12 Trivia Tidbits That Sing Like A Choir About Pop-Culture, News, And History

After a kid complained about a monster under their bed, a Kansas babysitter took a gander and found herself looking directly into the eyes of a 27-year-old man who had once lived there, but was court-ordered to stay away from the property.

A new study found that baby birds sing because it releases dopamine into their brains, reinforcing neural circuitry that helps them learn new calls and other skills.

Sex toy company Ohdoki surveyed 2,000 Americans to determine how folks are self-diddling. Most are sticking to vibrators, but then you’ve got Utah preferring sex furniture and Washington, D.C. gravitating toward the trusty masterbation (sic) sleeve. Unfortunately, the misspelling of “masturbation” calls the entire study into question.

Eighty-nine-year-old Iwao Hakamata was on death row in Japan for 47 years after being convicted of murdering his boss (and his boss’ family) in 1968. In 2014, they let him out of prison for his retrial after learning that, shock of shocks, investigators may have planted evidence. He was finally acquitted in 2024, and was recently awarded a (frankly, paltry) $1.45 million mea culpa from the state.

The Pan-American Highway was dreamed up in the 1920s as a way to encourage road trips and help the auto industry dig its talons into the wallets of North Americans. In 1937, 14 countries agreed to the 19,000-mile behemoth that now runs from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to Ushuaia, Argentina.

Now that the Pope is recovering from his five-week hospital stay, a doctor has revealed that they were pretty close to ending medical treatment rather than pumping him full of drugs and “running the very high risk of damaging other organs.” They went with the latter, and that seems to be working out.

After the restaurant chain named after boobs was taken over by a private equity firm, servers’ already skimpy uniforms were changed to look even less like clothes and more like underwear. The founders cite that as a reason for declining sales, and have launched a scheme to take the brand over again and institute what they’re calling a “re-Hooterization.”

For the first time, a scientist witnessed a white-necked jacobin mother caring for a young baby, who looked like a puffy ball of pain. The baby looked strikingly like the flannel moth caterpillar, which is covered in painful little hairs that predators know to stay away from.

Napster was sued to death in 2001, but was reawakened as a small-time streaming site in 2016. It just sold for $207 million to a start-up that’s obsessed with virtual concerts, like that thing Travis Scott did on Fortnite one time, and like Kidz Bop and Cher plan to do on Roblox.

While studying mummies in Northwestern China’s Xiaohe cemetery, researchers noticed a peculiar embalming oil smeared on some of their heads. After letting DNA technology cook for a decade or so, they were able to study the substance closer, and found cow and goat DNA in it. They concluded that it was 3,600-year-old kefir cheese.

The American Society of Civil Engineers gives U.S. infrastructure a report card every four years, and our score has been upgraded from a C- to a C, largely due to the 2021 $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. Thanks Biden!

Jim Henson is a University of Maryland alumnus, and there are bronze statues of both him and his famous puppet on campus, so this collaboration “honors the long history between UMD and Muppets creator Jim Henson.”