Only 4% of mammals are wild. Thirty-six percent are humans, and 60% are livestock.

The term “polka dot” originated because of the popularity of the polka dance around the same time the pattern became fashionable, just as many other products and fashions of the era also adopted the “polka” name.

In a species of marine isopods, males are polymorphic and exist in 3 forms, α, β, and γ of different sizes. Of the three, α males are the largest and most dominant; they mate with multiple females in a harem. The β males mimic the females and therefore manage to mate with some of the females in an α male’s harem. The γ form is much smaller and mimics the juvenile form, also allowing it to escape detection.

The pomato is a grafted plant that is produced by grafting together a tomato plant and a potato plant, both of which are members of the Solanum genus in the Solanaceae (nightshade) family. Cherry tomatoes grow on the vine, while white potatoes grow in the soil from the same plant.

On February 5, 1858, Laurence Keitt started a massive brawl on the House floor during a tense late-night debate. Keitt, offended by Pennsylvania Congressman (and later Speaker of the House) Galusha A. Grow, a Republican, having stepped over to the Democratic side of the House chamber, dismissively demanded that Grow sit down, calling him a “black Republican puppy”. Grow responded by telling Keitt that “No negro-driver shall crack his whip over me.” Keitt became enraged and went for Grow’s throat, shouting that he would “choke [him] for that”. A large brawl involving approximately 50 representatives erupted on the House floor, ending only when a missed punch from Rep. Cadwallader Washburn of Wisconsin upended the hairpiece of Rep. William Barksdale of Mississippi. The embarrassed Barksdale accidentally replaced the wig backwards, causing both sides to erupt in spontaneous laughter.

In Zootopia, the arctic shrew was chosen for Mr. Big, the mafia boss, because they are the most vicious predator on earth.

Seiryu Miharashi station is found in the Yamaguchi Prefecture between the Naguwa and Nekasa stations — meaning it’s located in the middle of nowhere. It has no entrance or exit. The most travellers get is a platform where they can stand and enjoy the view of the verdant mountains.

During medieval times in Italy, wine was sold through wine windows to prevent the spread of the bubonic plague.

A chiliagon is a polygon with 1,000 sides.

It is possible to unboil an egg. This technology is used in biochemistry and pharmaceutical industries, primarily for chemotherapy drugs.

At the Arlanda airport in Stockholm, the bakery RC Chocolat runs a 24-hour hotel for sourdoughs. Anyone can store their dough there and be sure that it will be fed, massaged, and well taken care of.

In several states, like Ohio (5), Tennessee (8), and Pennsylvania (15), there are limits on the number of women that can live together to prevent brothels.

This is way sororities couldn’t have houses in some of those states.

Last year, Hasbro (the toy company behind My Little Pony and Furby) bought Death Row Records, which includes the rights to Tupac, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Dogg.

The contiguous United States’ electrical power grid is separated into three parts: Two make up the Eastern Interconnection and the Western Interconnection, and their grids power both sides of the lower 48 states.

The third grid — called the Electric Reliability Council of Texas — is an electrical island that powers Texas, and it remains separate from the other two.

Texas has always operated on its own power grid, but the main motivator was the federal government, said ERCOT president and CEO Bill Magness.

Regional utilities in Texas created limited connections during World War II when the war effort demanded large amounts of power be sent to the Gulf Coast. The connections enabled power to flow from all over Texas to where it was needed most. That grid became the Texas Interconnected System.

Japanese women are required by the Maternal Child Health Act to register their pregnancies with the local government, and encouraged to be vigilant of their pregnancy by utilizing the Maternal and Child Health Handbook (boshi techo) distributed upon registration. Over 90% of pregnancies are registered before the 20th week of gestation, suggesting that most women are visiting a doctor and receiving support from public health services.

The beard-second is a unit of length inspired by the light-year, but applicable to extremely short distances such as those in integrated circuits. It is the length an average beard grows in one second. Kemp Bennett Kolb defines the distance as exactly 100 angstroms (10 nanometers), as does Nordling and Österman’s Physics Handbook. Google Calculator uses 5 nm.

The Spanish company named Vortex Bladeless recently unveiled their design for a wind turbine that generates electricity without the need of rotating blades.

In what one of the co-designers described as looking like “asparagus”, the turbine uses the force created by natural wind vortices to generate electricity. Basically, if you put an object in the path of wind, it will create an undulating vortex behind the barrier. Structural engineers have understood this for some time, and have designed tall-standing buildings and structures (like the Burj Khalifa) to either withstand or channel them. Vortex Bladeless, on the other hand, designed their turbine to take advantage of this effect.

