The Raven Rock Mountain Complex is a military underground bunker located in Pennsylvania and is known as the underground Pentagon. It formed the core bunker complex for the US Continuity of Government plan during the cold war to survive a nuclear attack.

Telling the bees is a traditional European custom in which bees would be told the important details about their keepers lives like births, deaths, marriages, and changes in the household. It was thought that if they didn’t include the bees, then the bees would leave their hive and stop producing honey.

David Grohl doesn’t know how to read music and writes his music by ear.

Biological dark matter is the term given to unclassified and poorly understood genetic material. Some of the genetic material may not fall under one of the three existing domains of life, suggesting a possible fourth domain of life that has not been discovered.

For example our stomachs contain viruses that keep the bacteria in check. According to one study only 19% of the viruses in our stomachs match anything in the genetic material databases. The other 81% is unknown due to the vast numbers of viruses, rapid evolution of viruses, and the inability to culture these viruses.

The NIH has the Human Microbiome Project that is trying to improve the understanding of microbial flora involved in human health and disease. They are trying to characterize the microbiome of heathy human subjects at five major body sites

The architectural feature, gargoyles, have a spout to move water off the roof and away from the side of the building. If they don’t move water, then they are of the broader category, grotesque, which is fantastic or mythical creature used for decorative purposes.

King Farouk of Egypt, who ruled from 1936 to 1952, was a kleptomaniac that liked to steal from famous people. During a dinner, he stole Winston Churchill’s pocket watch and when Churchill noticed it was missing, Farouk claimed to have found it.

Baijiu is a Chinese spirit, rarely found outside China, but is the most consumed spirit in the world.

The distillation process is a long preserved art that remains hands-on and labor intensive to this day.

It is made with qu which is yeast and mold cultivated into balls. Qu is an important part of Chinese cuisine and used to make rice wine, soy sauce, vinegar, and bean paste.

The author of Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess, was given one year to live so he set out to write as many novels as he could to provide money for his wife. He wrote five and a half novels in that year. And he outlived her and survived his death sentence by 33 years.

The Han Son Doong cave in Vietnam is so big it has its own climate and clouds form inside it. It can fit a 40-storey skyscraper.

Knitters have a “sweaters curse” where they believe giving a hand made sweater to a significant other will end with the recipient breaking up with the knitter.

In a 2005, 15% of knitters have experienced the curse first hand and 41% considered it a possibility that should be taken seriously.

The translucent maple leaf in Canadian money is a security feature. When a laser pointer is pointed at the spot, the denomination is projected on the wall.

The decibel is 1/10th of the unit Bel, which is named after Alexander Graham Bell.

In 1955, two onion traders cornered the onion futures market on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Siegal and Kosuga controlled 98% of the onions in Chicago and had 30 million pounds of onions in storage. They ended up flooding the market driving the price of a 50 pound bag to 10¢, which is less than the cost of the bag the onions were stored in. The previous year, a 50 pound bag cost $2.75.

By the mid-1950s, onion futures contracts were the most traded product on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. In 1955, they accounted for 20% of its trades.

Siegal and Kosuga made millions, however it drove many onion farmers into bankruptcy. This led to the Onions Futures Act being passed that bans the trade of future contracts on onions. This is also why onions are excluded as a commodity in the Commodity Exchange Act

The Onions Futures Act also bans the trading of motion picture box office receipts.

The “Resolute desk” was made by out of oak timbers from the British ship H.M.S Resolute and gifted to President Hayes from Queen Victoria in 1880.

The Resolute was part of an expedition searching for Sir John Franklin in 1852. It was abandoned in the Artic. In 1855, it was found and extricated by Captain Buddington of the US Whaler “George Henry”.

It was gifted to Queen Victoria by the US President. When the ship was broken up and turned into a table, Queen Victoria gifted it to President Hayes.

Charlie Chaplin’s dead body was stolen from the cemetery and ransomed for $600,000.

The US Navy manages its own private forest in Indiana called “Constitution Grove”. The forest is full white oak trees that are used to fix and maintain the wooden ship, the USS Constitution that was launched in 1797.

The 2018 Olympic Village was stocked with 110,000 condoms. The Rio Summer Olympics were stocked with 450,000 condoms, 42 per athlete.

The Netflix series, Halt and Catch Fire, is a drama about the tech industry in the 80s and 90s. One of the products is called Comet. And the show created the website with links as how it would look in the early 90s with real website links: http://www.cometlist.net/index.html

There are Strawberry Pop Tart blowtorches: http://www.pmichaud.com/toast/

And the second live camera, Amazing Fish Cam: https://www.fishcam.com/

They also created the search engine, Rover: http://www.roversearch.net/

During the Vietnam War, Doug Hegdal was knocked off the USS Canberra in the Gulf of Tonkin, three miles off the coast. Cambodian fisherman picked him up, but eventually passes him off to the Vietnamese militiamen. He was taken to the prison, “Hanoi Hilton”.

He was interrogated, but they didn’t believe him. He figured he had a better chance if he played dumb. He pretended to be of low intelligence and couldn’t read or write. He was known as the “incredibly stupid one” and eventually had free reign of the camp.

