According to the Living Planet Report by the World Wildlife Foundation, in half a century, human activity has decimated global wildlife populations by an average of 68%.

Baby penguins catastrophically molt. All their baby feathers are replaced with adult feathers at once.

Pie birds are ceramic devices with holes on the bottom and at the top that are used to allow the steam to escape from pies.

120,000 year old footprints were found in Saudi Arabia near an ancient watering hole. It’s the earliest evidence of humans in the Arabian peninsula. It’s speculated that it was a stopping point during long-distance travel. Elephant, camel, horse, and vivid footprints were also found.

Wales has a tree planting program that plants two trees for every child born or adopted in Wales. One tree is planted in Wales and the other is planted in Uganda. More than 10 million trees have been planted.

In the late 19th century, Paris had a time distribution system using pneumatic clocks. A system of pipes was connected to clocks and every minute a 20-second pulse of compressed air was sent through the pipes which moved the clock hands. Companies and people could subscribe to the service. It worked without interruption until the air compressor plant flooded in 1910.

Sloth bears are the only bears that carry their young on their back.

There are over 15,000 varieties of apples, but 90% of apples sold in stores are comprised of only 15 varieties.

Nick Botner owned a 40 -acre farm in Molalla, Oregon where he collected apple and other fruit trees. He had 4,500 varieties of apple trees. It was the largest private collection of apple trees. The USDA’s collection is only 2,000.

There are several organizations dedicated to finding and bring back these apples. Temperate Orchard Conservancy is grafting Botner’s trees to clone them. The Lost Apple Project finds lost orchards and collects apples for identification. This year they found 20 lost varieties.

65 countries have gained independence from the United Kingdom. They are in the Guinness Book of World Records for this fact. It is estimated that at one time the UK exercised authority over 88 million people which was 20% of the population.

The Mino was an all-female military regiment in the Kingdom of Dahomey which is present-day Republic of Benin in West Africa. The Europeans called them the Dahomey Amazons. The regiment was established in the late 1600s and disbanded around 1900 when the area became a French protectorate.

The Mino were trained as traditional warriors with intense physical exercise, learning survival skills, and performing military exercises. There were different regiments with different weapons, uniforms, and commanders. The woman fought in many conflicts with neighboring kingdoms, often doing slave raids. They were married to the king, but only in a formal sense, so they couldn’t marry anyone else and were celibate.

They had privileges such as good tobacco and alcohol, and residing in the King’s palace after dark. They also had up to 50 slaves each. One slave would walk ahead of them ringing a bell to alert people giving them time to move out of the way and avert their eyes.

They were the inspiration for the Dora Milaje, the all-female warriors, in the Black Panther movie.

In 1981 at St. Bees Priory in Cumbria England, a well preserved body was found in a wooden coffin wrapped in a lead sheet and two shrouds. The body had pink skin and visible irises and the nails, skin, and stomach were in near perfect condition. He was dubbed the St. Bees Man, who turned out to be Anthony de Lucy, a medieval man that was born in 1333. He died from a blow to the chest fighting for the Teutonic Knights in the Northern Crusades against the Lithuanians.

John Howland was an indentured servant that came over on the Mayflower. During an epic storm, he fell over board but managed to grab a hold of a trailing rope. The crew was able to rescue him with a boat-hook. He was one of the 41 men to sign the Mayflower Compact.

Once settled in Plymouth, he was an assistant to John Carver. Elizabeth Tilley lived at the Carter estate and history thought her to be Carter’s adopted daughter. However her parents came over on the Mayflower, but died the first winter.

After Carter and his wife died, Howland inherited the estate. And Howland married Tilley. They had 10 children that made it to adulthood and each of them had children. There were 80 grandchildren in total. It is estimated that 2 million americans have Howland as an ancestor.

Howland descendants include three presidents (both Bushes and Franklin Roosevelt), Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alec Baldwin, Sarah Palin, Joseph Smith Jr ( Founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), Dr. Benjamin Spock, William Macy, Justice Robert Jackson, Humphrey Bogart, James Coughtry, Esther Allen Howland (produced the first American valentine).

Only 51 Mayflower Pilgrims had children for a total of 10 million descendants.

After Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1993, she decided to wear a French robe d’avocat instead of the traditional American court dress. In later years she replaced the traditional French rabat with more fanciful jabots. She had a collection of lace jabots from around the world and would wear different ones depending on what she was doing in court. She had a black one with gold embroidery and faceted stones for issuing dissents. She had a crocheted yellow and cream with crystals for issuing majority opinions. Her favorite was from South Africa, woven with white beads.

In 1999, after her cancer treatments, she got Bryant Johnson, a former army reservist attached to the special forces, to train her in the Supreme Court gym. She could do 20 pushups in a session before her 80th birthday.

