- All right, here we go, got your drink, got your snacks,
then let's get into the amazing facts, let's do this.
Here are 50 amazing facts to blow your mind.
(squeaking) (exploding)
A single day on the planet Venus lasts
longer than an entire year.
This is due to the incredibly slow rotation of the planet
compared to its close proximity
and thus shorter journey around the sun.
When hungry on in need of something,
cats knowingly manipulate people into doing their bidding.
They use a special purr that sounds like a normal one
but embedded in it is a cry that humans find hard to ignore.
Despite being twins, Amy and Katie Jones-Elliot
were born 87 days apart.
Their mother Maria went into labor on June first, 2012,
after being pregnant for only 23 weeks
and gave birth to Amy.
Then on August 27th, 13 weeks later,
doctors induced labor and Katie was born.
The pair of girls hold the world record
for time between two twins being born.
Ignoring the many diseases that insects can carry,
it would take around 400,000 mosquitoes
to extract enough blood from a human being to kill them,
and it would take one million mosquitoes
to drain all the average person's blood from their body.
Famous artist and genius of his time, Leonardo da Vinci,
was an ambidextrous paranoid dyslexic
and could draw or paint forward with one hand
while the other wrote sentences backwards.
The melody of the Star Spangled Banner,
the national anthem of the USA,
was actually taken from To Anacreon in Heaven,
a British song about drinking and sex.
When icebergs melt, they produce a fizzing sound
called the Bergie Seltzer.
The sound is made by the popping of air bubbles
that have been trapped in the pressurized ice for centuries.
The real name of the wizard in The Wizard of Oz
is Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman
Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs.
In the original book, he explains that he goes by Oz
because the rest of his initials
literally spell out Pinhead.
Lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars
are the only subspecies of cats that can roar.
All other felines are incapable due to not having
the elastic ligament connecting bones
supporting their larynxes that those four types have.
The filling that sits between the wafers of a Kit Kat
chocolate bar are actually other Kit Kats.
The exterior of every bar is examined
and those that have too many air bubbles
or other imperfections are ground up
into crumbly dust and used to make more chocolate bars.
Side note, if you've never had the green tea Kit Kat
from Japan, you haven't lived.
The Denver International Airport in Denver, Colorado
is more than twice the size of the island of Manhattan.
It's the largest airport in the United States
and has the biggest jet fuel
distribution network on the planet.
Researchers and zoologists have proven that
birth control pills used by human females
also work for female gorillas,
leading many to believe that our two species
have more in common than we originally thought.
Susami, a small fishing town in Japan,
received a Guinness World Record for having
the deepest mailbox on the planet.
Situated 10 meters underwater off the coast
is an old style red mailbox in which divers can place
waterproof letters which are collected every few days.
And it receives a lot, the mailbox actually gets
between 1,000 and 1,500 pieces of mail every year.
There are more possible iterations of piece placement
in a game of chess than there are
atoms in the known universe.
Every month, water treatment companies around the world
extract over a ton of hair from their plants.
The hair is most often taken to a waste facility
and buried, but some companies have found other uses for it.
I do not want to know what those uses are.
There are whales living off the coast of Alaska
that were alive before Herman Melville's classic novel
Moby Dick was written.
Melville originally published the book
on October 18th, 1851 and many of the aquatic mammals
living in the Arctic are over 200 years old.
The Haskell Free Library and Opera House is located
directly on the Canada US border
and has two different addresses, one in Stanstead, Quebec
and the other in Derby Line, Vermont.
The Canadian side contains the library and stage
while the American side has the main entrance
and most of the seats.
You can literally borrow a book in one country,
take it a few steps and read it in the same room
but in a different country.
Although she's often associated with the Great Pyramid
in Egypt, Cleopatra lived closer in time to the creation
of the smart phone than she did to the construction
of the massive pointy wonder of the ancient world.
When the Great Pyramid was completed,
wooly mammoths were still roaming the Earth.
The last man to walk on the moon
was astronaut Eugene Cernan.
Before climbing back into the lander on December, 1972,
Cernan dragged his foot through the moon's dusty surface,
writing TDC, his daughter Tracy's initials.
And theoretically, they're still there today.
Consuming alcohol before firearm shooting competitions
has been banned in many places due to alcohol
being labeled a performance enhancing drug.
Drinking has a calming effect on nerves,
which can actually steady a shooter's hand.
Monarch butterflies have been known to become cannibals,
consuming other monarch caterpillars or eggs,
though usually to do so only when
their food sources are scarce.
Almost all Muppets on Sesame Street
or the Muppet Show are left handed.
This is because most puppeteers are right handed.
They use their right hand to operate the character's mouth
and the left to work the left hand or hand rod.
The owner of Fender Electric Instrument Manufacturing
and inventor of the telecaster,
the first mass produced electric guitar on Earth,
Leo Fender couldn't actually play
any of the instruments that he designed.
