12 Farm-Fresh Trivia Tidbits for Wednesday, November 20, 2024

African mayflies set their mating schedules around the moon, a bird called the nightjar adjusts its hunting and traveling schedules based on the full moon, swifts fly 4,000 meters higher during the full moon and dung beetles use the full moon to help them roll their balls of dook in a straight line

Sorry for the worst sentence you’ve read all week. Haliey Welch just released a dating app called Pookie Tools (after her pet name for her boyfriend), that uses A.I. to suggest date locations and rate your messages for flirtiness.

A Pew report says that 21 percent of American adults get their news from content creators on social media, rather than traditional media. That number rockets to 40 percent among adults under 30.

Some of the most precise time-keeping measurements are made by observing the pulsating of cesium atoms, which oscillate 9,192,631,770 times every second. One incredibly precise clock observes strontium atoms, which oscillate 50,000 times faster than that. Scientists just made a breakthrough in nuclear timekeeping, which is even more precise, and could help them begin to understand the nature of dark matter, and the relationship between gravity and time.

Tropicana indulged in a little shrinkflation, as a treat, and also made their iconic carafe-style bottle way more generic. Customers noticed immediately, and sales dropped 19 percent in just the first few months of the rollout.

Those 43 monkeys who escaped a South Carolina lab are worth up to $60,000 each. The lab has been unable to capture almost all of them, and speculation is growing over whether a local resident can legally capture, sell or rescue one. There’s some legal precedent in New York that says an escaped animal no longer belongs to its previous owner.

The Nonhuman Rights Project sued the Bronx Zoo on behalf of an elephant, but lost that suit in 2022. The Colorado Supreme Court is mulling over a similar suit brought by the group.

A study found that fat tissue cells change at a genetic level, taking in nutrients at a faster rate even when metabolism was taken out of the equation. This may account for why it can be incredibly hard to keep weight off for an extended period of time.

A New Hampshire pet owner didn’t bother to separate his pet mice by sex, and the mouse gestation period is only 20 days, so these li’l freaks multiplied like crazy. He brought 75 of them to an animal shelter, promising to return with “150 more.” He actually meant 150 more tubs of mice, totalling around 1,000. 

If you’re in the Northeast and want to own or foster a mouse, it’s currently a buyer’s market.

Looking at the cost of rent, food and education, one study found that Zurich, Hong Kong and Singapore are the most expensive cities in the world to live in. Four different Swiss cities made the list, while L.A. came in at number ten and New York at number seven.

Keratopigmentation is a $12,000 cosmetic surgery for permanently changing your eye color. People are getting the procedure done to boost their self-esteem, look more like family members or, in at least one case, look more like their Siberian husky.

It’s statistically very improbable for a massive impact to cause Mars to blow chunks onto the Earth. Only around 300 to 400 of the approximately 79,000 catalogued meteorites are known to come from Mars, and they struck about five distinct locations on our planet. One of them contains hints that the red planet was once covered in water.