There are many advantages to the Vortex design. For starters, it is cheaper to manufacture than current pinwheel turbines. It is also cheaper to maintain, seeing as how the design does not involve friction between moving parts. It is also completely silent, and birds can fly around them without fear of being sucked in or chopped to pieces by blades.

Banggwijaengi myeoneuri (방귀쟁이 며느리 The Farting Daughter-in-law) is an orally transmitted Korean folk tale.

It is the story of a Korean woman who produces loud destructive farts. When one fart severely damages her husband’s house, his family throws her out. However, her flatulence later proves beneficial to the family and she is welcomed back.

Genghis Khan adopted a policy of strategic marriages. He would marry off a daughter to the king of an allied nation. The king’s other wives were dismissed. Then he would assign his new son-in-law to military duty in the Mongol wars, while the daughter took over the rule of the kingdom. Most sons-in-law died in combat.

In this way Genghis Khan built a shield around the Mongol homelands, while expanding beyond them. In his marital instructions to his daughter Alaqai, “He left no doubt that this was a major military assignment. She was not there merely to administer, but to rule — thereby beginning the expansion of the Mongols from a tribal nation into a global empire.”

By the time of Genghis Khan’s death, his daughters ruled from the Yellow Sea to the Caspian. Probably never before, or since, have women held so much power over so vast a region.

There are snails and slugs that live in volcano vents.

The scaly-foot snail lives in a deep-sea hydrothermal vent in the Indian Ocean. It’s shell is composed of three layers the outer one consisting of iron sulfide.

In Australia, there is the Mount Kaputar pink slug.

The USS New York was constructed with a symbolic amount of steel salvaged from the World Trade Center.

7.5 short tons (6.8 t) of the steel used in the ship’s construction came from the rubble of the World Trade Center; this represents less than one thousandth of the total weight of the ship. The steel was melted down at Amite Foundry and Machine in Amite, Louisiana, to cast the ship’s bow section. It was poured into the molds on 9 September 2003, with 7 short tons (6.4 t) cast to form the ship’s “stem bar”—part of the ship’s bow. The foundry workers reportedly treated it with “reverence usually accorded to religious relics,” gently touching it as they walked by. One worker delayed his retirement after 40 years of working to be part of the project.

Big bird is different colors in different countries. In Mexico, he is green. In the Netherlands and Brazil, he is blue. In Turkey, he is red. In Portugal, he is orange.

Washington-based painter Tyree Callahan modified a 1937 Underwood Standard typewriter, replacing the letters and keys with color pads and hued labels to create a functional “painting” device called the Chromatic Typewriter.

The four teenage lead characters of Scooby-Doo were inspired by four of the main characters from the 1959–63 American sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, with Shaggy having been derived from the character Maynard G. Krebs, as played by Bob Denver. Maynard’s beatnik-style goatee, general appearance, and use of the word “like” as a form of punctuation all found their way into the character of Shaggy, with the base personality of the character updated to make him a hippie rather than a beatnik.

Houses in Bermuda have white stepped roofs to harvest rain water and store it as the island has no fresh-wayer, springs, rivers or lakes.

The steps slow down the rain water. The steps are made of limestone which is not easily shifted during hurricanes. The limestone mortar has antimicrobials properties. The white color reflects the ultraviolet light from the sun helping to purify the water. The white paint is also used because it is easy to tell when it’s dirty. The roof is repainted every two years

The annual rainfall is similar to England and fairly consistent throughout the year. This makes each home self-sufficient and there is no water bill.

The Canadian doctor, Sir Fredrick Banting, discovered insulin in 1923. He sold the patent for $1 stating “Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world.”

Iceland has Europe’s largest banana plantation. It is a greenhouse heated using geothermal energy. It is located in the village of Reykir and managed by the Icelandic Agricultural University. The annual banana harvest is 500-2,000 kg.

Nowe Ateny (New Athens) is the abbreviated title of the first Polish-language encyclopedia, authored by the 18th century Polish priest Benedykt Joachim Chmielowski.

Nowe Ateny is the source of a few memorable and amusing “definitions”, often quoted in Poland to this day:

Horse: Everyone knows what a horse is.

Goats are a stinking kind of animal.

Dragon is hard to overcome, yet one shall try”

The Coca-Cola Company sought ways to increase the five cent price, even approaching the U.S. Treasury Department in 1953 to ask that they mint a 7.5 cent coin. The Treasury was unsympathetic. In another attempt, The Coca-Cola Company briefly implemented a strategy where one in every nine vending machine bottles was empty. The empty bottle was called an “official blank”. This meant that, while most nickels inserted in a vending machine would yield cold drinks, one in nine patrons would have to insert two nickels in order to get a bottle. This effectively raised the price to 5.625 cents. Coca-Cola never implemented this strategy on a national scale.