A close inspection of the Liberty Bell,
which is currently in Philadelphia,
reveals that Pennsylvania is misspelled.
One of the Ns is missing.
Spell check, folks, spell check.
NASA's vehicle assembly building
at the Kennedy Space Center in Titusville, Florida
is so massive that it has its own weather.
Rain clouds often form inside the building
due to humid weather.
The captain mascot from Captain Crunch cereal's full name
is Captain Horacio Magellan Crunch,
and his ship is the S.S. Guppy.
In the town of Coloma, California, the dead outnumber
the living by a ratio of nearly 1,000 to one.
There are grave markers for around 1.5 million
of the deceased, while the living population
sits at only 1,600.
As per his last wishes after the death
of Edward Hedrick, the inventor of Frisbee golf,
the man's ashes were molded into a new series of Frisbee
and sold so that he could be thrown around forever.
After his fatal shooting, rapper Tupac Shakur's ashes
were rolled up and smoked by his friends, who took his
last wishes from his song Black Jesus very seriously.
If you took all the cement used in the making
of the Hoover Dam, you could construct a two-lane roadway
from New York City all the way to San Francisco.
If dropped from an equal distance,
a solid glass or steel ball will actually bounce
higher in the air than a regular non-bouncy rubber ball.
This is due to the harder balls losing less energy
when they make an impact.
Leopard frogs use their eyes to help them swallow food.
By squeezing them shut, they pull their eyes into their own
mouths, compressing food down into their throats.
According to research conducted for Forbes magazine,
the richest fictional character is Scrooge McDuck,
who had theoretically amassed a fortune
of over $65.4 billion by 2013.
Well yeah, I mean he filled a room with coins
and swims in them, he's rich.
Smaug, the dragon from The Hobbit book and movies,
also made Forbes richest list, taking second place.
His hordes of gold and other treasures
were estimated to be worth around $54.1 billion.
Mature goat bucks will urinate on their own heads,
beards, and front legs before initiating a mating ritual.
There are an estimated average of 40,000 injuries
involving toilets every year in the United States,
and some of them lead to fatalities.
High up on the northwest tower of Washington
National Cathedral among the grotesque gargoyles
sits a stone carving of the head of Darth Vader.
When the tower was being built in the 1980s,
a contest was held for kids to design the statues.
Christopher Rader received third place
and his submission, the Dark Lord of the Sith,
joined the ranks of limestone heads.
In 1985, the tiny town of Riverside, Iowa declared itself
the future birthplace of Captain James. T. Kirk,
the fictional captain of the USS Enterprise
in the original Star Trek series.
Modern Eskimos use refrigerators despite living
in mostly sub-zero temperatures.
Instead of using them to keep food cool,
they actually use them to prevent their food from freezing.
Though listening to someone being constantly sarcastic
can be frustrating, studies show that hearing
such sly and witty remarks can actually
improve both analytical and creative thinking.
Oh yeah, sure it can, it'll make you way smarter.
The largest tapeworm to ever be surgically removed
from a human body was a whopping 33 meters long.
Yarl Siggud the Mighty, Viking ruler of Orkney
was killed in 892 A.D. after being bitten
by a man he beheaded.
After mounting the head of his executed enemy on horse,
Siggud rode off, only to have
the head's teeth scratch his leg.
The wound became infected and soon cost the Viking his life.
There are more wild camels in Australia
than anywhere else on the planet, including the Middle East.
In fact, the camel population has gotten out of control
and tens of millions of dollars has been spent
by the Australian government just to deal with them.
In 1989, while taking a private, romantic stroll
though a zoo with his then-wife Robin Gibbons,
heavyweight boxing legend Mike Tyson spotted
an alpha male gorilla bullying his fellow apes.
So the champ offered a zookeeper $10,000
to let him into the cage so that it could fight it.
The zookeeper declined his offer.
For three years during World War II,
Academy Award winners took home painted plaster statuettes
instead of the more traditional solid bronze Oscars
that were plated in 24 karat gold.
This was due to a metal shortage,
but after the war was over, winners were invited
to trade in their plaster Oscars for the standard versions.
The name Jessica, which was the top baby name
for girls in the United States for many years in the 1980s
and '90s, was actually invented by William Shakespeare.
He created it for his play The Merchant of Venice.
Shakespeare was also the man behind the well-known
phrases dead as a doornail, baited breath,
kill with kindness, and vanish into thin air.
Beetle species make up around 40% of all documented insects.
After finding out his wife had been sold fake gems
by a jewel dealer, Roman emperor Gallienus
had the dealer arrested and dumped into an empty arena.
He then let the man stew there while he listened
to hungry lions roar on the other side of a door
and waited to be torn limb from limb.
However, when the door eventually opened,
instead of vicious cats, a small chicken came running out.
A herald then called out "he practiced deceit
"and has had it practiced on him."
(relaxed music)