She was born Joan Ruth, but there were several kids by the name of Joan at school, so she went by Ruth. And officially changed it when she got married.

She graduated high school at 15.

She learned Swedish to co-author a book about civil procedure in Sweden.

In a Nature article, researchers analyzed the data of 442 vikings and determined there was a lot more genetic variability within the viking population than previously thought.

They were more likely to have black hair than blonde. They were descended from the Saami, an indigenous group closer to East Asians and Siberians rather than Europeans.

And for some it was vocation and social identity rather than an ethnicity.

In the late 70s and early 80s, computer magazines featured code listings that a reader would type into their computer to get a certain program or play a game.

In evolutionary biology, there is a concept called the four Fs that are said to be the four basic and most primal drives that animals are evolutionarily adapted to have, follow, and achieve: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and mating.

The brachistochrone curve is the curve of fastest descent. It is the curve that a ball falls the fastest, which is not a straight line but a cycloid curve.

Death by elephant was a common method of capital punishment in India hundreds of years ago. The elephants were trained to kill quickly and slowly to torture over a long period of time.

Cookie Monster’s real name is Sid.

Coolio’s Gangsta Paradise is a remake of Stevie Wonder’s Pastime Paradise.

Spacewar! was the first video game to be played on multiple computers. It was created at MIT by Steve Russell and a bunch of collaboraters in 1962.

The code was public domain and college kids ported it to other computers. The students would sneak into the computer lab at night to play.

It is considered in the top ten of important video games. In 2006, it was proposed that the Library of Congress archive these important games. There are now thousands of video games preserved.

Dr. David Robert Grimes developed an equation to determine how quickly a conspiracy theory would reveal itself.

If the moon landing was fake, then it would have been revealed in a little less than four years.

For a plot to last longer than five years, the maximum people to know is 2521. A decade, fewer than 1000. And a century, 125.

The 1619 Project was released in August 2019 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans to the English colonies.

The project consisted of dedicating the entire August issue of the New York Times Magazine to a re-examination of the legacy of slavery in America.

The Times plans to take the 1619 Project to schools in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center. There are free lesson plans on their website.

The project has received lots of criticism due to inaccurate information including from a lot of historians. Many journalists appreciated the goal worthy project, but recognized the scholarship was poor.

Ellen McGirt at Fortune said “A dramatic and necessary corrective to the fundamental lie of the American origin story.”

In the Netherlands during WWII, Freddie Oversteegen (14 years old) and her older sister, Truus, joined the anti-Nazi group, Council of Resistance. Along with friend Hannie Schaft.

They would sabotage Nazi military presence by using dynamite to blow up bridges and railroad tracks. They would smuggle Jewish children out of the country and help them escape concentration camps.

They would pickup a Nazi soldier at the bar, then lure them into the woods with romantic overtures, where they would shoot them.

Nan Madol is an archeological site in Pohnpei built between the 8th and 11th centuries.

The megalithic architecture consists of large basalt stones. About 40% of the stones have been sourced to come from the north. It is unknown how they were moved and where the rest of the stones come from. The stones create walls the enclose an area about 1.5 by 0.5 kilometers creating nearly 100 artificial islets.

It is unknown how the structures were built. There are theories it is a lost continent, Lemuria or Mu. Others think it was built by Greek sailors. And others think it was aliens.

Pohnpeians think that builders of Leluh archeological site on Kosrae, but radiocarbon dating proves Leluh is newer than Nan Madol. According to Pohnpeian legend, twin sourcers levitated huge stones with the help of a dragon.

In 1995, Duncan Scott, New Mexico state senator, proposed the expert wizard amendment that would require psychologists and psychiatrists expert witnesses to dress up as wizards in court proceedings.

They will wear a cone shaped hat that is not less than two feet tall and be imprinted with stars and lightning bolts. Also they have to wear a white beard that is at least 18 inches long. And stab the air with their wand to punctuate crucial elements of their testimony.

It passed the New Mexico Senate unanimously. Scott revealed it was satire and it was never signed into law

CNN pays 58 airports to exclusively play CNN Airport on their monitors. CNN Airport is a special 24/7 broadcast with around the clock technical and editorial staffing, including three reporters. It has stricter content standards that includes omitting aviation incidents/crashes, sexual content, and graphic violence. It also has automated overlay of weather conditions and increased fonts to allow readability at a distance.

In Man Of Steel (2013), Henry Cavill (Superman) was asked to shave his chest for the collapsing oil rig scene, However he refused saying that Superman had chest hair, citing the famous “Death of Superman” graphic novel as a reference.

