- You know what time it is!
Time for the facts via the Knowledge Whale.
(low-synth music)
Here are 50 amazing facts to blow your mind.
Located in the Palestinian territories,
the city of Jericho dates back over 10,000 years.
It's actually the oldest city on Earth!
Theoretically, one gram of DNA
could hold around 455 exabytes of data
which is enough to contain all of the data
held by every major tech company combined
including Facebook and Google.
Thanks to extremely high carbon dioxide levels,
the island of Tasmania is home to what very well may be
the cleanest air in the entire world.
In 1807, Pall Mall in the city of London, England
became the very first street in history
to be illuminated by gas light.
You can walk down Pall Mall, though modern lamp posts
have obviously replaced the gas lights.
According to a report released in May of 2016
by the Government Accountability Office,
America's nuclear weapons system is incredibly outdated
and still runs on floppy disks,
a medium that hasn't been popular since the 1980s.
Well, that gives me a lot of hope.
Nukes being controlled my floppy disks, okay.
Despite being nearly 805,000 kilometers in circumference,
the rings around the planet Saturn
are only around 30.5 centimeters thick.
In Tokyo, Japan, vending machines offer a large selection
of wigs that you can buy for your dog.
The trend became so popular that you can now buy
a much larger assortment through online stores.
Between August 28th and September 3rd of 1970,
tens of thousands of people attended an event
in Clackamas County, Oregon called Vortex I.
The free-to-attend event
was dubbed a biodegradable festival of life
and remains America's only large-scale rock festival
to be sponsored by a Republican governor.
However, the entire thing was a ploy
designed to keep young people out of Portland
where then president, Richard Nixon,
was visiting for a convention and it worked!
When food becomes scarce,
ribbon worms will begin consuming themselves.
Experts claim that these adaptive creatures
can eat as much as 95% of their own bodies
and still survive!
That doesn't work for humans.
(gnawing)
After being denied a reduced rate
while buying syrup in bulk,
American businessman, Claud Hatcher, promised himself
that he would never buy Coca-Cola again
and would instead create his own soft drink.
Hatcher kept his promise and created Royal Crown, RC Cola.
Before his criminal career,
famous bank robber, John Dillinger
had a professional baseball career,
playing shortstop for the Martinsville Athletics.
The Beatles' hit, Strawberry Fields Forever
is actually about a Liverpool orphanage
that John Lennon would frequently visit
when he was younger.
In November of 1995,
Marvel released a very dark one-shot comic book
in which The Punisher loses his family
in a fight between superheroes as well as super villains.
He goes on a one-man killing spree,
effectively ending the lives of everyone on both sides
before taking his own.
Oh my god, and I thought the end of Infinity War was dark.
If not for the amazing Robert Englund
who played Freddy Krueger
in The Nightmare on Elm Street movies,
Mark Hamill would not have been cast as Luke Skywalker .
The Star Wars actor
happened to be crashing on Englund's couch
while the horror movie legend was briefly being considered
for the role of Han Solo.
Englund encouraged Hamill to go audition for Skywalker
and of course, he did, and landed the iconic role!
Looking to the night sky, you can see nearly five times
the number of meteors after midnight
than you can before midnight.
Before he was James Bond or Remington Steele,
actor Pierce Brosnan spent three years
performing as a fire eater in the circus.
Better than a clown! (laughs comically)
Due to an incident in which a 14-year-old girl
had difficulties returning from a trans-like state,
schools in San Diego have banned the use of hypnotism.
Okay, kids, and that's it!
Oh, she's still under?
Oh, (laughs nervously) gotta go!
A few weeks after the city of Nagasaki
was devastated by a nuclear bomb,
members of the crew responsible
for dropping the explosive toured the city.
Though they spoke with a number of Japanese locals,
all members of the air crew kept
their true identities a secret.
In 1990, Fred Rogers, the charismatic Mr. Rogers
from the PBS show of the same name,
and his production company sued the Ku Klux Klan
in an attempt to stop the organization
from impersonating him in a very racist
as well as homophobic telephone message
that they were sending out.
A judge ordered the KKK to stop and turn over the tapes.
♪ It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood ♪
♪ Unless you're a racist ♪
In Athens, Greece, a police officer can strip a person
off their driver's license if they feel the individual
is unbathed or even just poorly dressed.
When exposed to prolonged periods of microgravity in space,
an astronaut's heart actually begins to shrink.
The MGM Grand Hotel and Casino is one of the largest,
most extravagant hotels in all of Las Vegas
and it's estimated that a whopping 15,000 pillow cases
are washed in their laundry rooms every day!
In Hong Kong, China, you can purchase a watercress
and duck gizzard-flavored package of Campbell's soup.
While in Mexico, you can get cream of chile poblano.
I mean, I would try them.
A man named Daniel Steibelt once challenged Beethoven
to an improvisation contest.
When it was Beethoven's turn to perform,
he took the piece, turned it upside down,
and placed it on the stand.
His performance frustrated Steibelt to the point
that he left before the music stopped
and made it known that he would not perform at any event
that Beethoven was invited to.
The first video game to be played in sapce was Tetris!
It was played by Russian cosmonaut, Aleksandr A. Serobrov
on a Game Boy that he brought along with him in 1993.
