12 Trivia Tidbits for Friday, April 5, 2024

You heard me right: self-dyeing vegan leather. Scientists have made a breakthrough with sustainable material, creating a genetically modified strain of bacteria that produces a completely plastic-free, leather-life material. Oh, and it’s self-dyeing.

In 1959, two pilots traded off flying a tiny plane over Las Vegas for 64 days, 22 hours and 19 minutes. The record has yet to be broken, even by a solar-powered drone designed specifically to do so in 2022. The drone broke down and crashed four hours before it hit the record.

Eastern Michigan’s Zack Conti was working two jobs and donating his plasma to be able to continue to afford tuition. The head coach pleaded with EMU to hand out one more scholarship, but the school repeatedly denied his requests. Teammate Brian Dooley stepped up and handed his scholarship over to Conti.

Researchers have developed, but not yet perfected, a skullcap infused with brain sensors that can be used to play video games. Despite still being a bit wonky, it did allow users to play two games simultaneously.

An extremely rare genetic disease, early-onset metachromatic leukodystrophy, has finally gotten a cure: a one-time gene therapy treatment called Lenmeldy, that costs $4.25 million.

Japan’s Kyoto University ran a clinical test on the trust and patience of 34 dogs. A researcher would successively point to a series of containers, prompting the dogs to run over and check them out. The first would have food in it, but the second wouldn’t. By the third container, the dogs would understand that the human was unreliable, and would generally not bother investigating.

The official European Tree of the Year Award has gone to a Polish tree for three years in a row. The 2024 winner is a gorgeous 200-year-old common beech tree called Heart of the Garden, which lives in a university’s botanical garden.

The anti-diet movement started as an organic body positivity campaign, but junk-food companies have begun infiltrating it. The Washington Post and The Examiner uncovered a whole campaign by General Mills to get influencers to promote conveniently pro-junk food research, and spin health tips as “food shaming.”

Metal-detector enthusiast Richard Brock was walking around with a detector that was “pretty much kaput” when he stumbled upon the nearly 65-gram beauty in Shropshire. It’s the largest clump of gold on record to have been discovered in England. 

A man pled guilty to stealing a solid gold toilet from Blenheim Palace, the estate where Churchill was born. Technically speaking, the toilet was installed in 2019, so it’s very unlikely Churchill actually pooped in it.

When singer Liam Payne started a Twitter account for his new puppy in 2013, he was inundated with death threats. It wasn’t random internet trolls, but genuine One Direction stans, who blamed the puppy for getting Liam back together with his girlfriend.

Lopburi, a popular tourist destination that has been swarmed with monkeys, is finally implementing a plan to get them out of town. First, they're targeting the alphas, hoping their absence cools things off a bit, like removing a queen bee from a hive. Stage two is building out-of-town enclosures for the captured monkeys, with distinct monkey gangs being housed separately to avoid brawls.