New evidence reveals that Babylonian astronomers, working several centuries B.C.E., employed sophisticated geometric methods that foreshadow the development of calculus. Historians had thought such techniques did not emerge until more than 1400 years later, in 14th century Europe.

Swearing generally draws from a pool of 10 expressions and occurs at a rate of about 0.5% of one’s daily word output.

In children, swearing emerges by age 2 and becomes adult like by ages 11 or 12. by the time children enter school, they have a working vocabulary of 30-40 offensive words.

Bilinguals experience tip-of-the-tongue moments twice as often as monolinguals, because processing two languages comes at a computational cost, however bilinguals have better working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control.

When using sign language, people experience tip-of-the-finger moments just as often as speakers do.

During Prohibition, the government mandated that toxic additives be added into products that could be converted into bootleg alcohol.

In 1929, enforcement of prohibition transfered from the Internal Revenue Service to the Justice Department.

Between 1919 and 1969, college home economic programs used orphan babies and practice houses to learn household tasks. In the 50s, there were 40 to 50 colleges and universities throughout the country that used babies lent by orphanages.

Students would rotate through the apartment on a schedule to ensure the babies were cared for and the house is kept up.

At Cornell, all the practice babies had the last name Done on, short for domestic economics. At Illinois State University, they had the last name North or South, depending on the building they were raised in.

During George Washington’s time with the Continental Army, he noticed how smallpox and other diseases spread quickly through Army camps and gatherings. Washington used quarantine and inoculation methods to keep his men healthy from diseases.

During a smallpox outbreak in Boston in March of 1776, he only sent soldiers that had previously been infected to protect his soldiers and take advantage of the vulnerability of Boston and it’s British inhabitants.

Alligators will stick their snouts out of the water when it freezes, so they can still breathe. They enter a state called brumation which is like hibernation and will be alive when the ice melts.

There are rocking chairs in over 40 airports. It started as a photography exhibit called “Porch Sitting” with rocking chairs as props at the Charlotte Douglas International Airport in 1997. When the exhibit was over, people complained that the chairs were removed.

The chairs are called Kennedy rockers after John F. Kennedy who had these chairs all over including Air Force One, Camp David, and the Oval Office. They are sold by Troutman Chairs in North Carolina.

In 1970, four high school students started an organization to eliminate pay toilets in the United States and succeeded. They were fed up with pay toilets on the New Jersey turnpike. The organization was called the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America (CEPTIA). The had an anthem, a newsletter, and a logo. It was bankrolled by $25.20 (or $148.30 in today’s dollars) and membership cost a quarter.

There first meeting was in the Dayton Public Library where 29 out of 48 members were in attendance, although it almost didn’t happen because the librarians were concerned that there was no grown up.

At the same time legislation started to occur to eliminate the pay toilets, but none passed.

In 1973, the now college students held a press conference in the downtown Chicago Sheraton hotel where they explained the situation and their reasoning to get rid of the pay toilets and explaining four ways to circumvent the payment. About 30 reporters from every major local paper and some national papers attended.

By 1976, CEPTIA declared victory with many anti-pay toilet bills being passed around the country. By the 80s very few remained.

In 1881, William Winchester died of tuberculosis and his wife, Sarah, inherited 50% of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, making her the wealthiest woman in the world at that time.

In 1884, Sarah moved to San Jose, California from New Haven, CT and bought an 8 room farmhouse that is known today as the Winchester Mystery House. Shortly after purchasing the house she started renovations and didn’t stop until her death in 1922.

The house had 24,000 square feet, 10,000 windows, 2,000 doors, 160 rooms, 52 skylights, 47 stairways and fireplaces, 17 chimneys, 13 bathrooms, and 6 kitchens.

The house has weird oddities like stairs that go nowhere, windows overlooking other rooms, and stairs with odd-sized risers.

Sarah believes she was cursed and many claim the house is haunted by those that died by Winchester rifles and the oddities of the house were due to these ghosts.

The house is on the National Register of Historic Places and now serves as a tourist attraction and can be booked for events like team building and weddings. It has axe throwing in the stables and an antique products museum.

There is also a video tour that is $5.99 to rent and $13.99 to purchase as well as an immersive 360 tour for $8.99.

There are documented cases of feral children being raised by monkeys/primates, wolves, dogs, bears, sheep, cattle, goats, and ostriches as well as many cases not associated with animals.

The cases of wild children occurs across the world including Columbia, Uganda, Russia, India, Spain, Ukraine, Chile, Romania, Siberia, Lithuania, Ireland, Andes, Sahara desert, Pyrenees, Germany, Belgium,France, Hungary, Cambodia, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

Before the 1600s, feral children were relegated to myths and legends like Romulus and Remus in the Roman legend.

