12 Farm-Fresh Trivia Tidbits for Thursday, January 16, 2025
MI5’s training manual for World War II-era spies amounted to: don’t look like a cop.
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Walgreens Finally Learned the Corporate Equivalent of Object Permanence
Walgreens CEO Tim Wentworth has realized that hiding everyday items like shampoo and deodorant behind lock and key is hurting sales: “When you lock things up, you don’t sell as many of them.”
How Much Do We Spend on Wildfire Suppression?
The National Interagency Fire Center estimates that the U.S. has spent $3 billion per year the last five years on beating back wildfires. On the whole, they’re not getting more frequent, they’re just getting harder to contain, and therefore burning more acres.
The Trend in Wildfires Is Becoming Murkier
In 2023, 2.7 million acres burned, which was down 60 percent year-over-year and was the smallest area burned since 1998. But 2024 was an especially bad year, appearing to surpass the recent average (60,000 wildfires burning 7 million acres).
Sayonara, Gaia
Europe’s Gaia space observatory just ran out of gas, after 11 years of taking snapshots of the cosmos. It had a pretty good run, cataloging almost two billion stellar objects and leading scientists to exciting new conclusions. Thanks to Gaia, we know that starquakes exist and that the Milky Way merged with an entire second galaxy as it was forming.
The App That Makes You Touch Grass
The billionaire founder of Kayak.com has published a new app, Steppin, that will lock you out of your social media apps until you take a walk. You can set how many steps you need to take to unlock a minute of scrolling.
A Swedish Artist Is Getting His Model Sent to the Moon
Artist Mikael Genberg said he had a “crazy, maybe idiotic, but at the same time, in my mind, really poetic thought to put a red house with white corners on the surface of the Moon.” He designed and built the Moonhouse, a five-inch-long model house that’s being sent to the Moon on a Japanese lunar lander.
No One Wanted to Tell Queen Elizabeth She Was Friends With a KGB Spy
Britain’s MI5 intelligence agency declassified a bunch of documents, including some on the “Cambridge Five” ring of World War II-era Soviet spies. One of those five was John Cairncross, who had served as the Queen’s art advisor, and passed along sensitive information to the Russians. Cairncross confessed in 1964, but no one told Elizabeth until 1973 because they thought she had enough on her mind.
MI5’s Advice to New Recruits
That trove of declassified information includes old tips for new spies: Don’t wear a fake beard, come up with your cover story before you go out spying and generally try to “look as unlike a policeman as possible.”
The Fish That Gets Healthier As It Ages
The bigmouth buffalo is a North American fish with a peculiar habit of Benjamin Button-ing, often living for more than 100 years. But their long lifespans have obscured a dangerous trend: Scientists have noticed that some populations haven’t successfully spawned in six decades.
Ticks Literally Cement Themselves to Your Skin
Scientists have mapped out the chemical reaction that allows ticks to create a cement cone out of their saliva when latching onto a host.
Microbiomes May Help Us Adapt to the Environment
Scientists studying the gut biomes of Antarctic worms have pinpointed a bacteria that produces proteins that help the worms thrive in outrageously freezing conditions they might not otherwise survive in.
The Most Teddy Bears Ever Chucked
A Pennsylvania ice hockey team, the Hershey Bears, broke the record for the most bears thrown at once when 100,000 of them were chucked onto the ice after their first goal of a game. The yearly Teddy Bear Toss has collected and donated over 500,000 teddy bears to date.
