12 Farm-Fresh Trivia Tidbits for Tuesday, February 18, 2025

Pornhub collected data the week leading up to Valentine’s Day, and made a map of the most-searched terms in each state. It runs the gamut from “wife” (Missouri) and “husband” (Pennsylvania) to “grandpa” (New Hampshire) and “pee” (Vermont).

Cordyceps sinensis, or “Himalayan Viagra,” is a fungus that grows on the corpse of moth larvae, and costs $136,000 per pound.

Scientists have found that your sex organs leave behind a sexual biome, known as a sexome, which can be swabbed and traced back to you like a genital fingerprint.

A Canadian visiting Turks and Caicos waded into the water to get a picture with a shark, and was promptly attacked by the shark, severing both hands.

Originally found on a meteorite, there’s a type of “super diamond” that’s 40 percent tougher than the regular glassy rocks. For the first time since its discovery in 1967, scientists in China have figured out how to create it in a lab.

If you want an memorial bench erected in Golden Gate Park, that’s how much it’ll cost you. But an engineer named Chris Duderstadt has been going rogue, building benches for the community for free (and eating the $80 materials costs).

Fueled by A.I. and a wave of cryptophilia among idiots, “pig butchering” crypto scams skyrocketed by 40 percent in 2024, transferring $10 billion in wealth from hapless investors to scammers.

Culdesac Tempe opened up outside of Phoenix, Arizona in 2021, at a cost of $200 million, billing itself as “the country’s first car-free neighborhood.” Automobile-pilled Americans have been giving the walkable neighborhood a lot of guff, but the hood’s 300 actual residents are very satisfied with their minuscule carbon footprint and free e-bikes.

After the administration ordered the firings of thousands of government workers, and federal departments blindly acquiesced, the Energy Department realized it needed some of those nuclear safety experts it had just canned, and is trying to figure out how to quickly hire them back.

Oxford scientists were able to get two computers over six feet apart to work together on processing the same algorithm, by transmitting information via photons rather than electricity. 

After being on the loose for 130 years, Jack the Ripper has finally been positively identified by historian Russell Edwards, who was able to test DNA left on an old shawl, as a man named Aaron Kosminski. So watch out for that guy.

Scientists studying knee cartilage in mice found that a very simple exercise boosted knee cartilage thickness by 100 percent: hopping. They were studying how to keep astronauts’ knees from withering away while their physical activity is reduced in orbit, and the answer is to jump around like schoolchildren.