Surprising Facts

1. The longest time between two twins being
born is 87 days .

2. The world's deepest postbox is in Susami Bay
in Japan . It's 10 metres underwater.

3. In 2007, an American man named Corey
Taylor tried to fake his own death in order to get
out of his cell phone contract without paying a
fee. It didn't work.

4. The oldest condoms ever found date back to
the 1640s (they were found in a cesspit at
Dudley Castle), and were made from animal and
fish intestines.

5. In 1923, jockey Frank Hayes won a race at
Belmont Park in New York despite being dead —
he suffered a heart attack mid-race, but his body
stayed in the saddle until his horse crossed the
line for a 20–1 outsider victory.

6. Everyone has a unique tongue print , just like
fingerprints.

7. Most Muppets are left-handed. (Because
most Muppeteers are right-handed , so they
operate the head with their favoured hand.)

8. Female kangaroos have three vaginas .
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9. It costs the U.S. Mint almost twice as much
to mint each penny and nickel as the coins are
actually worth. Taxpayers lost over $100 million
in 2013 just through the coins being made.

10. Light doesn't necessarily travel at the speed
of light. The slowest we've ever recorded light
moving at is 38 mph .

11. Casu marzu is a Sardinian cheese that
contains live maggots. The maggots can jump up
to five inches out of cheese while you're eating
it, so it's a good idea to shield it with your hand
to stop them jumping into your eyes.

12. The loneliest creature on Earth is a whale
who has been calling out for a mate for over two
decades — but whose high-pitched voice is so
different to other whales that they never respond .

13. The spikes on the end of a stegosaurus' tail
are known among paleontologists as the
"thagomizer" — a term coined by cartoonist Gary
Larson in a 1982 Far Side drawing .

14. During World War II, the crew of the British
submarine HMS Trident kept a fully grown
reindeer called Pollyanna aboard their vessel for
six weeks (it was a gift from the Russians).

15. The northern leopard frog swallows its prey
using its eyes — it uses them to help push food
down its throat by retracting them into its head.

16. The first man to urinate on the moon was
Buzz Aldrin, shortly after stepping onto the lunar
surface.
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17. Some fruit flies are genetically resistant to
getting drunk — but only if they have an inactive
version of a gene scientists have named
"happyhour" .

18. Experiments show that male rhesus macaque
monkeys will pay to look at pictures of female
rhesus macaques' bottoms.

19. In 1567, the man said to have the longest
beard in the world died after he tripped over his
beard running away from a fire .

20. The Dance Fever of 1518 was a month-long
plague of inexplicable dancing in Strasbourg , in
which hundreds of people danced for about a
month for no apparent reason. Several of them
danced themselves to death.

21. Vladimir Nabokov nearly invented the smiley .

22. In 1993, San Francisco held a referendum
over whether a police officer called Bob Geary
was allowed to patrol while carrying a ventriloquist's dummy called Brendan O'Smarty.
He was.

23. Sigurd the Mighty, a ninth-century Norse earl
of Orkney, was killed by an enemy he had
beheaded several hours earlier. He'd tied the
man's head to his horse's saddle, but while
riding home one of its protruding teeth grazed
his leg . He died from the infection.

24. The Dutch village of Giethoorn has no roads ;
its buildings are connected entirely by canals and
footbridges.
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25. A family of people with blue skin lived in
Kentucky for many generations. The Fulgates of
Troublesome Creek are thought to have gained
their blue skin through combination of inbreeding
and a rare genetic condition known as
methemoglobinemia.

26. Powerful earthquakes can permanently
shorten the length of Earth's day, by moving the
spin of the Earth's axis. The 2011 Japan
earthquake knocked 1.8 microseconds off our
days. The 2004 Sumatra quake cost us around
6.8 microseconds.

27. The first American film to show a toilet being
flushed on screen was Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

28. Melting glaciers and icebergs make a
distinctive fizzing noise known as "bergy
seltzer" .

29. There is a glacier called "Blood Falls" in
Antarctica that regularly pours out red liquid,
making it look like the ice is bleeding. (It's
actually oxidised salty water .)

30. In 2008 scientists discovered a new species
of bacteria that lives in hairspray.

31. The top of the Eiffel Tower leans away from
the sun, as the metal facing the sun heats up
and expands. It can move as much as 7 inches.
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32. Lt. Col. "Mad" Jack Churchill was only
British soldier in WWII known to have killed an
enemy soldier with a longbow. "Mad Jack"
insisted on going into battle armed with both a
medieval bow and a claymore sword.

33. A U.S. park ranger named Roy C. Sullivan
held the record for being struck by lightning the
most times, having been struck — and surviving
— seven times between 1942 and 1977. He died
of a self-inflicted gunshot in 1983.

34. The longest musical performance in history
is currently taking place in the church of St.
Burchardi in Halberstadt, Germany. The
performance of John Cage's "Organ²/ASLSP (As
Slow As Possible)" started on Sept. 5, 2001, and
is set to finish in 2640. The last time the note
changed was October 2013; the next change
isn't due until 2020.

35. There's an opera house on the U.S.–Canada
border where the stage is in one country and half
the audience is in another .

36. The tiny parasite Toxoplasma gondii can only
breed sexually when in the guts of a cat. To this
end, when it infects rats, it changes their
behaviour to make them less scared of cats.
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37. The katzenklavier ("cat piano") was a
musical instrument made out of cats. Designed
by 17th-century German scholar Athanasius
Kircher, it consisted of a row of caged cats with
different voice pitches, who could be "played" by
a keyboardist driving nails into their tails.

38. There is a single mega-colony of ants that
spans three continents, covering much of Europe,
the west coast of the U.S., and the west coast
of Japan.

39. The largest snowflake ever recorded
reportedly measured 15 inches across.

40. An epidemic of laughing that lasted almost a
year broke out in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) in
1962. Several thousand people were affected,
across several villages. It forced a school to
close. It wasn't fun, though — other symptoms
included crying, fainting, rashes, and pain.

41. The Romans used to clean and whiten their
teeth with urine . Apparently it works. Please
don't do it, though.

42. There are around 60,000 miles of blood
vessels in the human body. If you took them all
out and laid them end to end, they'd stretch
around the world more than twice. But, seriously,
don't do that either.
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Thanks for the reading.