During WWII, the United States Army had a tactical deception unit called the Ghost Army. Their mission was to impersonate other Allied Army units to deceive the enemy. They put on a “traveling roadshow” using inflatable tanks, sound tanks, fake radio transmissions, scripts, and pretense and staged more than 20 battlefield deceptions often operating close to the front lines.

In the 1780s, the hand chain saw was invented to widen the pelvis during child birth.

In Athens Georgia, there is a white oak tree that owns itself. It is now in its second generation of owning itself. The original tree was thought to start between the mid 16th century and late 18th century and it fell in 1942. One of its own acorns was planted in the spot.

It was on the property of William Henry Jackson and he wanted to protect the tree because he had a lot childhood memories with it. So in the 1820s, he deeded the tree and 8 feet around it to the tree itself. Only 1 person has ever seen the deed and it is believed to no longer exist. It is no technically part of the right-of-way of the adjacent street.

Happy birthday to Vincent Van Gogh and Eric Clapton.

There are 1000s of variations of chess. Triangular chess and Quatrochess allow 3 and 4 player games. Infinite chess has an unbounded board whereas Alice chess plays with two boards. Dunsany’s chess is a regular chess army versus a large army of pawns. Kriegspiel is when you can’t see the opponents pieces. Almost chess uses chancellor pieces instead of queens. Losing chess changes the objective to losing all of your pieces.

Bobby Fischer created a variation of shuffle chess called Chess960 where the back row is randomized while following certain rules like bishops have to be on opposite colors and the king has to be between the rooks. He wanted to favor creativity over memorization.

Einstein chess is based on his theory of relativity. When a piece is moved it loses energy and is demoted. When a piece captures another it gains energy and is promoted.

The Bible has jokes. The most famous joke in the Bible is the story of God telling Abraham and Sarah they would have child and being 100 and 90 years old, respectively, they laughed. And then they had Isaac. (Genesis 17:17)

A study done in 1999, determined that small concentrations of Viagra dissolved in a vase of water can double the shelf life of cut flowers, making them stand up straight for as long as a week beyond their natural life span.

The year 1816 is known as the year without summer, because the low temperatures and high rain falls.

Scientists think it was a volcanic winter caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in April. In addition to the fact that in the previous 3 years, 4 other large volcanic eruptions occurred which caused lots of atmospheric dust allowing less sunlight to come through the stratosphere.

It caused a major food shortage due to crop failures. Due to an oat shortage, Karl Drais invented horseless transportation devices like the draisine and the velocipede, precursors to the bicycle. There were amazing sunsets. Paintings during this time had a yellow tinge.

And Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. Shelley along with some friends on Lake Geneva during their Swiss holiday decided to have a scary story contest. Lord Byron wrote “The Fragment” which was used as inspiration for a prequel to Dracula.

Before the stethoscope was invented doctors would place their ear on the patients chest to listen to the heart. In 1816, a French doctor, Rene Laennec, didn’t feel comfortable placing his head on a women’s chest, so he used a rolled up piece of paper between her chest and his ear. He went to design a trumpet shaped object made of wood.

Bruce Banner stores the extra mass he uses to become the Hulk in an alternate dimension.

Originally, Banner became a gray-skinned monster every night, but he got trapped in a space shuttle that exposed him to cosmic radiation which caused him to go green. So there are different versions of the Hulk that are tied to different split personalities of Banner stemming from his abusive childhood.

Hulk is capable of holding his breath for hours and has the ability to regenerate body parts.

There are few mosquitos at Disney World even though it is in the middle of a swamp. They have a Mosquito Surveillance Program has various methods of controlling mosquitos. They have carbon dioxide traps to trap the mosquitos. The traps are analyzed to determine where and when insecticides should be sprayed. Typically they spray twice a day.

They also have chickens to determine if diseases are found in the mosquitos. An encephalitis scare in 1990 and 1997 had Walt Disney World telling guests to limit outdoor activities in the morning/evening and moving activities indoors if possible or canceling them altogether. In 2016, guests were given free insect repellent due to the Zika virus.

Some drug smugglers in Mexico use cannons to launch drugs in to the United States. The cannons are basically huge potato guns mounted on panel vans.

The Roman scholar, Marcus Varro, was the first to describe germ theory, 2000 years before it was to be widely accepted.

In an agriculture book called De Re Rustica, he stated that people shouldn’t put homesteads near swamps ‘because there are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and there cause serious diseases’.

When humans kiss, they tend to turn their head to the right twice as often as the left.

Universe 25 was a mouse utopia experiment created by John Calhoun at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIHM) where he put a group of mice inside a box with unlimited amounts of water and food, climate control, hundreds of nesting boxes, and protection from predators. The mice were allowed to live and reproduce in paradise.

