12 Farm-Fresh Trivia Tidbits for Tuesday, November 26, 2024

Japanese showerhead company Science Co. has debuted a big weird Matrix-esque pod that’ll blast you clean with water and air dry you in 15 minutes or less.

After a historic exodus from Twitter, when its owner became a sniveling sycophant to an emperor and decided to train A.I. on its users’ thoughts, competitor Bluesky jumped from 13 million to 21 million users in less than a month. It still has far fewer users than Threads, but more than double the traffic.

You can technically chart sourness on a pH scale, similar to how spicy heat has the Scoville scale, but that’s a scientific approach that doesn’t seem to correlate to the mastication experience. All we can really do is listen to the sour candy enjoyer community, which tends to stan a British candy called Black Death Ultra Sour.

A team of researchers built an instrument that mimics the throat and skull of a Parasaurolophus to try to reproduce the noise it made when dinosaurs ruled the Earth. Expect more embarrassing honks to make your favorite dinosaurs less impressive, like they did with that Pharaoh a few years ago.

A scientific study has found that while dolphins technically don’t “smile,” but rather exhibit “rapid facial mimicry” that happens to look a lot like smiling, they do it to signal playfulness. It’s kind of like a dog wagging its tail when it wants to play-fight: a dolphin will make this signal to another, and the second one will mimic it about a third of the time.

Based on data from Business Insider, the tallest people in the world hail from Estonia (men are 6-foot on the dot on average, while women are 5-foot-6.4), Montenegro (men are 6-foot-0.2, women are 5-foot-6.9) and Netherlands (6-foot-0.4 and 5-foot-7.1).

The five-time world champion chess player dropped out of the traditional chess scene a couple years ago to work on an even cooler version of chess. He raised $12 million in venture capital money for Freestyle Chess, a league that lets players mess around a little bit with their back row before the game starts. 

The hamburger originated in Hamburg, Germany, but part of the reason Americans became so fond of shortening it to “burger” was because they didn’t want to give the Germans any credit during World War I.

They sold 153 million of them in 2023, but somehow managed to take in negative $80 billion in revenue.

Conventional wisdom says that letting off some steam is a good way to keep big feelings from eating you alive, but an Ohio State University study found that it can actually increase anger: “There’s not a shred of scientific evidence to support catharsis theory.”

Mindfulness and relaxation practices like yoga are a much more effective alternative to punching a hole in the wall.

A scientific study has found that the tendency to overthink social situations comes from the earliest-developed, most primitive part of your brain, the amygdala (aka the “lizard brain”) attempting to communicate with more modern, advanced neural structures. The amygdala is responsible for primal emotions like fear, which it tends to inject into everyday situations, causing you to feel like you’re being hunted by a lion just because you forgot someone’s name.

A 10-year-old in Wisconsin called 9-1-1 because he needed help with a math problem: “Dividing a number by 10 is the same as finding one-tenth of the number. Use the phrase ‘one-tenth of’ or the phrase ‘ten times’ to complete each statement about 1,000.”