Little Known Facts That Made Us Say What??

The universe is a vast and fascinating place so it’s not surprising just how much new information, scientific or otherwise, there is to discover. We’ve said it before, but we just love some of the crazy, mind-blowing, and just downright weird facts that we keep stumbling across. For example, did you know that there was once a chicken named Mike who lived without a head for 18 months? (More about him later.)

Today we thought we’d venture into to the realm where reality outshines fiction, the mundane dances with the bizarre, and where the absurd meets the scientific in a waltz of wonder and awe. Prepare to be astounded as we share an amalgam of some of these little-known facts that made us say what???!  

Prepare to encounter a parade of eccentric truths that will make you question the very fabric of existence. From the mind-bending revelations of quantum mechanics to the downright bizarre behaviors of the animal kingdom, we shall roam recklessly across the landscape of the extraordinary. During our expedition, we will unveil the mysteries that lie just beyond the veil of normalcy, proving once again that truth is indeed stranger than fiction. Get ready to be amused, astonished, and perhaps even mildly disgusted, as we delve into the realm of the inexplicable and emerge with a newfound appreciation for the wonderfully weird world we call home.

Which came first, the match or the lighter? Simple right? I mean, after all a match is just a piece of wood or pressed paper, while a lighter is a mechanical device. Simple assumption would tell us that the match came first. But of course, that would be wrong. In 1823, a German chemist named Johann Wolfgang Dobereiner created what was known as “Dobereiner’s Lamp”. The early lighter was a jar-like container.

When you turned the valve on top, hydrogen was released and catalyzed by zinc metal in the jar, causing a flame. Workable but not exactly a ‘flick your bic’ of simplicity.

Matches weren’t invented until three years later, in 1826. The first matches weren’t terribly successful, and it wasn’t until they started being coated in (toxic) white phosphorus that they really took off. And we do mean this literally as these matches would often ignite on their own.

Redheads Feel Pain Too:  Natural redheads have a genetic resistance to anesthesia and an unusually high tolerance for pain. (Maybe the latter is there to compensate for the former?)

Yes, strange though it may seem, redheads experience pain differently than the rest of the general population. Among other things, they frequently require more anesthesia in order to stay sedated – about 20% more in fact. They need more topical analgesics, and they seem to have less skin sensitivity, meaning it’s harder for them to detect things like shock and needle pricks. This is apparently because their skin’s pigment-producing cells lack the function of a certain receptor. The lack of which causes changes that tip the balance between pain sensitivity and pain tolerance.

How do you Weigh a Cloud? Most of us think about clouds as lighter than air. They are floating across the sky after all.

However, like pretty much everything else, a cloud too has substance. First off, air itself has weight, though it’s more commonly referred to as ‘pressure’. In fact, air weighs about 14.5 pounds per square inch. The other factor in determining a clouds weight is density. Oil floats on water because water is denser than oil. The same is true for clouds. They float in the sky because they’re less dense than air. But they’re not weightless. A cloud is just an accumulation of moisture, and every drop of that moisture weighs a fraction of a gram. Which means that 1 cubic kilometer of cloud weighs about 1.1 million pounds. So, the next time you’re standing under a cloud, just be happy that it can stay up there.

Toilet Paper Splinters? People have been pooping for a very long time and our ancestors used many varied tools to handle their business. (This may be a good topic for a future blog post…) However, toilet paper in the form that we’re familiar with today didn’t come about until the latter half of the 19th century.

Improvements in sanitation in the 20th century led to greater demand for, and competition in the manufacture of, said toilet paper. And in 1935, companies began advertising “splinter-free” toilet paper. Which implies that, before this, toilet paper came with splinters. All we can say is “YIKES”!

What Exactly is Behind Blue Eyes? Did you know that, at one point, everyone on Earth had brown eyes? That’s because the melanin in a person’s iris is naturally brown. The only reason we have green, hazel, or blue eyes is because of genetic mutations that happened long ago. And for people with blue eyes, their genetic mutation can be traced to a single individual, most likely in Denmark, between 6,000 – 10,000 years ago. Since there is just this one origin for blue eyes, that means that all blue-eyed people today are related in some way. Six degrees?

In the USA, approximately 27% of the population has blue eyes. And it drops to between 8-10% for the entire world. But in Denmark nearly 65% of the population has blue eyes.

Waiter, There’s A Cockroach in my Coffee. Did you know that scientists who work with cockroaches often become allergic to pre-ground coffee? According to entomologist Douglas Emlen, cockroaches that infest large piles of coffee beans are often just ground up with the beans instead of removed, since it would be too difficult to eliminate them completely. In the USA, the Food & Drug Administration allows a certain amount of “insect filth” to be included in coffee and other foods, as long as it doesn’t exceed a pre-established percentage.

Thus, since it’s actually pretty common for researchers to develop acute allergies to the specimens they study, entomologists who become allergic to cockroaches also become allergic to things like pre-ground coffee and chocolate.

That’ll Cement the Issue: This factoid just blew us away. And you may be familiar with it as Bill Gates blogged about it after seeing it in the book “Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization.” China used more cement in three years – between 2011 and 2013 – than the US did during the entire 20th century.

