12 Farm-Fresh Trivia Tidbits for Sunday, November 24, 2024
Evolutionarily speaking, the b-hole walked so the brain could run.
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The New Weapon in the War on Remote Work: Scent Marketing
When Abercrombie & Fitch fills the mall with a thick musk of cologne, or when Subway pipes air from their kitchen to their door, that’s called “scent marketing.” And managers across the country are employing this tactic by maintaining a pacifying stink in offices, to keep you from longing for the scent of your own home.
The World’s Tallest Woman and the World’s Shortest Woman Had a Tea Party
Seven-foot-seven Rumeysa Gelgi and 2-foot-7 Jyoti Amge met up for tea in London to celebrate Guinness World Record Day.
China Has More Than Enough Railroad to Circumnavigate the Earth
China is about to eclipse 33,000 miles of track for high-speed rail, which is 8,000 more miles than the circumference of the planet.
Global Warming Has Unearthed a Whole Ecosystem That Predates the Dinosaurs
A hiker in the Alps discovered fossilized footprints of reptiles and amphibians from 280 million years ago, about 35 million years before the first dinosaurs. The fossils used to be covered in snow and ice, but the climate crisis took care of that.
Lucy Turns 3,200,050
Lucy, the 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis fossil who proved that our big brains came after we started walking upright, was discovered 50 years ago this week. She was named after “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.”
Sewage Beer
A group of researchers from Singapore debuted a beer made with treated wastewater at the U.N. Climate Conference, highlighting innovations in water conservation.
Researchers Want to Hijack Mosquitoes to Spread a Malaria Vaccine
Scientists have successfully genetically altered the bacteria that causes malaria, a major step toward getting a vaccine into the bodies of the little freaks who are spreading the illness in the first place.
What Shape Do You Associate With the Letter R?
A study of speakers of 28 different languages found that 88 percent of participants associate the letter R with a jagged line.
The World’s Thinnest Spaghetti
Scientists have created a 400-nanometer strand of spaghetti that’s 200 times thinner than a human hair.
It’s Official: The First Millennial Saint
London teen Carlo Acutis, who died in 2006, has officially had his second “miracle” pinned to him, setting him up for canonization. He’s known as “God’s influencer” and is being pitched as the patron saint of the internet.
Forget the Brain, We Owe Everything to the Noble B-Hole
The earliest versions of life had but a single orifice to both consume nutrients and expel waste. The first organism to develop a “through-gut” (aka a cornhole) made the most valuable single contribution to animal complexity in our planet’s history.
The World’s Largest Artificial Reef
The SS United States was a popular vessel for cross-continental travel during the 1950s and 1960s, and while it’s been retired for years, several entrepreneurs tried to squeeze a few more bucks out of it. Its final voyage will be to Florida’s Gulf Coast, where it’ll be sunk in the hopes that coral want to move in.