12 Farm-Fresh Trivia Tidbits for Friday, November 8, 2024

This website made an encyclopedia of words used in the Ikea catalog, and indicates the origin of each. Only some are actual Swedish words, while many others are human or place names, slang or completely and utterly made up. For example, they throw the meaningless suffix “-is” onto a lot of words, turning words like “hylla” and “bralla” (meaning “shelf” and “pants”) into “hyllis” and “brallis” (meaning “shelf thingie” and “pants thingie”).

The states of Colorado, Louisiana and Utah already accept payments via crypto, but in 2025 Detroit will become the largest city in the country to do so.

If passed, a newly proposed Australian law would ban Aussies under the age of 16 from accessing all the major social media sites. Sounds nice, honestly.

Biologists have calculated that a creature the size and mass of a human would be expected to have a brain seven times smaller than the one we’ve got jiggling around up there. We don’t know why our melons got so big, but it appears clear that the unusual size is what makes us the only species that can solve Wordle or institute capitalism.

In the ‘90s, the ingredient oral phenylephrine was considered a wonder drug that was added to cold medicines to reduce blood-vessel swelling in your nasal passage. But they just found out that, while it’s safe, it doesn’t do jack squat, so they may soon order it removed from all cold medicine.

The molecule cordycepin, which is found in certain types of fungus that grows on caterpillars and has been used in Chinese medicine for centuries, has been found to help slow the growth of some tumors.

Archaeologists uncovered the 400-year-old skeleton of a woman they believe was deemed a vampire, and was buried with a triangular padlock on her foot and a sickle over her neck.

After being fired, the former employee hacked into a third-party menu creator used by the park, and wreaked havoc in both fun and dangerous ways. They changed a bunch of the fonts to Wingdings, and sprinkled in some profanity, but also indicated that meals with nuts in them were actually safe for those with peanut allergies.

The weirdo Australian ballroom dancer who nominated herself to represent her nation, poorly, in the Olympic breaking contest and got memed into oblivion, is officially retiring from competition.

Giant African rats are very adept at sniffing out things from landmines to tuberculosis, and Tanzania just completed a successful trial in which they proved capable of finding illegal stores of rhino horns, elephant tusks and pangolin scales.

In a recent example of this relatively new field of study, experts believe they’ve found a figure painted by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel whose model may have had breast cancer at the time of the painting.

A study that looked at factors like amount of haunted locations, unsolved murders and reported ghost sightings found that Hawaii, Minnesota and Idaho are the least haunted states, while West Virginia, Michigan and New Mexico are the most haunted.