12 Juicy Bits of Trivia That Have Been Genetically Modified Over Millennia of Cross-Breeding to Bare More Factual Fruit Than Their Prehistoric Predecessors
If you’d seen these factoids 10,000 years ago, you’d hardly recognize them. They each contained barely enough nourishment to sustain the average human brain for five minutes. But through thousands of years of human ingenuity, this listicle has become more bountiful than our ancestors could have ever imagined.
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A Volcanic Eruption Got Climate Scientists Thinking: What About Gigantic Fart Clouds?
After Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, massive smoke plumes caused the global temperature to drop noticeably for a time. People then began devising potential plans to have jets release streams of sulfuric acid, which would mix with water vapor in the atmosphere, creating a temporary gaseous sun visor. In other words: cloud seeding with fart acid. Cooler heads have prevailed, pointing out that this would create artificial air pollution on a devastating scale.
Political Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau Was Obsessed With His Own Ass
His private writings revealed that he loved to moon people, having at least once snuck up on a bunch of women and exposed himself — “What they saw was not the obscene thing, I never even thought of that, it was the ridiculous thing. The foolish pleasure I took in displaying it before their eyes cannot be described” — and developed an early love of spanking after getting reprimanded by his friend’s mom as a kid. Or as he put it, “To fall at the feet of an imperious mistress, obey her mandates, or implore pardon, were for me the most exquisite enjoyments.”
The 19th-Century Optometrist Who Became Obsessed With Horse Glasses
When a man came to his office in 1893 asking to get a pair of glasses fitted for his horse, an optometrist by the name of Dolland became immediately concerned about horse eyesight. Dolland believed horses spooked so easily because they were nearsighted, and developed what he believed to be the perfect pair of glasses that would cure every horse in the world. Sadly, horse glasses never caught on.
China Built an Eiffel Tower Replica, Just in Case 10,000 People Want to Pretend to Live in France
China is really into building intricate, expensive replica cities, but they don’t always pan out. Tianducheng is a city built to mimic Paris, and was designed to sustain a population of 10,000 — but only about 2,000 people bought into it. The population has since ballooned to 30,000, but mostly because Shanghai and other, more populous cities nearby have had a population boom, and people needed somewhere to go.
Michael Jackson Slept Through 9/11
Jackson is reportedly one of many people grateful that their personal schedule went accidentally awry on 9/11. His brother Jermaine claims that Michael was supposed to be at a meeting on the top floor of one of the towers at the time of the attack, but overslept after talking with their mother on the phone all night.
Some Birds Bully Other Birds Until They Puke
Some kleptoparasitic birds, including jaegers, skuas and frigatebirds, will harass other species until they regurgitate their most recent meal. The bully will then feed on the recently yakked food. This sometimes occurs in midair.
Death by Lacrosse
The Ojibwe tribe in Michigan enjoyed a lacrosse-like sport called baggatiway, which they’d often play near the British and French Fort Michilimackinac. Not by choice, of course — they’d long played the game in the area, and the Europeans just set up shop in their territory. Relations were more or less cordial, but the Ojibwe were, understandably, not psyched about the whole arrangement.
They invited the fort commander to come watch one of their games outside the fort gates, then mid-game, “accidentally” launched a ball inside the fort. When a group of athletes ran in to fetch it, they also took up arms, killed about 20 soldiers and held the rest hostage while they plundered the whole place.
A Christmas Burglar Almost Got Stuck in the Chimney
A California man attempting to rob a bar just before Christmas 2017 decided to festively descend into the establishment via the chimney. As they often do, this chimney had a 90-degree turn about halfway down, and the guy got terrifyingly lodged deep inside the 18-inch wide pipe. He eventually managed to get his cell phone out and call the cops on himself. He looks like an old-timey chimney sweep in his mugshot.
You Could Probably Outrun a T. Rex
For a long time, scientists thought the leggy and muscular T. rex could run up to 45 miles per hour, but studies of large animal anaerobic activity have caused them to revise it to about 16.6 miles per hour. Their bodies were just so massive, they weren’t capable of getting enough oxygen to the right places quickly enough to run at highway speeds. The average human can reach about 15 miles per hour, but we’re willing to bet they could find that extra 1.5 MPH if there was a house-sized lizard dog on their tail.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Wife Burned the First Draft of ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’
The story came to Stevenson in the middle of a coke-fueled nightmare. His wife Fanny woke him up, and he immediately drafted up a 30,000-word manuscript, which he believed was the greatest work he’d ever written. Fanny disagreed, calling it “utter nonsense,” and lit the whole thing on fire. She had more constructive criticism, too — including the idea that the doctor’s transformation should represent the deep inner struggle of being human, instead of just because it sounds cool — which he incorporated into the now-classic second draft.
Life Never Gave Us Lemons — They’re Humanmade
Lemons were cultivated by cross-breeding a bunch of significantly less-yellow citrus fruits, like sour oranges. It likely happened about 2,000 years ago, in the foothills of the Himalayas.
The Appendix May Be a Backup Drive for Your Gut Biome
When you get sick and expel the contents of your stomach and intestines, it absolutely devastates the delicate but extremely important microbiome inhabiting your guts. Research has indicated that the appendix can help in building it back up, as it stores much of the same bacteria in an organ that can’t be cleaned out by some bad chicken.
