Fascinating Trivia for the Holidays
The Greek playwright Aeschylus was killed in 455 B.C. when an eagle, mistaking his bald head for a rock, dropped a tortoise on it. According to Pliny, Aeschylus was spending a lot of time in the open to avoid a prophecy that he would be killed by a falling object!
Rats cannot vomit. Neither can horses.
Soviet tenor Victor Ivanovich Nikitin had such an appealing voice that when he sang to his Soviet comrades during World War II, German troops on the Eastern Front ceased fire to listen.
The human heart can squirt blood up to a distance of 30 feet.
The American football huddle was invented in 1892 by Paul Hubbard, a quarterback from then all-deaf Gallaudet University, to stop the opposing team from reading their signs.
A woman who was blinded in an accident developed multiple personalities -some of which could see.
An average raindrop falls at a speed of roughly 7 mph.
When it comes to educating future billionaires, Harvard University holds the lead with an astonishing 29 billionaire alumni as of 2021.
A town named Hell in Norway freezes over quite regularly.
Do your lips get annoyingly dry in the winter? Better read the ingredients in that lip balm, as quite a few of them contain salicylic acid, which can exacerbate the problem and cause your lips to peel -necessitating even more lip balm.
The first plant to flower and produce seeds in space was Arabidopsis thaliana, grown in 1982 by the crew of the Soviet Salyut 7 on the International Space Station.
It is illegal to step on money in Thailand because you would be insulting the king by treading on his picture.
If all the stars in the Milky Way were grains of salt, they’d fill an Olympic-size swimming pool.
The Louvre museum in Paris was originally built as a fortress to repel Vikings.
In 1887, a group of men added Susanna Madora Salter of Argonia, Kansas to a mayoral ballot as a prank intended to embarrass and curtail the influence of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, of which she was an officer. Instead, she won over 60% of the vote and became America’s first female mayor.
Despite their humps, camels have straight spines.
The first use of the word “Superbowl,” credited to a Chinese writer named Lom Ba Di, dates to the third century.
In 2008, Chile minted 1.5 million 50-peso coins with a spelling error, only noticing a year later they’d spelled “CHIIE” instead of “CHILE.”
Honeybee venom has been found to destroy some types of cancer cells.
There’s a Google map for Mercury, Venus, Earth’s moon, Mars, Pluto, three out of four of Jupiter’s moons, and all but one of the round Saturnian moons.
Juan Ponce de Leon brought cattle when he landed at Charlotte Harbor in 1521, his second trip to La Florida. When he came under attack, four of his heifers and a bull fled into the scrub, thus introducing cows to America.