12 Trivia Tidbits for Monday, April 8, 2024

Four years ago, three cryptographers posted a YouTube video claiming to have cracked the Zodiac Killer’s infamous Z340 cipher. The FBI even weighed in on it, saying they think the group nailed it. They’ve now published a paper detailing how they went about solving it.

A study from the 1990s found that women who have at least three orgasms per week look 10 years younger, and couples in their 40s who have 50 percent more sex than average tend to look five to seven years younger. The study concluded that genetics account for only about 25 percent of what makes a person look youthful.

Construction on the 6,600-pound, 3,200-megapixel “Legacy Survey of Space and Time” camera has just been completed at a Chilean observatory. Its incredible resolution will collect more data than ever before about the southern sky, ideally picking up some clues about the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

A study found that amphibians may warn of, and ward off, predators by emitting a scream so high-pitched, it’s inaudible to the human ear. So all the space between those adorable ribbits may actually be filled with bloodcurdling howling.

Scientists recently found the oldest known tapeworm trapped in amber, and were able to use frozen context clues to forensically piece together the death of a fish. The story goes that a shark ancestor with a belly parasite got itself beached on a shore and died. Then a scavenging dinosaur came along, violently tore it to shreds, sending its guts splattering against a tree. Some of that viscera became encased in sap, and ultimately fossilized as amber.

Hot Topic traffics in horror franchises and goth kid accessories. The Castle of Otranto, published in 1765 by Horace Walpole, is widely regarded as the first-ever horror novel. It’s credited specifically with kicking off the whole goth subculture, including gothic literature, art, films and the aesthetic of those feisty brooding mall teens.

Andrew Jackson made it his personal mission to get the U.S. out of debt, so he sold a ton of federal land and dissolved some national banks, finally getting the ledger to zero in 1853. Then a real-estate bubble caused a six-year depression, which, in turn, led to the invention of the credit rating, and it’s all been downhill from there.

They’ve already started ruining their traditional search platform with irrelevant and paid results, and now they’re toying with the idea of a paid, A.I.-based search platform. We can expect the free version to deteriorate further when they implement a subscription tier for a search engine.

Filmmaker Harry Everett Smith cobbled together 250 paper planes of all different shapes and designs in the 1960s and 1970s, which were donated to the Smithsonian upon his death. He would go to great lengths to collect specimens, even running into traffic if he saw a good one in the street.

Some influential Twitter users have found that they’ve been given a reward for being famous and/or power users on the app: the blue checks that were taken from them when Musk thought everyone would gladly pay for the privilege. He’s also gifted them a “Premium+” subscription, the very product that no one wanted to pay $168 per year for.

The first aquatic remotely operated vehicle, POODLE, was developed by the Navy in 1953 to help with underwater tests. The most recent development in the saga of the government making fake fish is Charlie, the CIA’s false catfish designed to grab water samples from deep water. Or so they claim.

After shuttering their $10 billion electric vehicle wing, Apple seems poised to pivot to home robotics, planning stuff like a little sentient Roomba that follows you all over your house.