- (whale sounds)
♫ Everybody knowledge whale (whale sounds) ♫
Here are 50 amazing facts to blow your mind.
When the Confederate Army was low on gun powder,
bat caves were raided for poop.
Bat guano's high nitrate content provided a key ingredient
for the production of gun powder.
Mmm, guano, yummy.
In 1991, drug lord Pablo Escobar
got to build his own prison known as La Cathedral.
It featured a soccer field, a giant dollhouse,
a bar, a Jacuzzi, and a waterfall.
It's where he stayed for only one year
and one month after he was caught torturing his guests.
From there, he was back on the run.
Wild chimpanzees look both ways before crossing the road.
The National Museum of Natural History in Paris
began studying their vigilance and found
that 57% of the time, they would run across the road
to be extra safe.
Astronomers have discovered the largest known diamond
in the universe is a star named Lucy that is
ten trillion, billion karats.
This white dwarf has a carbon interior
that crystallized as it cooled
which formed a giant diamond in the sky.
Scientists couldn't resist naming it after The Beatles' song
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
In 2013, a dog named Killian saved a baby boy
from an abusive babysitter when he alerted his owners
by growling and standing between the baby
and the sitter whenever she was present.
The parents later recorded the abuse
and the sitter was convicted.
The cost of a tourist visa for China is $140 for Americans,
and $30 for the rest of the world.
Panama is the only place in the world where one can see
the sun rise on the Pacific Ocean, and set on the Atlantic.
In 2002, Thad Roberts, a former intern at NASA
was sentenced to six years in federal prison
after stealing moon rocks gathered from the Apollo 11
moon landing mission so that he could
have sex with his girlfriend on them.
Dude, it's not like you're doing it on the moon,
and you could get those rocks lost in weird, weird places.
So, I don't get the logic.
During the American Civil War,
some soldiers' wounds actually glowed blue.
These soldiers had a better survival rate
so the glow was called Angel's Glow.
The luminescence was actually due to bacteria
that produced antibiotics that live inside Nematodes
who have made homes in the soldiers' open wounds.
NASA often shows the Hollywood movie Armageddon
as part of its management training program,
and then asks its new staff to identify
as many scientific inaccuracies as they can.
There are at least 168 of them.
Steven Jay Russell that escaped four times from prison.
The first time, he simply walked out.
Upon recapture, Russell lowered and paid his bail
by pretending to be a judge, escaped his next capture
by impersonating a doctor,
and did so again by then faking his death.
Eventually he received a 144-year sentence
that he is still currently serving.
1.5 million people were evicted from their homes in Beijing
in preparation for the 2008 Olympics.
That's nice.
At El Diablo restaurant in the Canary Islands,
food is served with the geothermal heat
from an actual volcano.
A photo of nine-year-old Daniel Cabrera from the Philippines
doing his homework in the street,
assisted by the light of a local McDonald's
resulted in the world donating money, school supplies
and a college scholarship to both him and his family.
When Benjamin Franklin died in 1790, he willed the cities
of Boston and Philadelphia $4,400 each
but with the stipulation that the money
could not be spent for 200 years.
By 1990, Boston's trust was worth over $5 million.
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin had to fill out
a military travel voucher for reimbursement for his mission
to the moon and was reimbursed $33.31.
A 31-year-old man named Jason Willis from
Waterford, Wisconsin was banned from the internet
in 2014 after sending naked men
to a neighbor's house through a Craigslist ad.
That's actually kind of brilliant
if you don't like your neighbors.
(laughs) Don't do it.
The US is the only nation that prints
all of its currency in the same size and color.
Because of this, 3.3 million blind
and visually-impaired Americans depend on someone else,
a family member, a friend, a cashier, or even a bank teller
to identify the denomination of each bill.
That's a lot of trust.
In ancient Egypt, men could take time off work
to care for menstruating daughters and wives.
New Zealand will deny people residency visas
if they have too high of a BMI, and there have been cases
of people rejected simply because of their weight.
Stephen Hawking has said outside of our own universe,
lies another, different universe, and in this universe,
Zayn is still in One Direction.
I'm not making that up.
On July 23, 1983,
Air Canada's Flight 143 with 69 people on board
ran out of fuel at an altitude of 12.5 kilometers.
Miraculously, the pilot managed to glide the plane
down safely, as he was a very experienced glider pilot.
Additionally, 2,300 pounds of jet fuel
had been put in instead of 2,300 kilograms.
Gotta watch those conversions people.
In 2015, a man who skipped out on his bill
at a Houston area restaurant was seen
running into a vacant building across the street.
The police officers who arrived jokingly called out "Marco"
to which the suspect accidentally replied, "Polo."
He was immediately arrested.
George Washington was worth $525 million
back in his day, adjusted for inflation.
