12 Farm-Fresh Trivia Tidbits for Tuesday, December 17, 2024

In 1994, scientists saw comet fragments hit the surface of Jupiter. We know stuff runs into other stuff in space, but it was the first time we got to see it happen in real time. Thirty years later, astronomers believe the debris from those collisions has settled into a permanent orbit around the planet in the form of a faint ring.

An A.I. blood-screening device appears to be able to detect breast cancer with 98 percent accuracy at earlier stages than current tests. Until Grok learns how to keep my grandmother alive, he needs to quit boiling the Great Lakes to spread Elon-approved propaganda.

An adorable scrappy mutt named Scrim has been evading capture by well-meaning animal rescue teams in New Orleans. He’s escaped from kennels, and scrambled away from net launchers and tranquilizer darts.

A guy who took out Baseball's Zaniest Stars as a 13-year-old in 1974 has been given permission to keep the book by a Detroit library on the occasion of its 50-year due date. The late fee would have been about $4,564, an amount he’s now looking to raise for the nonprofit literacy group Reading Is Fundamental.

A stunt called The Final Experiment has cobbled together tens of thousands of dollars to send one flat Earth influencer and one normal STEM influencer to Antarctica “to settle the shape of the Earth debate.” So far, the flat Earther has conceded that there is a 24-hour sun at the South Pole, but has stopped short of saying definitively that the Earth is a globe.

On Venus, pyrite is vaporized and can form a metallic frost. On Mars, spontaneous formation of dry ice would likely resemble falling snow. Bodies in the asteroid belt probably shoot off methane crystals from their ice volcanoes. And the gas giants seemingly have horrid-smelling snow-like phenomena made out of ammonia or methane.

An Italian bus driver was stalked by his company when he took time off of work to treat his anxiety. When his stalkers found him playing piano at a wine bar, he was fired. But a court just ruled that wine and music are actually legitimate ways to treat anxiety, and ordered the company to give him his job back.

One pediatric ER doctor has advised against these major injurers of playful children: toys with those tiny, delicious disc-shaped batteries, water beads that swell up when swallowed, electric scooters and hoverboards that are magnets for broken bones and concussions and that perennial nightmare: the trampoline.

The constellation called the Seven Sisters, or the Pleiades, is the subject of different myths and legends from cultures around the world. The odd thing is that there are only six visible stars in the Pleiades, though stories across cultures usually refer to seven. Astronomers believe there would have been a seventh visible star about 100,000 years ago, which would mean those stories have existed for many, many millennia. 

Not in Wyoming, at least. Wyoming highway cops bragged on social media about pulling over a car decked out with Christmas lights because it broke their “no red or blue lights on cars” statute.

A market research firm says that, after 56 years on the market, Hot Wheels may be the best-selling toy ever. On average, Mattel is selling 22.5 of these bad boys every second.

Jacob Schweppe started bottling and selling carbonated water in 1783, making Schweppes the first and oldest soda brand in history.