29 Facts to Nourish Knowledge Receptors

1. In 2012 a British man named Wesley Carrington bought a metal detector and within 20 minutes found gold from the Roman Age worth £100,000.

2. the U.S. military has used superstition and pretended to be vampires and ghosts to scare enemies away. They dispersed scary horoscopes in Germany, staged vampire attacks in the Philippines, and in Vietnam blasted ghost tapes which consisted of spooky music and eerie voices. Only vampires worked.

3. that Apples are not ‘true to seed’, so the seeds from any particular variety apple will not grow to be the same variety as the apple tree they came from. E.g. If you planted seeds of Granny Smith it likely will produce a wide variety of different and unknown apple tree types.

4. Bill Murray got so annoyed with producers on the set of 'Groundhog Day' that he hired a deaf Personal Assistant to handle all interactions with the studio, despite him nor anyone else knowing sign language.

5. there is a group of wolves in British Columbia known as "sea wolves" and 90% of their food comes from the sea. They have distinct DNA that sets them apart from interior wolves and they're entirely dedicated to the sea swimming several miles everyday in search of food.

6. Hitler planned to replace Berlin with a megacity, Germania, to showcase Nazi power. The plan was a metropolis of madness, with wide thoroughfares only for military parades, car and foot traffic directed to underground tunnels, and no traffic lights anywhere.

7. the Dr. Heimlich fought against the Red Cross for 20 years over the practice of giving "5 back slaps" being a better alternative to the Heimlich Maneuver.

8. that the details of the Manhattan Project were so secret that many workers had no idea why they did their jobs. A laundrywoman had a dedicated duty to "hold up an instrument and listen for a clicking noise" without knowing why. It was a Geiger counter testing the radiation levels of uniforms.

9. that in 1982, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was rushed to hospital when a fish bone became stuck in her throat, and she ended up having an operation to remove it. Being a keen fisher, she calmly joked when it was done: "The salmon have got their own back".

10. That elephants stay cancer free as they have 20 copies of a key tumor-fighting gene; humans have just one.

11. a woman quit her job to search for her border collie who escaped from a hotel room during a thunderstorm while on vacation in Kalispell, Montana. After 57 days of searching and posting hundreds of flyers around town, she finally found ‘Katie’ who was starving, but otherwise OK.

12. that the world record for the most passengers on an aircraft was set during Israel's evacuation of Jews from Ethiopia in 1991, when a single 747 carried at least 1,088 people, including two babies who were born on the flight.

13. an Austrian man left $2.4 million to the French village that hid him from the Nazis

14. that after the Black Plague, depopulation in Europe caused a shortage of laborers, who then were able to demand higher wages for work. Some estimates state that the typical worker's wages had increased by 50 percent

15. that in USA, parents are 12.7% less likely to be happy than childless people.

16. that Albert I of Belgium is called the "Knight King" because he personally led his army in combat for all of WWI; also his wife, Elizabeth of Bavaria, served as a nurse in front-line field hospitals.

17. we use 100% of our brain. It is a myth we only use a small portion of our brain, and no scientific evidence supports such a hypothesis as a valid theory.

18. that Americans are consistently more confident than Britons in which animals they believe they can beat in an unarmed fight, with 8% thinking they could take out an elephant if needed

19. that in 2006, a couple lost for three nights in the San Jacinto Mountains of CA were rescued because they were able to light a signal fire from matches they found in the abandoned camp of a lost hiker who vanished exactly One year before their incident.

20. when Steve Buscemi was 4-years-old he was hit by a bus and managed to survive with a fractured skull. He received a $6,000 settlement from the city that was to be collected from a trust fund when he turned 18. When Buscemi turned 18, he used part of the money to pay for full-time acting classes.

21. that the North America — and the USA in particular, has the world's most extreme weather, averaging more than 10,000 severe thunderstorm events per year, with more than 1,000 tornadoes.

22. The US is one of 3 countries on Earth not using the metric system, but the US N.I.S.T. says that's a myth because the US has been metric for years.

23. in WWII, Germany carried out only one land operation in north America, the installation of a secret weather station in Newfoundland. They scattered American cigarette packets and planted a sign saying "Canadian Meteor Service" in case anyone found it, and the site wasn't rediscovered until 1977.

24. one of the Dead Sea Scroll caves, discovered in 1952, contained up to 15,000 torn fragments. One archaeologist spent his life piecing them together, but died in 1979 with the work unfinished.

25. there were no tomatoes, potatoes, blueberries, peanuts, corn, beans, chocolate, vanilla, or tobacco in the old world until about the year 1500, as they are native to the Americas. This was part of the Columbian Exchange which also included many other plants, animals, fungi and diseases.

26. a survey in 2011 revealed that nearly 8 in 10 Americans believe in angels

27. about "lonely negatives". These are words with common prefixes or suffixes such as "dis-", "in-", "un-", "-less" but they don't have positive counterparts such as the words "disgust", "disappoint", "reckless" - they don't have "gust", "appoint", or "reckful" as their opposites.

28. Cats rival dogs on many tests of social smarts, but very few scientists have the patience to try and study them

29. it takes the poop excreted by the climbers at Mt Everest's highest base camp five years to move through the ice and arrive at the lowest base camp, where it is consumed by climbers in the drinking water.