12 Trivia Tidbits for Friday, August 2, 2024

Since bringing back the Olympics in 1896, Germany has 655 total medals, France has 751, Great Britain has 916 and the Soviet Union has 1,010. The U.S., however, tops the list at 2,629.

Art historian Adam Busiakiewicz noticed a rare picture of King Henry VIII in the background of a random British cop’s tweet. Upon inspection, it turned out to be from a collection commissioned in the 1590s, and has been handed over to a local museum.

Carrie Fisher’s least favorite costume, the uncomfortable gold bikini from Return of the Jedi, just sold at auction for $175,000.

North Carolina’s 175,000-square foot Biltmore Estate is the largest home in America by 7,000 square feet. It was originally owned by the Vanderbilts, and has 43 bathrooms.

Five years after Theranos got busted for being a cynical series of lies and false promises, a couple of start-ups are tag teaming to actually bring Elizabeth Holmes’ dream to life. Becton Dickinson has developed a less invasive finger prick process, while Babson Diagnostics has developed a machine that can run multiple routine blood tests with one-tenth the blood it would normally take.

Greece endured a decade-long debt crisis starting in 2009, and economic experts tend to agree that the $11 billion they shoveled into the 2004 Athens Olympics, just before a global financial crisis, didn’t exactly help.

“Pyongyang Restaurant” is a chain that’s run by the North Korean government, with about 130 franchises worldwide. They’re almost exclusively in Asian countries, but there’s one in Amsterdam, and Kim Jong-Un really wants to get one in Scotland. They specialize in kimchi, dog soup and an “unlabeled bear aphrodisiac.”

Event planner Craig Samborski was trying to plan a “tall ships festival” when a drunk coworker told him that was a dumb idea. Samborski, also drunk, came up with a better idea: a very big rubber duck. He hired a Dutch artist to draw up a sketch, but they couldn’t agree on a price, so they both built identical rubber duckies that they’re touring around the world.

Toxoplasma gondii is the parasite that has been shown to cause mice to lose their fear of cats, and has been blamed for erratic behavior among hardcore cat people. Scientists have now figured out how to use its mechanism to deliver therapeutic drugs deep inside the brain.

Entrepreneur Avi Schiffmann paid almost $2 million for the domain friend.com, to advertise his “adult Tamagotchi,” an A.I. necklace that texts you to help stave off the loneliness epidemic.

Harvard chemists have recreated conditions on early Earth, and concluded that cloud-to-ground lightning was likely the catalyst that turned a bunch of chemical goop into life.

In 1945, a dancer in a parade in Buñol, Spain got jostled by the crowd, causing his costume’s head to fall off. He started freaking out, kicking and punching everything around him. The crowd responded by knocking over a vegetable cart and pelting the dude with tomatoes. That began a yearly tradition of a huge tomato fight in the town square with sometimes over 20,000 participants. One of the official rules decreed by the Buñol City Council is “Have a great, fun time!”