Former US President Bill Clinton claims
that the Netflix series House of Cards is 99% real.
That's actually terrifying.
Japanese engineer Koneko Saito invented a new, tiny,
personal transportation system, the wa-car,
similar to an electric skateboard, but small enough
to fit right in your backpack.
The world record for the largest number ever counted
belongs to Jeremy Harper.
He streamlined the entire process online
and raised money for charity.
He reached one million, it took him three months.
90% of US media, TV, radio and news
is owned by only six corporations, those being
Disney, CBS, Viacom, Newscorp, GE, and Time Warner.
(fake coughs) Oligopoly. Oh, goodness.
People actually used to do their laundry in Old Faithful
located in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.
They would put their clothes in the geyser
and it would erupt and clean them, although,
this really only worked for linen and cotton fabrics.
Woolen clothes were torn apart.
Smart people underestimate themselves,
ignorant people think they're brilliant.
It's a cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
It's where the highly-skilled assume
that things that they find easy are also easy for others.
And that the unskilled are so incompetent
that they can't recognize their own stupidity.
In 2000, cigarette giant Phillip Morris
introduced fire-safe cigarettes which actually
posed a greater risk of starting fires when left unattended.
You mean we can't trust cigarette companies?
What's this world coming to?
In 1969, NASA possessed the technology to land on the moon,
but not the technology to fake the moon landings.
There simply didn't exist
the equipment to fake the broadcast.
Prairie dogs have a complex means of communication.
It's so advanced that not only do they have different calls
depending on the type of predator, but they also
make sentences that describe the predator.
The concept of rap-battle has existed since the 5th century,
where poets would engage in flighting,
it was a spoken word event where poets
would actually insult one another in verse.
It's like epic rap battles of history.
There are red bananas that taste sweet, creamy,
and a little bit like raspberries
Singapore is the only country in the history
of the modern world
to gain independence against its own will.
A man named Chen Xi spends every weekend of his life
at the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge
which is the world's number one suicide bridge.
He does it to save people from jumping, and in fact,
he has saved 144 people from killing themselves
at the time of this recording.
ISIS has so much money that
it's wealthier than several actual countries.
The group makes about $1 million to $5 million a day.
It took Ronda Rousey a total of only 25 minutes
and thirty-six seconds to win all of her 12 fights.
Bowhead whales are amongst the longest-living mammals
In 2007, a specimen caught off the Alaskan coast
was found to have a 35-inch-long head of an explosive
harpoon embedded deep in its neck.
The projectile was manufactured in
Massachusetts around 1890, suggesting that the whale
survived a hunt over a century ago.
They're just as tough as knowledge whales (whale calls).
Humpback whales often let dolphins hitch a ride
on their head for the sheer fun of it.
The difference between terror and horror is that terror
occurs in anticipation of the horrifying experience,
while horror occurs after.
Boo! Ahhhh, no.
That didn't work at all.
Your eyebrows renew themselves every 64 days.
Before Saladin, the first Sultan of Egypt died in 1193.
He had given all of his wealth to his poor subjects.
His final estate consisted of a single piece of gold
and 40 pieces of silver,
not even enough to pay for the funeral.
The current CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki is the woman
who rented her garage to Larry Page and Sergey Brin
in 1998 when they were creating Google.
KevJumba, a YouTuber, created a second YouTube channel
and donated 100% of its ad revenue to a community in Kenya
which used that money to construct
the first secondary school in their community
and named the school after him.
Breastfeeding allows the baby to give germs to the mother
so her immune system can respond
and synthesize antibodies for her baby.
The Shiawassee Police Department in Michigan
staged a fake wedding on September 21, 1990.
The bride and groom were undercover cops who invited
local drug dealers to their big day.
At the reception, they busted them all at once.
Why would they even show up to that?
I mean, you can buy your own cake can't you?
You got drug money.
There exists a company called DicksByMail.com who will,
for $15, mail a 141 gram bag
of gummy bear (ahem), dicks,
with a letter that reads "Eat a Bag of Dicks"
to anyone in your life that you think deserves it.
Please don't send this to my P.O. Box, please.
Please, don't.
Jason Padgett was a jock who never made it past pre-Algebra,
but, after being attacked outside of a bar,
he started seeing the world in pixelated, geometric shapes.
He soon understood the concept of pi, and had a sudden
ability to hand draw complex fractals
and is now a renowned math genius.
But don't go getting in fights outside of bars
thinking that you're gonna end up a math genius,
Knowledge Whale does not condone that (whale sounds).
And that's it for this video guys,
if you enjoyed it, be sure to subscribe to my channel
so that you can catch my next video,
and I will see you next time.
♫ Knowledge Whale, out (whale sounds) ♫