12 Farm-Fresh Trivia Tidbits for Wednesday, March 12, 2025

DVDs are supposed to last for a century, but Warner Bros. recently admitted that a production glitch made any DVDs it produced between 2006 and 2008 prone to rotting.

“Dorkapalooza” is the nickname for MIT’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, where sports analyst nerds get together every year to crunch numbers and talk strategy. Dorkapalooza is responsible for, among other things, pushing the idea that it’s statistically better for MLB players to aim for home runs. That strategy led to fewer baserunners, causing more boring gameplay and directly impacting viewership.

This European Word Translator lets you type in a word or phrase, and then overlays the various translations across a map of Europe.

Tickets for the MV Narrative start at $1,000,000, and feature amenities like bioidentical hormone therapy and stem-cell treatments.

A new thermoelectric yarn has been developed that has the ability to turn body heat into electricity. The technology has been created before, but this is the first time such a material can last in the air for more than a couple of days.

During the Great Depression, people reportedly resorted to boiling rubber to make soup. People are gearing up for the next Great Depression with a weird new trend of seasoning and eating packing peanuts.

People like to think they understand their dogs’ emotions, but a new study found that anthropomorphizing gets in the way of recognizing actual emotional cues from pets. As one researcher put it, “You see a dog getting a treat, you assume he must be feeling good. You see a dog getting yelled at, you assume he’s feeling bad. These assumptions of how you think the dog is feeling have nothing to do with the dog’s behavior or emotional cues.”

Construction workers unearthed the “excessively dangerous” British bomb near some train tracks, and the threat of detonation was so large that all car traffic on the nearby beltway and all high speed and local rail traffic had to be suspended for half a day.

It’s not liquid, solid, gas or plasma; ranch dressing is what biophysicists refer to as “soft matter.” It shares that distinction with other viscoelastic substances like yogurt, toothpaste and snot.

A toddler in Oklahoma was playing with an old phone when he dialed 911 and unexpectedly got through. He ordered “emergency doughnuts” from the responding officer.

Looking at 15 years of data, MIT scientists have determined with 95 percent certainty that actively reducing CFCs is what caused the dreaded hole in the ozone layer to stop growing and begin to heal.

The beaver-like nutria is messing up local ecosystems and habitats, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has announced that “eating invasive species can help protect native wildlife.” Nutria are said to taste like rabbit or dark turkey meat.