- You ready to learn something new?
Then let's do it.
Here are 50 amazing facts to blow your mind.
(explosion)
In 2012, the street artist, Megx converted an old bridge
in Wuppertal, Germany into a giant Lego structure
using colored panels to create the illusion
of the underside of Lego bricks.
In most European countries, including Britain,
declawing your cat is illegal.
If you're caught declawing a cat in Israel,
you can actually be sent to jail for a year
and be fined 20 thousand dollars.
Scotland, Italy, New Zealand, and over
30 other countries have also followed suit.
In New Zealand, it's illegal to own just one guinea pig
because they are very lonely and social creatures.
In fact, they have matchmaking companies
to match up your guinea pig if their partner dies,
which is part of a sweeping animals' rights legislation
that was first introduced in 2008.
If you live in Australia, you are 20 times
more likely to drown than be bitten by a shark.
In fact, to put it into perspective,
you're significantly more likely
to win the top prize in the lottery than even being involved
in a shark accident of any kind.
Humans are friends, not food.
According to the World Health Organization, there are
360 million people in the world with disabling hearing loss.
That's around five percent of the entire world's population.
32 million of them are children
between the ages of zero and 14.
Luckily things like captions exist just like on this video.
On July 13th, 1955, nightclub owner, Ruth Ellis
was the last woman to be executed
for murder in Great Britain.
She was hanged for killing her boyfriend,
and it wasn't until 1965 that the death penalty
for murder was banned in England, Scotland, and Wales.
A study in the Journal of Current Biology
found that those people, who exercise four hours
after learning something new, retained the information
better two days later than those
who exercise immediately or not at all.
The reason that tires are black and not another color
is because of the chemical that's added
to the tires called Carbon black.
It's added to protect tires against ozone and UV damage,
and it drastically prolongs the life of any tire,
which is why all tire manufacturers use it.
Researchers from the UK's Manchester Metropolitan University
found that mice don't really
like cheese as much as we think.
They much more prefer fruit and grains.
The rumor of them liking cheese so much
was spread via pop culture and cartoons.
Summer on the planet Uranus lasts 42 years long,
followed by 42 years of winter.
It's earth's tilt that gives us our seasons,
but Uranus's is significantly more on its side
in relation to its poles, hence the length of its seasons.
There's a place in Arizona called the boneyard
that is the final resting place
of about 3,000 military aircraft,
some of them up to 60 years old.
They literally just sit there and
are gradually harvested for spare parts over time.
There's a very rare illness called Kleine-Levin syndrome
or Sleeping Beauty syndrome, where those affected
sleep for up to 20 hours per day for days, weeks, or even
months at a time, only waking to use the washroom or eat.
Flamingos are pink because the algae and crustaceans
like shrimp and prawns that they eat
contain pigments called carotenoids.
Their liver breaks down the carotenoids
into pink and orange pigment molecules
that get deposited in their feathers, bill, and legs.
You can actually reshape some babies' ears.
Some of them have a condition called lidling,
where top part of the cartilage in the ear
is basically folded over so the top ridge
is kind of rounded over, however there's actually a mold,
called EarWell, that can change the shape
of your baby's ear in approximately six weeks.
There are more bicycles than people in Copenhagen,
and five times as many bicycles as cars.
Over 50% of city dwellers commute by bicycle,
and over 41% arrive at their place of work or study by bike.
Monkey brains are considered a delicacy
in parts of South Asia, Africa, and China.
They're considered an easily digestible substance
often given to invalids and children,
and there are even entire cookbooks
dedicated on how to cook them.
It takes Pluto 241 years to orbit the sun.
That's because Pluto orbits at an average distance
of 3.7 billion miles from the sun,
while earth only orbits at 93 million miles.
Octopuses will actually break off a limb
as part of a fight to impress a mate
or to get away from a predator.
They will also eat their own arms once in a while,
which some scientists believe may be
due to a disease of some sort.
The seven rays on the Statue of Liberty's crown
stand for each of the seven continents.
They each measure nine feet long
and weigh as much as 150 pounds.
In addition, it's overall height is 305 feet
from its base, and it has a 35 foot
waistline and weighs 225 tons.
Cuba has a 99.8% literacy rate,
one of the highest in the whole world.
When flying in a flock, Flamingos can
fly as fast as 35 miles per hour.
They may seem clumsy in flight, however,
because their long necks stretch out in front
of their bodies, and their long legs
dangle well past their short tails.
The first electric traffic light
was installed on August 5, 1914
on the corner of Euclid Avenue
and East 105th St in Cleveland, Ohio.
Based on the design by James Hodge,
who received a U.S. patent for his municipal traffic
control system, it consisted of four pairs
of red and green lights that served as stop and go
indicators, each mounted on a corner post.
In California, there's a law that prohibits
a vehicle without a driver to exceed 60 miles per hour.
Companies like Google who make autonomous cars
have the technology to make them go much faster
but must limit them based on this law.
On September 13, 1916, the town of Erwin, Tennessee
hung an elephant, nicknamed Murderous Mary
because she mauled one of her keepers to death.
It required a massive crane to accomplish
and was done because hangings and lynchings
were a popular form of justice at the time.
The automotive industry used to use
sperm whale oil to lubricate new cars.
