars fan organisation, whose members came to join the filming in their own home-made Stormtrooper costumes.

14. After Marcelo Bielsa became manager of Leeds United FC, he found out that the average fan had to work 3 hours to pay for a match ticket. He called his players together and made them pick up litter from around the training ground for 3 hours, to appreciate how the fans laboured for their passion

15. Honeybee venom rapidly kills aggressive breast cancer cells and when the venom’s main component is combined with existing chemotherapy drugs, it is extremely efficient at reducing tumour growth in mice.

16. Suzanne Somers was fired from ‘Three’s Company’ for asking for equal pay with her male co-star, John Ritter, who was earning five times her salary.

17. A field of seagrass converts carbon dioxide to oxygen at over 8x the rate of a forest the same size.

18. Firefighters that responded to last year’s fire at Notre Dame knew which works of art to rescue and in which order following a protocol developed for such a disaster.

19. Rome has major struggles with expanding the subway system in the city because diggers keep running into major archaeological finds. The Metro C expansion has been in the works for the past 40 years and has unearthed Hadrian’s Athenaeum, a military complex, and an amphitheater.

20. African elephants often bury dead or sleeping humans or aid them when they are hurt. One woman fell asleep under a tree and woke to find an elephant standing over her gently touching her. As other elephants arrived they buried her under branches. She was found the next morning unharmed.

21. Tolkien wrote yearly letters to his children as if they were from Father Christmas. They started off as simple Happy Christmas letters but grew more complex including a polar bear sidekick, the man on the moon, goblins, snow-elves, pictures, and he even developed an Arktik language.

22. In 2018, a hacker broke into people’s routers (100,000 of them) and patched their vulnerabilities up so that they couldn’t be abused by other hackers.

23. A South African farmer rescued a baby hippo from a flood and gave it a home. The farmer fed him, brushed his teeth and helped him. The farmer was found dead with severe bite marks from the hippo and his body submerged in the river where he rescued the hippo 6 years earlier

24. Legendary Hollywood director Martin Scorsese, best known for his violent gangster films, has used the same female editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, on every movie he’s made since Raging Bull in 1980.

25. Curry was introduced to Japan by the British. The British brought curry from India back to Britain and introduced it to Japan after it ended its policy of self-isolation. Curry in Japan is categorized as a Western dish

26. Since domestication, dogs’ eyes have changed. Dogs now have eye muscles that make them more expressive and infant-like. These same muscles are absent in wolves, their closest relative.

27. In September 1945 Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett defied US restrictions and snuck into Hiroshima by train. Burchett was the first to tell the world about the effects of radiation on the victims of the bombing, which the US denied both before and after his story was published.

28. Paper books still outsell e-books by a huge margin, even among young people.