12 Farm-Fresh Trivia Tidbits for Tuesday, January 14, 2025

During the six-week Hindu festival Maha Kumbh Mela, about 400 million people travel to a specific part of northern India where sacred rivers converge.

It started with tech bros microdosing shrooms and acid, and now people are microdosing Ozempic and Wegovy to help the expensive medication last longer (and make the extreme weight loss come on more gradually). Just stick to macrodosing aspartame like the rest of us.

It’s technically possible to die from capsaicin poisoning, but you’d have to eat about two percent of your own body weight to get there. Your body would probably reject it before you had that much, in processes that are both unpleasant and potentially deadly.

One study found that capsaicin can prevent and heal stomach ulcers, contrary to what Dumb and Dumber would have you believe.

The five-second rule has been tested and debunked many times over. Scientists have studied various ranges of time (from less than a second to half a minute), food textures (gummy bears, watermelon, bread, bread with butter) and surface textures (stainless steel, wood, carpet). Across the board, they’ve found that most bacteria that will ever get onto a piece of food is already on there by five seconds, and much of it makes the jump instantly.

From the years 1264 to 1827, recipients of a Master of Arts had to agree to this Latin clause: “quod numquam consenties in reconciliationem Henrici Simeonis.” In effect, “I will never agree to the reconciliation of Henry Simeonis.” There’s no record of who he was or what he did.

Scientists discovered a new type of cell, mainly found in cartilage, that acts as a “bubble wrap”-like padding and accounts for the flexibility of your nose.

If you open up Bing and type in “Google,” it will change the design of its homepage to mimic the Google homepage, and will scroll the window down just enough to cover up any Microsoft or Bing branding.

Around the 1800s, it was very popular to build panopticon-style prisons, with a large domed ceiling and a central guard tower designed to make prisoners feel constantly watched. Three of these prisons in the Netherlands are being repurposed to house multi-level malls for art exhibits, event spaces and — speaking of psychological terror — podcast studios.

After Ikea called up the Polish military to ask, “When they would collect their mines,” it was determined that they had simply forgotten to unload 1,000 tons of explosives from a train, which then made its way to an Ikea warehouse. Not a good look for a military still reeling from accusations of installing screen doors on their submarines.

Someone bought a historical landmark in Palm Beach for $148 million, someone else sold Palm Beach’s only private island for $152 million and the founder of Oakley sunglasses sold his cliffside Malibu home for $210 million.

Samsung says its smart devices, like washing machines and refrigerators, can detect unrecognized movements, and send the automatic vacuum bot to go take a picture. This is helpful for catching old-timey bandits with stockings on their heads, but is an absolute nightmare for cyber security.