12 Farm-Fresh Trivia Tidbits for Wednesday, November 13, 2024

It’s hard to know which claims of provenance are legit as you go further back in time, but Sean’s Bar in Athlone, Ireland (almost the exact center of the country) is credibly believed to have been established in 900 AD.

German slackliners Friedi Kuehne and Lukas Irmler set the record by walking between two hot air balloons at 2,500 meters high.

Denisovans are an ancient subspecies of humans that are distinct from Neanderthals, the only remains of which are a finger, some teeth and a few skull fragments. From just those extremely limited samples, scientists have found three different sub-subspecies of Denisovans in some human DNA. There seems to have been a few millennia where human hookup culture was absolutely off the charts.

Scientists have designed a concept for a Rubik’s cube that has an infinite number of possible states, and could take tens of millions of moves to solve. By replacing each piece with quantum particles, they bring “the square root of a permutation” into the equation, meaning that any side could be moved and not moved at the same time.

Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” sat at number one for 19 weeks in 2019. Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” is creeping up there, having just taken over second place at 17 weeks.

Elwood Edwards got a gig saying “You’ve got mail,” “File’s done” and “Goodbye” because his wife did customer service at AOL back in 1989. He got a one-time payment of $200.

Researchers have created an extremely high-res hologram of a mouse fetus: a 3D compilation of 8,000,000 cells, color-coded by organ and system.

The City of Paris has been hard at work repairing the cathedral after it was obliterated in a fire five years ago. Its eight bells have been restored, and three new ones have been added, including one from the 2024 Paris Olympics.

NASA’s Voyager II banked a bunch of data when it cruised past Uranus in 1986, but they now believe it may have coincided with a huge solar wind event, which would have skewed the numbers. That would mean they’ve thought the planet’s magnetosphere was way stronger than it actually is for almost 40 years.

Victoria Woodhull ran for office in 1872, almost 50 years before women had the right to vote in America. As part of her campaign, she publicized the admitted affair of a prominent clergyman to highlight the hypocrisy of gender expectations. She was jailed because she sent details of the affair to the press via federal mail, violating obscenity laws.

An Aussie surfer spotted an Emperor penguin on a secluded beach in Australia. Scientists think the juvenile male (penguin, not surfer) swam out further than usual in search of food, and eventually found himself 2,100 miles from home.

To fix a widespread problem with its capacity to deliver cargo, Japan is developing a humongous 320-mile conveyor belt between Tokyo and Osaka to more quickly and efficiently transport cargo.