In fact the stuff works so well that huge mammals
were actually hunted almost to extinction,
so the U.S. declared sperm whales an endangered species
and switched to the new whale-free
automatic transmission fluid.
Believe it or not, you can determine the temperature
outside by counting the chirps made by crickets.
According to the Farmer's Almanac, to convert cricket chirps
to celsius, you count the number of chirps in 25 seconds,
divide by three, then add four to get the temperature.
The 31st president of the United States, Herbert Hoover,
spent none of his salary on himself,
and instead gave it away to charities,
or as income supplements to his associates.
There's something called a moonbow or lunar rainbow
that's a rainbow that can be seen
at night and happens very rarely.
In order for this to happen, a full moon is needed,
it must be raining opposite to the moon,
the sky must be dark, and the moon
must be less than 42 degrees high.
There's a law in Pacific Grove, California
that prohibits the molesting of monarch butterflies.
Seriously.
Ordinance 11.48.010
states that is is declared to be unlawful
for any person to molest or interfere with
in any way the peaceful occupancy of the monarch butterfly
on their annual visit to the city of Pacific Grove,
and it goes on like that for several more sentences.
The longest solar eclipse in the 21st century
lasted six minutes and 39 seconds,
and it won't be surpassed in duration
until the eclipse of June 13, 2132.
Venus and Uranus are the only planets that rotate clockwise.
The other six planets in the solar
system rotate counterclockwise.
Lobsters are able to regenerate
lost eyes, claws, and antennae.
You can also determine the gender of
a lobster by looking at its swimmerets,
the small feathery appendages on the underside of its tail.
The first pair of swimmerets closest to the body
are hard and bony on a male and
soft and feathery on a female.
It is illegal in Mobile, Alabama to possess confetti.
It's also illegal to store, use, manufacture,
sell, offer for sell, give away, or even handle confetti.
Pope Francis broke a record when he hit one million
Instagram followers within 12 hours of starting the account.
The previous record was set by David Beckham
at one million within 24 hours.
He christened the account on a Saturday
with a photo of him kneeling in prayer
with an accompanying message that said,
"Pray for me," in nine languages.
Before Samuel L. Jackson became a movie star,
he was Bill Cosby's camera stand-in on The Cosby Show.
Gonna touch your butt with some Jell-O Pudding.
Leonardo da Vinci was dyslexic.
Also strangely, not because of his dyslexia,
he chose to write all of his notes to himself backwards
in mirror writing, meaning that you can only read them
in the reflection of a mirror.
However notes that he wrote to other people,
he wrote in a normal direction.
In Albania, nodding your head means no,
and shaking your head means yes.
A human taste bud has an average
lifespan of seven to 10 days.
Taste bud cells undergo continual turnover,
even into adulthood, but taste buds in rats
last from two days to over three weeks.
There were over 13 couples celebrating their honeymoon
on the Titanic, however none of them survived
upon impact and the subsequent sinking of the boat.
Dogs love the herb anise the same way that cats love catnip.
In fact, anise is the scent on the artificial rabbit
that is used in greyhound races to get the dogs to run.
The hardest bone in the human body is the jawbone.
Also known as the mandible, it's also the largest
and strongest bone in the human face.
Believe it or not, you consume 1/10 of a calorie
by licking a U.S. stamp, but if you were to lick a stamp
in Britain, it's 5.9 calories per lick
and the adhesive on a larger commemorative
or special British stamp contains a whopping 14.5 calories.
Camels actually have three eyelids
to protect their eyes from blowing sand.
The upper and lower eyelids have eyelashes,
however there's a third one that's a thin membrane
that they can see through even in a sandstorm.
On July 5, 1996, the first mammal
ever was successfully cloned.
Dolly the sheep was cloned from an adult cell
at the Roslin Institute in Scotland.
She was named after Dolly Parton because
she was cloned from a mammary cell.
Well at least that's a better name than her codename 6LL3.
Doesn't ring the same bell.
Mosquitoes can detect carbon dioxide from 75 feet away.
In fact that's how they find
their victims, specifically you.
A galactic year, also known as a cosmic year
is the duration of a complete rotation of the Milky Way,
which is approximately 200 million terrestrial years.
The human aorta is the largest artery in the human body,
and is about the size of a garden hose.
There is a dog breed called Basenji
that doesn't have the ability to bark.
It can produce a yodeling howl sound though.
It's a small to medium sized, square-shaped animal that is
believed to be bred intentionally
without the ability to bark.
Gatorade was named after the Florida Gators.
In 1965, a team of university physicians in Florida
were approached by a University of Florida's
assistant football coach because he wanted to find out why
his players were being affected
by the heat and heat-related illnesses.
They ended up creating the drink Gatorade
that balanced carbohydrates and electrolytes.
The first ever video to air on MTV
was "Video Killed the Radio Star"
by the Buggles on August 1, 1981.
That was over 36 years ago, and in fact,
the very first original broadcast is on YouTube right now.
There's afros and neon lights everywhere, I warn you.
And now you're just a little bit smarter.
As always, thank you guys so much for coming by today.
Remember to come back on Monday and every weekday
at exactly three p.m. Eastern Standard Time
because I'll have a brand new video for you.
I'll see you next week.