The Great Green Wall is an African-led movement with an epic ambition to grow an 8,000km natural wonder of the world across the entire width of Africa.

An earthquake light is a luminous aerial phenomenon that reportedly appears in the sky at or near areas of tectonic stress, seismic activity, or volcanic eruptions.

Earthquake lights are a phenomenon so unusual that they border on myth. The first known reports of them are from 89 BC, with spotty descriptions over the centuries.

Recently, they’ve been seen during foreshocks and the main earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy, in 2009, and as flashes of blue lightning over Wellington, New Zealand, in 2016.

Research into earthquake lights is ongoing; as such, several mechanisms have been proposed. Positive Holes is one such model. Another hypothesis involves intense electric fields created piezoelectrically by tectonic movements of rocks containing quartz. And a third explanation is a phenomenon called triboluminescence.

“We Didn’t Start the Fire” is a list song by American musician Billy Joel. Its lyrics include brief, rapid-fire allusions to more than 100 headline events between 1949, the year of Joel’s birth, and 1989, when the song was released.

According to a 2002 research study redheads need more anesthesia than the average person, which confirms an old wives tale in the anesthesia field.

The upper left corner of a flag is called a canton.

In Australia during the 30s, a farmer played the flute for their pet lyrebird. The bird would sing songs that the flute player played. The bird was released into a nearby forest.

Thirty years later a park ranger heard a lyrebird singing the flute songs, specifically “The Keel Row” and “Mosquito’s Dance.” The flute songs had become part of the local lyrebird songbook.

An ARkStorm is a hypothetical but scientifically realistic megastorm that could devastate much of California due to flooding, landslides, and strong winds.

The name “ARkStorm” means atmospheric river (AR) 1000 (k) as the storm is projected as a 1-in-1000 year event. Similar scenarios have occured 10 times. Scientists have concluded that these events have a mean return period of around 150-290 years.

In December 1861/January 1862, a similarly intense storm occured, dumping 10 feet of rain in 43 days.

If the scenario were to occur today, it is expected that there would be a lake in the Central Valley 300 miles long and 20 miles wide, wind speeds would reach 125 mph, hundreds of landslides would occur, property damage would exceed $300 billion, agricultural losses of $400 billion, and 1.5 million residents would need to evacuate.

In early February 1959, nine Russian hikers died in the northern Ural Mountains in unknown circumstances. At some point in the night, the hikers cut open their tent and walked away from their tent in inadequate clothing, no boots or winter jackets. Three of them died from physical trauma similar to a car accident. The other six died from hypothermia, but one also had a small skull fracture. The bodies were found hapazardly about a mile from the tent.

The various theories considered include:

• Mansi people attacked and murdered the group, but evidence does not support this idea.
• Avalanche
• Kabatic wind
• Infrasound generated by wind drove the hikers mad.
• A military parachute mine exercise.

A military parachute mine exercise is a strong theory. These exercises were being conducted at the time. It is suggested that the hikers were woken by loud explosions. Injuries of the mine would match the trauma from the three that died of trauma. The theory coincides with reported lights and photographs from the hikers. Some of the hikers had high levels of radiation on their clothes which would match a radiological weapons test. The files were kept secret.

The initial investigation concluded that the group died of a compelling natural force. And the files were sent to a secret archive. The investigation was reopened in 2019 and the conclusion in July of 2020 was that an avalanche forces them to suddenly leave their tent in low visibility conditions.

However there is evidence that contradicts the avalanche theory. The location did not have signs of an avalanche, nor is it known for avalanches based on history and terrain. There were two very experienced hikers that would not have camped near a potential avalanche site. The footprints were of people walking away from the tent at a normal pace not running in panic

A 2015 investigation suggests that a snowfield above the tent starts to slide down over the tent. The hikers escape through a cut hole, with incomplete clothing, and descend the slope to find a spot safe from an avalanche. They split up into three groups. The ones with least clothing stayed by the fire and dies of hypothermia, one group went to the tent for clothes and died of hypothermia on their way, and the last group were trying to find a better place to camp but fell into a snow hole dying of trauma.

Non-photosynthetic bacteria have an eternal daily clock that aligns with the 24 hour cycle of life on Earth like other animals and plants.

The Cistercian numeral system is a numeral system that was used by the Cistercian order of monks in the 13th to 15th centuries of the Middle Ages, and has been used sporadically since then. It allowed writing numbers from 1 to 9999 as single compound characters.

The system uses a horizontal or vertical stave as its base. Either side of either end of the stave may carry a digit from 1 to 9. The place value of the digit is determined by its location.