One year into the experiment things turned ugly. New generations of mice couldn’t find mates or a place in the social order. Spinster females would retreat to faraway nesting boxes living alone. Males would congregate in the middle of the room where they languished and occasionally attacked each other. Parents would constantly move their families sometimes losing babies in the moving process and would kick babies out too early. The “beautiful ones” were a handful of females in a nesting box being protected by a single male. The females would only eat, sleep and groom, and would not have sex or care for their young. Females stopped carrying to full term. Two years in all reproduction stopped. And over the next three years all the mice died.

Calhoun named this process “behavioral sink”. This led to dire predictions of overpopulation growth for humans.

The book, “The Rats of NIHM” was inspired by this experiment.

The San Diego Zoo has a frozen collection that was established in 1972. It is the largest and oldest frozen zoo collection. They currently have over 8,400 samples from over 800 species. When it was first started there was no way to make use of the collection, the technology didn’t exist.

The CN Tower in Toronto has a light show every night except during bird migration. There is an intelligent LED system that is energy and cost efficient installed in the elevator shaft. They have a list of the lightning schedule and the ability to request light shows to raise awareness for specific causes.The coolest part is that the random flashes of color aren’t actually random. It represents a 2 pixel wide vertical line of a picture. So when you put the lines together you get a picture. It wasn’t suppose to be a real-life Easter egg, just an easy way to get a color scheme.https://youtu.be/rqFMbXMfS9Q

A bra company designed the first space suit for the landing on the moon. The International Latex Corporation originally sold rubber diaper covers, swim caps and swimwear. Then they moved to Latex girdles, bras and other intimate apparel. They were the first company to advertise bras on TV and the first to use live models wearing only bras.

Back to the suit, during WWII there was a rubber shortage, so the owner of ILC appointed his TV repairman to head the industrial division to develop items for the war effort in an attempt to get government contracts.

In the early 60s, NASA put out a bid for a space suit. The suit had to endure extreme temperatures both highs and lows, not tear by dust particles moving 13 times faster than a bullet, and the user had to be able to see his feet and move about.

ILC designed the best suit but the contract was awarded to a more reputable company with the directive from NASA that they were to work with ILC. It was a three year disaster. So NASA started over and invited two companies, not ILC, to compete their suits in a variety of tasks. ILC heard about it and demanded that they get to participate.

They had six weeks to develop a suit. They hired seamstresses, which the other companies did not do, to help them develop a better suit. In the competition, despite a broken zipper, they clearly won. One of the other companies suit couldn’t enter the spacecraft when inflated. And the other companies helmet flew off during pressurization. ILC was officially awarded the contract.

The suit had 21 layers of material, and one of those materials was developed specifically for the suit. Beta cloth made of Teflon-coated microfiber was developed to withstand 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. The company developed joints called convolutes and steel air craft cables were used to absorb tension and maintain shape.

In the early 20th century, the American military was sent to Central America to keep the fruit plantations from striking in what is called the Banana Wars. Fruit companies in the United States needed to keep the Central American fruit plantations stable and cheap. The companies convinced the government to send the military to keep the workers from striking, forming militias, and waging rebellions for better working conditions and freedom. Thousands of locals and hundreds of American military members died.

US Marine Corps Major General, Smedley Butler, was one of the most active military officers during the war. Twenty years after the war, he described himself as “a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers…a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism”.

Cassius Marcellus Clay, (Muhammad Ali), had his new red Schwinn bike stolen when he was 12. He found the nearest policeman and stated he wanted to whup the thief. The policeman was Joe Martin, who also trained boxers and had a gym in the basement of the building they were standing near. Martin told Ali that he better learn to fight before seeking retaliation. Ali showed up at the gym the next day and spent the next six years training under Martin.Louisville has a bike share program with 305 bikes. Five of those bikes are red in honor of Muhammad Ali.

There are only 10-12 human cannonballs working today and it is a highly secretive trade generally kept within families. How the cannons work are unknown due to the secretive nature. Cannonballers don’t even share how their cannons work with each other.

A circus historian says that only 50 people have attempted the act and 30 of them have died. Another person thinks there have been closer to 100.

Human cannonballers are in the air for less than 3 seconds, but travels more than 60 mph and can hit a g-force of 7. The average person passes out at 5.

Embryonic diapause is when an embryonic blastocyst (the stage between fertilization and implantation into the uterus wall) remains in a state of dormancy and does immediately implant into the uterus wall until favorable conditions are met. For example, bears need 24% body fat before the blastocyst will embed. Embryonic diapause affects over 100 different mammals in 7 or 8 different orders.In 2012, a study with sheep and mice proved diapause is conserved across mammals. Sheep don’t do diapause while mice do. A sheep blastocyst was embedded into a mouse uterus and the blastocyst went into the diapause state. Then it was removed and put back into the sheep and diapause stopped.