27 Interesting Facts to Pique Your Interest
Just because you're old that doesn't mean you can't still learn new tricks. So consider yourself lucky that others before you did their homework because, without them, we wouldn't know these weird and wild facts.
1.
The way the sun "gives" people vitamin D is by converting cholesterol in the skin to vitamin D.
2.
In 2009 Burger King ran the "Whopper sacrifice" campaign, which gave a free whopper to anyone who deleted 10 friends on Facebook. Facebook suspended the program because Burger King was alerting people letting them know they'd been dropped for a sandwich.
3.
A female reporter attempted to recreate the famous novel "Around The World In 80 Days". Not only did she complete it with eight days to spare, she made a detour to interview Jules Verne, the original author.
4.
Martin Luther King Jr was a huge fan of Star Trek. He loved that it showed a future with people of all colors working together in harmony. He bumped into Uhura, Nichelle Nichols, at a convention. She said she was quitting. She ended up staying after MLK urged her to, saying she was a role model.
5.
Hisako Koyama, a female Japanese astronomer who hand drew sunspots every day for more than 40 years. Her detailed sketches aid researchers in studying solar cycles and the sun's magnetic fields.
6.
2010 Vancouver luge gold medallist Felix Loch had his medal melted into 2 discs and gave one to the parents of a deceased competitor who died in a practice run on the day of the opening ceremony.
7.
That since Brazil could not afford to send a team to the 1932 Olympics, they sent the athletes on a ship full of coffee. The athletes sold the coffee along the way to fund their journey.
8.
Thought destroyed by Nazis, a priceless mosaic owned by Roman emperor Caligula ended up as a coffee table for 50 years in a NYC apartment.
9.
That breast milk can adapt to a babies' illness and produce more milk with illness-specific antibodies.
10.
That Loving Day in June celebrates the day that Interracial Marriage became legal in the US.
11.
An FBI whistleblower reported multiple problems in forensic cases. After years of the FBI seeking to ruin him, his claims were investigated and a report showed that forensic hair analysis was flawed or inaccurate over 90% of the time.
12.
That Mississippi did not make child-selling illegal until 2009, after a woman tried to sell her granddaughter for $2,000 and a car and it was discovered that there was no law to punish her under.
13.
That to save the Hawaiian culture and people from disappearing, Kalākaua, the last king of the Hawaiian kingdom, went on a world tour in 1881, and travelled to Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, and he became the first reigning monarch to circumnavigate the globe.
14.
Thankful Villages (also known as Blessed Villages) are those few villages in Britain to which suffered no casualties in the First World War. These villages had lost no men in the war because all those who left to serve came home again when war ended.
15.
That in the 1950s, a psychiatrist had three paranoid schizophrenic patients who each believed they were Jesus Christ. He put them in a room together to see if their beliefs would change after confronting each other. They did not, in fact, change their beliefs but each individually came to the conclusion that the other two men were insane. They made a movie about it, called Three Christs.
16.
Of The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902. The French wanted rats exterminated from the sewer system. They set a bounty for each dead rat tail. Thousands of tails were submitted per day but the rat problem only grew worse. They found the hunters were breeding, not hunting, rats for their tails.
17.
More than 30 million viewers in Britain tuned in to watch the BBC “Royal Family” documentary in 1969, such that during the intermission, the flushing of toilets all over London caused a water shortage.
18.
Finland used a lot of resources and logistics during WW II to bring the fallen to their home parishes for a proper funeral, instead of using mass graves in the battlefield.
19.
That Tarzan actor and Olympic swimmer Johnny Weismuller and his brother were swimming in Lake Michigan when they saw a boat capsize. They pulled at least 14 people from the water, and 11 of those people survived.
20.
That Ethiopia has a unique calendar which is 7-8 years behind the rest of the world. The current year in Ethiopia is 2014.
21.
Emerson Romero was a silent film actor who was deaf. When movies with sound were invented, deaf actors got less roles and the intertitle text was removed. This led him to make an early form of movie captioning in 1947 so that movies would still be accessible to deaf people.
22.
That the work of Charles Drew, a pioneer in preserving blood, led to large-scale blood bank use, U.S. blood donations to Britons in WWII, and the use of bloodmobiles. He resigned as chief of the first American Red Cross blood bank over a policy that separated the blood of black and white people.
23.
Leonard Nimoy refused to join Star Trek the Animated Series without George Takai and Nichelle Nichols claiming they were proof of ethic diversity in the 23rd century.
24.
In 2020, Colombians shipped 130 grams of cocaine to Italy, inside individually hollowed out coffee beans. They were caught when a customs official noticed the "sender" shared the same name as a mafia boss in John Wick.
26.
That Paul McCartney is the only artist to reach the top of the UK charts as a solo artist, duo, trio, quartet, quintet and musical ensemble.
27.
When Charles Darwin was sent some flowers from a friend he noticed one flower was extremely long and bet some moth with really long mouth parts exists to pollinate it. A few years later that moth was discovered.
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