(high-pitched whale imitation)
- Slow-motion knowledge whale!
Here are 50 amazing facts to blow your mind.
Samuel Morse was originally an artist
but abandoned his career to develop a way of communicating
over distances after his wife fell ill
and died while he was away on an art assignment.
In 1997, three men from Yemen
tried to sue NASA for trespassing on Mars.
They claimed that they inherited the planet
from their ancestors 3,000 years ago
but, of course, didn't win
because there's an international treaty
that states that everything in the solar system,
except Earth itself, is the property
of everyone in the world.
The founder of Victoria's Secret, Roy Raymond,
sold the company in 1982 for $4 million,
but by the early 1990s it was worth a billion.
And, in response, Raymond killed himself
by jumping off of the Golden Gate Bridge.
In 2004, during the annual Harvard-Yale football game,
Yale's students tricked Harvard's students
into holding up place cards that formed the words we suck
by telling them that it would spell go Harvard.
And yet, Harvard still ended up winning the game.
In 2010, George Lucas made a pledge to dedicate
the majority of his wealth to improving education
and, just two years later, he sold Lucasfilm to Disney,
and donated most of the funds to a foundation
that focuses on education.
Patrick Stewart began losing his hair when he was just 18,
and started to believe that no woman
would ever be interested in him again.
He's now happily married to his third wife.
There's hope for me!
Even though Zambia has some very fertile lands,
they don't have any agriculture there
because whenever crops are grown,
the hippos in the area come out and eat everything.
Robert De Niro was considered one of Hollywood's
extreme method actors because he actually learned
how to box in Raging Bull and spent time
driving around in a cab for his role in Taxi Driver.
Growing a beard can have health benefits
such as protecting you from the sun,
preventing asthma attacks,
and even slowing the aging process.
In 2014, drug overdoses were named
the leading cause of accidental death in the United States
followed only by car crashes.
The very first e-commerce transaction was a drug deal
in the early 1970s when Stanford students
used ARPANET, the first iteration of the internet,
to buy marijuana from students at MIT.
Professor Sam Van Aken of Syracuse University
created The Tree of 40 Fruit, a multi-colored tree
that bears, you guessed it,
more than 40 different types of fruit.
There's an app called Wakie where,
instead of a normal alarm, you can be woken up
by a call from a stranger somewhere else in the world.
Benjamin Franklin designed the first official cent
of the United States and called it the Fugio,
that, instead of the usual In God We Trust
written on the coin, it had Mind Your Business.
There are eight levels of charity in Judaism,
the greatest being supporting someone or helping them
to find a job to allow them to become self-sufficient.
Cotton candy, which is notorious
for being bad for our teeth, was actually invented
by a dentist name William Morrison.
The amount of money that the U.S. spends on its military
is almost the same as the rest of the world combined.
Of the 8,400 attack helicopters in the world,
the U.S. owns 6,400 and America has 10 aircraft carriers.
So does the rest of the world, combined.
Stainless steel actually helps remove
the odor of garlic and onions.
Jay Z, The Notorious B.I.G., Busta Rhymes, and DMX
all went to the same high school together in Brooklyn,
in fact, Busta Rhymes and Jay Z once held
a rap battle in the lunch room.
In 2008, cooks in Iran tried to break the world record
for the world's longest sandwich, but failed when
the crowd began eating it before it could be measured.
Grumpy Cat is a millionaire, all thanks to her
paid appearances, book deals, and merchandise.
In 1961, a girl named Michelle Rochon wrote a letter
to President Kennedy addressing her concern
for Santa's safety during the Soviet nuclear bomb testing
near the North Pole.
Unbelievably, he wrote back telling her
that he spoke to Santa and there was nothing to worry about.
A study done in 2014 shows that soccer players
run an average of 11.27 kilometers per game.
By paying attention and actively noticing more things,
we can actually train our brains
to seemingly slow down time.
This is because when memories are more detailed,
moments seem to last longer and the brain
takes longer to write down the information,
so time seems to pass slower.
The Tukano tribe in South America
has a law where men must marry
outside of their language group so that children
can be born into a multi-lingual environment.
There are thousands of rogue planets in our universe
and it's entirely plausible that any number
of these planets could support life.
Even though it's called football in the United Kingdom,
the term soccer actually originated in Britain
in the late 1800s, not America.
Within the United Kingdom, accents change noticeably
about every 40 kilometers.
In 2011, a 75 year old woman accidentally cut off
all of Armenia's internet access after she accidentally
sliced through an underground cable
while looking for copper.
During World War II, two Polish doctors
created a fake Typhus epidemic,
which stopped the Nazis, who had phobias about hygiene,
from sending about 8,000 Jews
to concentration camps, and executions
Dysania is the state of having a hard time of waking up
and getting out of bed in the morning.
Pretty sure we all suffer from that.
This is Malcolm Myatt.
He suffered a stroke in 2004 and since then
has been unable to feel sadness again.
It's a little awkward when he goes to funerals.
In China there is an elderly rights law
which makes it illegal for anyone who has parents over 60
not to visit them regularly.
The baobab tree naturally hollows out after 1,000 years.
In fact, there's a 6,000 year old baobab tree
in South Africa right now that is so large and hollow
that it could enclose a small building.
There's a website called Freerice.com that allows people
to donate to charities by playing multiple choice quizzes.
For every question correctly answered, 10 grains of rice
are donated through the World Food Programme.
Napoleon Bonaparte was buried without his penis.
It was cut off during his autopsy
and given to a priest in Corsica.
The Sagrada Família is a large Roman Catholic church
in Barcelona that has been in construction since 1882
and will not be completed until 2026.
This is the world's largest coin pyramid,
built in 2014 by volunteers in Lithuania
and consists of a million coins.
The French Republican Calendar was created
during the French Revolution.
It had 12 months, but each month had three
10-day weeks, each day was made up of 10 hours,
each hour had 100 minutes,
and each minute was 100 seconds.
Sideburns were named after an American
Civil War general named Ambrose Burnside
who was known for his unusual facial hairstyle.
Dave Thomas worked at KFC before he started at Wendy's.
In fact, it was he who designed KFC's
signature chicken bucket.
Traffic in London is notoriously bad.
In fact, central London moves at an average
of just 16 kilometers per hour, which is about
the same speed as horse-drawn carriages from a century ago.
F C Barcelona has a reverse-sponsorship deal with UNICEF
where the football club wears UNICEF's logo
on its uniforms and donates 1.5 million Euros
a year to the organization.
Fabric was in short supply in the U.S. in the 1930s,
so women began using fabric from flour sacks
to make dresses.
And, in response, flour mills began to print their bags
in a wider range of patterns and colors.
In 1978, a student working a minimum wage summer job
could easily afford a full year's tuition at any four year
public university of their choice.
Good Lord, how things have changed.
There's a sport, slash, game called archery tag.
The concept is like dodgeball, but instead of foam balls,
foam-tipped arrows are used instead.
Avatar is the highest-grossing movie of all time,
earning just under 2.8 billion at the box office worldwide.
Canada has more lakes than the rest of the world combined.
Out of all the natural lakes in the world,
over 50% of them are in Canada.
Jonathan Ive, the head of Apple's design department,
and the man responsible for the iMac, iPod, and iPhone,
helped design EVE from the movie Wall-E.
Stephen Colbert actually exists in the Marvel Universe.
He ran for president and helped Spider-Man defeat a villain.
And now you're full of all kinds of knowledge-y goodness!
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Oh, now you smarter from the flippers of knowledge!
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(high-pitched whale imitation)