He memorized names, capture dates, method of capture, and other personal information of 256 prisoners to the tune of Old Macdonald Had a Farm.

He was released as part of a propoganda move by the North Vietnamese. After release he shared the information memorized and the terrible conditions of the POW camp.

In an official band biography, Abba admits to wearing outrageous costumes for the tax deduction.

The pumpkin would not exist if the megafauna (mastadons, mammoths, giant sloth) of the pleistocene era hadn’t gone extinct and if humans hadn’t intervened.

The cucurbits family consists of gourds and squashes and 12,000 years ago were bitter and toxic to humans. However the megafauna ate them and dispersed the seeds, so the plants were abundant. After the megafauna died off, they should have gone extinct as well.

Humans started to use cucurbits for containers and tools. The plants were further domesticated and became less bitter and toxic. It has been suggested that cucurbits had been domesticated at least six different times in six different areas. This led to modern day pumpkins and squashes.

Clementine Barnapet was a female African American teenage serial murderer in 1911 Louisiana/Texas. At 17, she was a self-proclaimed voodoo priestess of a cult, her and her brothers started called Church of Sacrifice. And supposedly killed people as sacrifices in rituals.

She would break into a family’s home and murder entire families with an ax while they slept. Her father was initially arrested for the murders, but the killings continued while he was in custody. She confessed to killing 35 people.

After being deemed sane, she was sent to Angola State Penitentiary for a life sentence. She was released in 1923 for good behavior even though she briefly escaped in 1913. And she disappeared.

In the spring of 1984, during the Iran-Iraq war the Battle of The Marshes occured. Iran soldiers were sitting in boats in the marshes. So Iraq soldiers lated electrical wires throughout the marsh in the middle of the night. The Iraq soldiers set off enough gun fire to force the Iranians in to the water. Once they were in the water, Iraq turned on the electricity to the wires electrocuting the Iranian soldiers.

The Iraqi soldiers then gathered the dead and stacked them five feet wide and five feet high. The line of dead soldiers was sprinkled with lime and a foot of desert sand poured on top creating a road through the marsh.

The Open Insulin Foundation is trying to open-source the production of insulin. They have biohackers trying to develop the first open-source organisms for insulin production. And another team is developing open-source hardware for protein production and purification.

The Diderot effect is when you want things you don’t need. In 1764, the French philosopher, Denis Diderot’s daughter was set to be married but he didn’t have enough for a dowry. Diderot was the co-founder and writer of Encyclopédie, one of the most comprehensive encyclopedias of the time. Catherine the Great heard about his money troubles and offered to buy his library.

Suddenly with money to spare Diderot bought a new scarlet robe. His surroundings didn’t match his new robe, so he started to replace them with fancier versions like new rugs, mirrors, and sculptures, thus creating a spiral of consumption. This is the Diderot effect.

Using the term “whip” as slang for car goes farther back than modern day hip-hop music.

Before cars, people used a whip, or threat of one, to steer horses tied to a carriage. When cars were created, the steering wheel replaced how to steer. So the steering wheel was called a “whip” as an analogy to carriages.

Much later a hip-hop artist noticed the Mercedes-Benz logo looked like a steering wheel and brought back the slang term “whip” for Mercedes-Benz cars. The term eventually went on to refer to any car.

Or so that’s how the story goes…

Maurice Hilleman is an American microbiologist that specialized in vaccinology and develop edbover 40 vaccines. Of the 14 vaccines routinely recommend, he developed 8 of them. He has saved more lives than any other medical scientist of the 20th century.

One of the worlds largest tick collections is owned by the US National Museum of Natural History and has been houses at Georgia Southern University since 1990.

There are over 125,000 accessioned lots, over one million species, and an extensive library.

There is translucent or grayish-white gelatinous substance that randomly appears called star jelly that is unexplainable. Reports of this substance date back back to the 14th century and some folklore states that it is deposited during meteor showers.

Scientific explanations include frog spawn jelly, animal vomit, slime molds, algae.

The National Geographic society tested the material and found no DNA.

Evolution has had creatures evolve into crabs on five separate occasions. This is known as carcinization.

It is widely known that the number of centenarians (people over 100 years old) in Japan is much higher than the rest of the world. This long life expectancy is often attributed to the lifestyle and diet of the culture.

In 2010, a 111 year old was listed as the oldest living male in Tokyo, but he was discovered in his bed mummified having died 30 years earlier. This launched a police investigation into people over the age of 105. It was discovered that 234,354 Japanese centenarians were “missing”.

Richard Pryor grew up in Peoria, IL in his grandmother’s brothel where his mother was a prostitute.

Pryor was married 7 times to 5 different woman. He had 7 children with 6 different women.

He also has three middle names Franklin Lennox Thomas.

He did a two year stint in the Army, but spent most of that time in Army prison for being part of a group that beat up and stabbed another soldier.

Costco’s hotdog has cost $1.50 since it was introduced in 1984. The CEO will not allow a price increase.