According to estimates from the US Geological Survey, the US used 4.5 gigatons of cement between 1901 and 2000. And according to the International Cement Review, between just 2011 and 2013, China used 6.6 gigatons of cement.

If You’re a Clownfish, It’s a Man’s World – Until It’s Not: Yes, all clownfish are born male. However, they also all carry reproductive organs.

Any given group of clownfish are led by the dominant female, who is the largest, followed by the breeding male, and a clutch of other immature males. Whenever a dominant female dies, it’s replaced by a male when it changes its sex. This change, unsurprisingly, is irreversible. Scientists think that what causes this sex change has something to do with the clownfish’s habitat – the sea anemone.

Beware of Killer Grass: Strangely, the smell of freshly cut grass is actually a distress signal from the plants themselves. Many plants emit a substance called green leaf volatiles, and some of these are emitted after a plant experiences some sort of trauma. In one study, the chemicals from the plant interacted with the saliva of grass-eating caterpillars to make them more attractive prey for their predators. So, the smell that grass emits after it’s getting cut is intended to mark whoever hurt the plant so that predators of the animal would eventually start to associate the smell with prey. Therefore, your lawn is literally trying to kill you once you start hurting it.

 Soup to Butterfly: Butterfly caterpillars don’t make silk cocoons; they morph into a chrysalis. And if you were to cut into a caterpillar chrysalis, you’d essentially be cutting into the caterpillar itself since their body actually forms the hard wall of the chrysalis.

And again, if you did cut into the chrysalis, you’d be subjected to a load of goo seeping out that used to be said caterpillar. Because, when a caterpillar transforms into a beautiful butterfly, it breaks itself down to mush to complete the metamorphosis. The caterpillar does this by literally digesting itself. It releases enzymes that break down their body tissue. In this soup, there are a few body parts that don’t break down completely, called imaginal discs. These discs use high protein materials floating around them to start a kind of rapid cell division, which begins to create the basis of the butterfly.

 A Kiss is Just a Kiss – But Chocolate Really Packs a Punch: Maybe there’s a reason why chocolate has long been associated with date nights and romantic evenings. Scientifically speaking, Chocolate is more stimulating than kissing. It turns out that chocolate can affect our minds in pretty powerful ways. A study measured the level of relaxation-related brain activity (called alpha bands) that people experienced when kissing and when eating chocolate.

They found that both kissing and letting chocolate melt on your tongue had spikes in this relaxed way of thinking in the brain. And it turned out that chocolate delivered a more significant spike, and its effects lasted longer than a kiss. Now, this is all well and good, and, while relaxing is a great thing, we don’t necessarily feel that relaxation is what most people are looking for when kissing. The relaxing part usually comes waaaay later.

You’re a Lobster and you Look Marvelous: Lobsters don’t display senescence, which is the deterioration of the body as it ages.

Lobster’s molt, shedding their exoskeleton as they grow. Their bodies are continuously growing, and their exoskeletons get heavier and heavier, thus when they molt into a new exoskeleton it takes more and more energy to take off the old one. Eventually they die because the exoskeleton just becomes too heavy to shed. This makes us wonder, if people could somehow assist the lobster with shedding the too heavy exoskeleton, does that mean you could have a lobster that would never die??

Monkey porn: Two neurobiologists conducted an experiment that explored the viewing habits of male rhesus monkeys seated in a laboratory. If a test monkey chose to look in one direction, it received a squirt of cherry juice. If it looked in another, it received a slightly larger or smaller squirt of juice, plus one of several images to look at: the face of a higher-status or lower-status monkey or the attractive back end of a female monkey. The results of the study, called “Monkey Pay Per View” wouldn’t surprise certain types of theater operators in Times Square. With remarkable consistency, the monkeys were willing to forgo a little juice – in essence, to pay extra – to look at some monkey booty.

Entertainment moguls, take note.

Paris Hilton Sex tape: And speaking of….well, strange as it may seem, did you know that the famous Paris Hilton sex tape of long ago starts with a memorial screen to those who died in 9/11? This is what the monkey’s told us anyway.

Why Isn’t the US on the Metric System? Pirates are at least partly to blame. In 1793, Joseph Domby, a botanist and Paris aristocrat, set sail from France with two standards for the new metric system: a rod that measured exactly one meter, and a copper cylinder called a “grave” that weighed precisely one kilogram. He was journeying across the Atlantic to meet then US Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who hoped to persuade the US Congress to ‘go metric’.

However, Domby’s ship was raided by pirates who took him hostage, looted his equipment and auctioned it all off. By the time new ones were sent, Jefferson was no longer Secretary of State and no one else seemed very interested in taking up the new system.

Had Your Corn Flakes This Morning? John Harvey Kellogg, who invented corn flakes in the 1890’s and started the Kellogg brand, was a health reformer and a proponent of what he called “biological living” which centered around nutrition. He believed that modern diets led people to carnal sins and that cereal was the dietary remedy and an excellent way to prevent masturbation. He felt that bland foods would lead to a reduced sex drive. While we may never be able to look at cornflakes the same way again, we can say from personal experience we are very happy that Kellogg was wrong on both counts. And we don’t even want to know what was on the mind of the inventor of Grape Nuts.

