12 Farm-Fresh Trivia Tidbits for Thursday, December 12, 2024

By combining radioactive antibodies with targeting drugs, scientists have been able to destroy lung and bladder cancer in mice, all with no side effects.

A London fashion start-up wants to usher in the end times by developing clothes whose materials are lab-grown in a petri dish (sustainable!), knitted together by robots (scabs!) and cost half a thousand dollars. It begs the question: Where will people get that kind of disposable income if their jobs are taken by robots?

Walgreens was once worth $100 billion, but have backslid since 2015 to a valuation of about $7 billion today. After announcing their sale to a private equity firm that will draw and quarter the company and sell off its innards like hamburger meat, its stock price sored by 18 percent — the best single day in the company’s history.

Early conventional wisdom about modern humans’ predecessors was that they were stooped and stupid, separated from apes only by their vaguely guy-shaped skeleton. Wells immortalized this depiction in his popular 1921 story The Grisly Folk, where Neanderthals were depicted and stupid, primal and speaking only in ughs.

A recent Pew study found that while 69 percent of American workers feel “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of job security, only 30 percent are satisfied with their pay. One year ago, that number was 34 percent.

After Luigi Mangione was taken into custody from a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, word spread that a customer had tattled to an employee, who then called the cops. People flooded the location’s business page on Google with negative reviews (which Google has been actively removing).

The pick-me dork that narced can’t just call dibs on their $50,000 payout. They have to be nominated by the FBI, then the nomination itself is investigated by a committee, then the Secretary of State has an opportunity to blackball them if they feel like it. 

At every step along the way, the FBI has an arsenal of technicalities that can reduce or nullify the reward entirely.

The dictionary chose “polarization” as its word of the year, selected for its representation of “a very specific kind of division. Polarization means that we are tending toward the extremes rather than toward the center.”

The oldest known stone inscription of the Biblical Ten Commandments, carved 1,500 years ago and discovered in 1913 among construction in a hotbed of religious relics in Israel, is going up for auction. It’s expected to bring in one to two million dollars from one of those rich guys that Jesus said would never get into heaven.

Airlines had a rough couple of years during the pandemic, but then they rode their heightened fees and lowered safety and comfort standards to riches. The global airline industry is expected to break $1 trillion for the first time in 2025, servicing a record five billion passengers.

In 1837, Louisiana passed a law that made it illegal to collect a debt on Christmas, giving debtors an extra day to pony up. The following year, Arkansas passed an equal and opposite law, requiring the debtor to pay by the day before Christmas.

Since 2011, every Christmas tree sold in America has a built-in 15-cent fee that goes toward a national branding program designed by the USDA to “strengthen the position of fresh cut Christmas trees in the marketplace.”