Between December 5th and 6th of 1928,
an estimated 3,000 workers were killed
while on strike from their jobs
at The United Fruit Company.
The group had refused to work
and demanded dignified working conditions.
Losing a significant amount of money
and with The United States threatening
to invade and protect their interests,
the Columbian Government sent in the military
who opened fire.
The horrible incident is now known as The Banana Massacre.
One bite from the Russell's pit viper
can send an adult human through a type of reverse puberty.
The snakes, which are found in southeast asia,
have a venom which can damage a person's pituitary gland
to the point where it stops producing hormones.
This can lead to the individual losing their sex drive
as well as fertility in addition to body hair.
Of course, this can only happen
if the snake bite doesn't of course kill them.
On the evening of December 13th, 1977,
Air India Flight 216 crashed soon after take off
in Evansville, Indiana, killing all but one member
of the University of Evansville basketball team.
The lone team member left alive
wasn't actually on the plane.
However, two weeks after the tragic crash,
he lost his life after being struck by a drunk driver!
In September of 2011, after a police search party
failed to locate a 77-year-old hunter
who had been lost in a forest
near Lac Saint-Jean, Quebec, Canada for two days,
the hunter's friend, ex-wrestling star Raymond Rougeau,
got in his sea plane and flew over the area
performing his own search and he found the man alive!
David Copperfield was the first illusionist
to get a star on The Hollywood Walk of Fame
and has sold more tickets as a solo performer
than any other entertainer in history.
Ears of corn always have an even number of rows.
This is because corn spikelets are always born in pairs.
In January of 1931, while staying
at a hotel in Paris, France,
novelist, Arnold Bennett was warned by a waiter
to avoid drinking the water.
Bennett asked for a glass of water anyway,
claiming it was safe but it was a fatal mistake
and he died of typhoid two months later.
The actors who play Cersei and Bronn
in HBO's epic series Game of Thrones
are never in the same scene together
because the two actors who portray them,
Lena Headey and Jerome Flynn dated in real life
and had a horrible break up.
Both of them have stipulations in their contracts
that say they will never be in the same room together.
Around 20% of the total calories taken in
by human beings worldwide comes
from the consumption of rice!
Many perfumes contain something called skatole,
a potent-smelling chemical that ironically
is naturally found in human feces. (gags)
Las Vegas law states that it's illegal
for someone to pawn their dentures
as they're deemed a prescribed medical device.
Most cultures view sticking of your tongue
as a sign of distaste,
but it's the opposite in Tibet
where it's considered good manners
to stick your tongue out at someone.
(playfully mumbles)
A survey conducted in The United States in 1997
revealed that 12% of Americans believe that Joan of Arc
was the wife of Noah, the biblical figure that had an arc.
Both figures received messages from God
but even if both their stories are 100% accurate,
the pair didn't even live in the same age in history.
According to The Aluminum Association,
nearly 75% of all aluminum ever made
is still in use today.
This is due to the reusability of the metal
and the recycling efforts put forward.
In the 1850s, gold was worth less than aluminum.
Gold was priced at a mere $664 per kilogram,
whereas aluminum was worth nearly double that,
at a whopping $1200 per kilogram!
This is because at the time,
finding aluminum in its pure form was very rare
but extracting it from bauxite,
the world's main source of the metal was expensive.
The sound of a Ferrari's engine
is one of the car's most distinctive features
and that sound is actually created
by utilizing third and sixth harmonics
in the engine's air tank.
Basically, they're musically engineered
to sound amazing, much like a flute or organ is!
(Ferrari engine revs)
Soft drink giant, Coca-Cola once launched
an upselling campaign called H2NO.
It included a website that taught waiters
how to convince customers to buy their products
over ordering a free water.
The goal is to make consumers say no to H2O.
The average 10-hour trip from a Boeing 747
uses up as much as 150,000 liters of fuel.
On average, the plane requires four liters
for every second that they're airborne.
Cheating on your final exams in any country is frowned upon
but in Bangladesh, students over the age of 15
that are caught cheating
can actually be sentenced to jail time.
In 1865, the American $20 bill featured a painting
of the legendary Native American woman, Pocahontas' baptism.
She's seen kneeling before a priest
with other Native Americans on the side
and settlers on the other.
The late Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy,
and thus, the Playboy Bunny,
had a real bunny species named after him.
The species is an endangered marsh rabbit
called the Sylvilagus palustris hefneri
and lives in Southeastern United States.
Two-time Oscar Award winner, Mel Gibson,
was born with a rare birth defect
that affects around one in 600 people
known as horseshoe kidney.
Both of his kidneys fused together before birth,
forming a U-shape or a horseshoe.
If you happened to run over an animal
with your car in the state of West Virginia,
the law there says that you are legally allowed
to claim it as your own, bring it home,
and consume it as roadkill dinner.
Really, is food not that plentiful there?
That's disgusting.
Before it was given the title Friends,
the hit sitcom had a number of working titles
including Across The Hall and Insomnia Cafe.
The thick bark and deeper grooves of older redwoods
create a protected barrier around the tree,
ultimately rendering the tree fire-proof.
(low-synth music)