12 Farm-Fresh Trivia Tidbits for Sunday, December 29, 2024

Among these new Pokemon-esque creatures are an amphibious mouse and a super-tiny squirrel, but for some reason, scientists are most excited about a bulbous, slimy “blob-headed fish.”

Point Nemo is a huge expanse of ocean that’s as far away from all other land masses as physically possible. Several countries have dumped 263 retired spacecrafts down there since the 1970s, and the International Space Station is scheduled to join them 13,000 feet below the surface in 2031.

A new treatment for sleep apnea involves getting a nerve implant installed in your head that sends little electrical impulses to your mouth to make you stick out your tongue a little bit while you sleep, opening up your airway.

Research has indicated that an ancestor to humans that lived in North America 60 million years ago was one of the last primates that would routinely pop out multiple babies at a time. Around 50 million years ago, it became more common for primates to have a single child, which likely made more room for our brains to develop in the womb.

The CDC says that COVID dropped from the fourth-leading cause of death to the 10th, and overdose deaths dropped as well, causing life expectancy to hit 78.4 years. Pre-pandemic, it had reached a high of 78.8 years.

WordPress had previously required users to check a box indicating that they were “not affiliated with WP Engine in any way.” A judge ordered that the checkbox had to be removed, but WordPress opted instead to amend it to read, “Pineapple is delicious on pizza.”

In a crystal-clear example of institutionalized slavery, Alabama has deemed 92 percent of eligible inmates as too dangerous for parole. Eight percent parole is the lowest in the nation, and the lowest in the state’s dismal history. But many of these same workers have been allowed to work at private companies like McDonald’s.

While they technically make minimum wage, the state takes 40 percent of that, and charges them each $5 a day for transportation and $15 a month for laundry.

Svetlana Dali recently snuck onto a Delta flight and stayed in the bathroom for the entire flight from New York to Paris. She was caught and sent back to New York, but she was just caught again, this time after cutting off her ankle monitor and trying to take a Greyhound to Canada.

We’ve reached an all-time low, with just 35 percent of Americans saying they’re confident in our courts and the justice system as a whole.

RFK Jr.’s close friend and lawyer, Aaron Siri, petitioned the FDA in 2022 to revoke approval for the latest polio vaccine. Perhaps his crusade against a medicine that has saved hundreds of thousands of people every year for seven decades will be tempered when his best bud is the head of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Oaxaca, Mexico’s annual Night of the Radishes is a celebration of the vegetable that includes a sculpture competition. Juan Manuel García, aka Lord of the Radishes, won the competition for 18 consecutive years.