12 Trivia Tidbits for Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Some spiders will chow on the occasional bit of plant nectar, but Bagheera kiplingi, a central American jumping spider, almost exclusively consumes the ends of the acacia plant.

The babirusas is an Indonesian deer-pig with tusks that first sprout up through its snout, then can curl back and pierce its skull if it doesn’t constantly grind them down.

From 2011 to 2014, a crew of costumed crime fighters patrolled the streets of Seattle, attempting to solve and thwart crime. They claimed to have broken up fights and prevented drunk driving, and are confirmed to have stopped some bozos dressed as cops stealing from a blind man.

Polytetrafluoroethylene was an accidental byproduct discovered by a DuPont scientist messing around with refrigerant chemicals. When he noticed the substance was highly repellant, it became useful in manufacturing various military equipment. Later, a different researcher was trying to use it in fishing equipment, when his wife said he should plop that shit onto all their frying pans. There’s probably nothing wrong with superheating it into all of our food.

Scientists discovered a virus that thrives on a particular fungus that grows on some grasses, and found that it seemed to be linked to those grasses’ ability to thrive in hot climates. They infected some tomatoes with that be-virused fungus, and found they were able to grow in 140-degree dirt.

The unknown author of Beowulf seems to have made up a word that has baffled linguists for centuries. The epic poem contains the only known use of the word aeppelfealu, which appears to be a portmanteau of the old english word for “apple” and a word that refers to lots of different colors, depending on context. It’s used to describe a horse, but it’s unclear where exactly horse colors and apple colors overlap.

In 1854, 101 years before Rosa Parks made her stand, church organist Elizabeth Jennings Graham was dragged out of a whites-only streetcar by police. She took the railroad company to court (represented by future president Chester A. Arthur), ultimately forcing the city to desegregate its transportation system a decade later.

Venus flytraps are native to North and South Carolina, but harvesting and illegal poaching have beaten them back to a small area just around Wilmington, North Carolina. Poaching of Venus flytraps has been a felony since 2014, and prosecutions of the crime have proven to be a pretty solid deterrent.

The oldest example of two vertebrates who became fossilized mid-coitus was discovered in Germany’s Messel pit, a hotbed of fossil study. Two small turtles were apparently killed and then preserved right in the middle of bumping uglies, which isn’t the worst way to go out, all things considered.

“Globsters” are carcasses of sea creatures that are so deformed from the oddities of underwater decomposition that they boggle the terrestrial mind when they wash ashore. A globster becomes hairy when its muscle tissue is broken down into long, stringy strands. To this day, hairy globsters are often mistaken for alien life or mythical creatures.

Riverside, Iowa is Captain Kirk’s canonical hometown, and residents have erected an ironically gravestone-looking plaque denoting his birthdate of March 22, 2228.

After World War II, Schindler went bankrupt and lost the businesses and factories he’d acquired to employ many Jewish people to spare them from labor camps. He started up a cement company in West Germany, but the bulk of his income for the rest of his life came from charitable donations.