To help salmon get past dams to spawn upstream, salmon cannons are used. Whooshh Innovations developed a pneumatic tube that moves fish over the dam quickly.

In medieval Germany, married couples could legally settle disputes by fighting a marital duel. To make the fight fair, the man had to fight from a three-foot wide hole in the ground. The penalty for defeat was death. If the woman won, the man was executed. If the man won, the woman was buried alive.

The University of Bologna is the oldest university in continuous operation. It was opened in 1088. University of Oxford is the second oldest and was opened in 1096.

An eel, named Miguel Wattson, at the Tennessee Aquarium sends out a tweet on Twitter when it discharges enough voltage. The natural volts are aided by a computer program built by Tennessee Tech University’s Business Media Center.

Miguel also powers the Christmas tree in. December. He can be found at @ElectricMiguel on Twitter.

There are several animals that use drugs in the wild.

Vervet monkeys in the Caribbean will eat the sugar cane crops that fermented before harvest. In experiments, 1 in 5 monkeys will choose the alcoholic drink over the virgin drink and younker monkeys are more likely to drink.

In Siberia, reindeer consume hallucinogenic mushrooms. Some researchers argue that this is the origin story for Santa.

Poppy farmers in Australia have reported wallabies consuming their plants, and then running around in circles before passing out.

Dolphins play with inflated pufferfish to consume the toxin tetrodotoxin.

Teddy Roosevelt’s oldest daughter, Alice, was a wild child that smoked on the rough of the white house,stayed out late playing poker, and rode around in cars with men. In her bag, she carried around her pet snake, named Emily Spinach and a copy of the Constitution.

When the Roosevelts left office, Alice buried a voodoo doll of Nellie Taft, the incoming first lady, in the front yard. Alice was banned from the White House for the next three administrations for various misbehaviors and off-color jokes.

A fossil nuclear fission reactor is a uranium deposit where self-sustaining nuclear chain reactions have occurred. Oklo, Gabon is the only known location for this to occur. There are 16 sites with this phenomenon that occurred about 1.7 billion years ago.

To prevent anyone from stealing his escape from a Chinese water torture cell trick, Houdini gave a single performance of the trick as a one act play before an audience of one. This allowed him to file the copyright on the act, which legally prevented imitations without explaining how the trick worked.

In the United Kingdom there is a phenomenon called the TV pickup which is when a large number of people take advantage of tv breaks to use toilets and turn on electrical devices like tea kettles causing large synchronized surges in electricity consumption. Electricity networks devote considerable resources to predict these events as well as the reverse synchronized switch-offs to prevent outages.

The largest pick up was July 4, 1990 after the penalty shootout in the England vs. West Germany FIFA World Cup Semi-final.

The book, Naked Came the Stranger, was a literary hoax that was deliberately poorly written with gratuitous amounts of sex to prove that American literary culture had become mindlessly vulgar. It fulfilled expectations and became a bestseller.

Curtis James Jackson III adopted the nickname 50 Cent because it was a metaphor for change. It was inspired by a 1980s Brooklyn robber, Kelvin Martin, who went by 50 Cent. The nickname was probably due to his small stature.

Martin has his own Wikipedia page and two autobiographical documentaries for being the name inspiration for the rapper.

On November 13, 1833, the annual Leonids meteor shower generated tens of thousands of meteors per hour.

Denison Olmsted, an astronomer, realized for the first time in astronomy that all the shooting stars came out of one point. He called it the radiant, which is still used today by astronomers.

Olmsted sent a report to the newspaper and asked for observations from people, starting citizen science. These reports led Olmsted to a series of discoveries ending Aristotle’s 2,200 year reign of on the explanation of meteors.

Thurgood Marshall worked with the NAACP and was the lawyer for the Browns in the Brown v. Board of Education. He argued several civil rights cases before the Supreme Court most of them successful.

Marshall went on to be a Supreme Court Justice.

There are 64 crossings over the Columbia River.

Between the Oregon-Washington border there are 12 bridges, 10 for cars and 2 for trains, 4 dams, and 1 ferry. For a total of 17.

In Washington, there are 19 bridges, 12 for cars, 5 for trains, 1 for cars and trains, and 1 pedestrian. There are 6 dams and 2 ferries. And one old rope conveyor. The total is 23.

In British Columbia, there 18 bridges, 16 for cars and 2 for trains. And 3 ferries and 3 dams. The total is 24.

Katmai National Park hosts a fat bear elimination tournament. People can vote on which bear has fattened up the most for winter.

https://explore.org/fat-bear-week

Elizabeth Bathory is the most prolific female murderer, killing over 650 women and girls, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. Bathory was a Hungarian noblewoman born in 1560 and committing her crimes between 1590 and 1610. Due to her importance, she did not face execution, but was placed on house arrest, some claim she was locked in a bricked room.

She had epilepsy and was treated by rubbing blood of non-sufferers on her lips. It is speculated that she that killings were part of her efforts to cure herself. It is also claimed she bathed in the blood to retain her youth and beauty.

A member of the Harvard Shaker community, Tabitha Babbitt invented the circular saw for use in saw mill in 1813. She also invented a process to manufacture false teeth.