Basketball Ooops: In 1891, James Naismith, a 31-year-old graduate student at what is now Springfield College in Springfield, Massachusetts, created basketball.

He approached the school janitor in his search for two square boxes to use for goals and the janitor came back with two peach baskets. Naismith nailed the baskets to the lower rim of the gymnasium balcony, one on either side. The students would play on teams to try to get the ball into their team’s basket. He had a person stationed at each end of the balcony to retrieve the ball from the basket and put it back into play. While the sport caught on, it took nearly 20 years before someone figured out that it might be a good idea to cut the bottom of the baskets out to make retrieving the ball a lot easier.

The Goddess of Love Planet: Often called Earth’s evil twin, Venus spins backwards on its axis, has a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead, and has an atmosphere so thick that, from the surface, the Sun is just a smear of light. But what really blew our minds was that a day on Venus (one complete rotation around its axis) is longer that a year on Venus (a complete revolution around the sun). For some reason, that’s just a really hard concept to wrap our minds around.

And Speaking of Mind Bending: In the time it takes you to read this sentence, you’ve traveled approximately 2,200 miles through space relative to the cosmic background radiation. Though humans don’t perceive it, the Earth is moving at a very high rate of speed on its rotation around the sun, approximately 66,667 mph (107,290 kph). At the same time, it’s also spinning on its axis at approximately 1,040 mph (1,675 kph). And most mind-blowing of all, the entire solar system is moving at roughly 228.6 miles per second (365 kps) relative to the cosmic background radiation. That means, in just 10 seconds, you will have traveled approximately 2,200 miles through space.

Dude, Where’s My Bomb? Did you know that the US Air Force lost a nuclear bomb somewhere off the coast of Georgia? Yep. On February 5, 1958, a B-47 bomber carrying the nuclear bomb collided with an F-86 jet fighter off the coast of Georgia. The impact ripped the left wing off the F-86 and heavily damaged the fuel tanks of the B-47. The pilot of the B-47 was afraid the bomb would break loose when he landed, so he ditched the bomb in the ocean before landing the plane at Hunter Air Force Base outside Savannah, Georgia.

The Navy searched for the bomb for months but never found it and today recommends it should remain in its resting place – wherever that may be.

And that about wraps up our look at the wild, weird, and wonderful world of little-known facts. Amidst the laughter and astonishment, there’s a subtle reminder hidden within these crazy facts. They remind us of the infinite complexity and boundless wonder that surrounds us every day. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear the whispers of tales of resistance, adaptation, and the relentless pursuit of understanding in a world that often defies explanation.

But wait! We promised to tell you the story about….

Mike the Headless Chicken: Lloyd and Clara Olsen were chicken farmers in Fruita, Colorado.

On September 10, 1945, they were doing what they always did, killing chickens on their farm. Lloyd would decapitate the birds and Clara would clean them up to ready them for sale. But one of the 40 or 50 birds that went under Lloyd’s hatchet that day didn’t behave like the rest. One was still alive and walking around. And it didn’t stop. Lloyd placed the headless bird in an apple box on the farm’s screened porch for the night, and when the couple came out the next morning, the chicken was still walking around.

Word spread around Fruita about the miraculous headless bird. The local newspaper picked up the story and, a couple weeks later, a sideshow promoter called Hope Wade traveled nearly 300 miles from Salt Lake City, Utah to see the bird. He had a simple proposition for the Olsen’s – take the chicken on the sideshow circuit and make some money. They said why not. First, they went to the University of Utah, where Mike was put through a series of tests. Then Lloyd, Clara, and Mike set off on a tour of the USA.

Mike was fed with liquid food and water that the Olsen’s dropped directly into his esophagus. They fed him with a dropper and cleared his throat with a syringe. Then tragedy struck. The night Mike died the Olsen’s were awoken in their motel room by the sound of the bird choking. When they looked for the syringe, they realized they’d left it at the sideshow, and before they could find an alternative, Mike had suffocated. But don’t despair, by any measure Mike, bred as a fryer chicken, had had a good run.

How did Mike manage to hang on for so long? For a human to lose his or her head would involve an almost total loss of the brain. For a chicken, it’s a bit different. Most of a chicken’s brain is concentrated at the back of the skull. It’s suggested that Mike survived because all or most of the brain stem remained attached to his body and that a timely blood clot prevented him from bleeding to death.

Thanks to Mike and their cross-country tour, the Olsen’s earned enough to by a hay baler, two tractors, and a 1946 Chevy pickup truck. Mike is still remembered today with a statue honoring him in the Fruita, Colorado town square.

Who knows what other wonders lie just beyond the horizon, waiting to be uncovered in the ever-enigmatic tapestry of existence. Tell us about something we missed in the comments below.

Although it's not about a chicken, this Warren Zevon song was as close to a tribute to Mike as we could find.

#facts #truth #chicken #toiletpaper #clouds #blueeyes #kevinbacon #butterfly #nemo #coffee #basketball #porn #monkey #parishilton #lobster #chocolate #venus #earth #warrenzevon #anyhigh