Fun Facts

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In 1518 Strasbourg, hundreds of people danced uncontrollably for weeks - some collapsed. Authorities even hired musicians, thinking they should dance it out. The cause is still debated.

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In 1901, on her 63rd birthday, schoolteacher Annie Edson Taylor became the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survive.

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Poon Lim was a 25-year-old steward on a British merchant ship when a German U-boat torpedoed it in the South Atlantic. He grabbed a wooden life raft and drifted alone for 133 days. He fished. He drank bird blood. He killed a passing shark with an empty water jug.

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You cannot tickle yourself because your cerebellum predicts the touch of your own movements and cancels the sensation - tickling needs surprise. A tiny delay restores the feeling.

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Roy Sullivan, a US park ranger at Shenandoah National Park, was struck by lightning seven times between 1942 and 1977 and survived every one - the most lightning strikes ever survived by a person, per Guinness World Records.

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Cleopatra lived closer in time to the 1969 Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid (around 2560 BC). The pyramids were already about 2,500 years old in her lifetime.

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The biggest cryptocurrencies by market cap, Bitcoin on top, LUNA and FTX collapsing.

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You are about 1 to 2 cm taller when you wake up: lying down lets your spinal discs rehydrate overnight, and gravity compresses them through the day. Astronauts grow up to 3 percent in zero gravity.

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The Voynich Manuscript is a roughly 240-page illustrated book from the early 1400s, written in an unknown script no one has ever decoded - despite WWII codebreakers and modern AI trying. It now sits at Yale.

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Social networks rise and fall, ending on Facebook.

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In 1945, a US Army bomber crashed into the Empire State Building. Elevator operator Betty Lou Oliver, already burned, fell about 75 stories when the cables snapped - and survived, holding the Guinness record for the longest survived elevator fall.

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In open-label placebo trials, patients told plainly they were taking sugar pills still reported real symptom relief for conditions like IBS, back pain and migraine.

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Browser wars 1994 to today, IE and Netscape fall, Chrome wins.

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Socotra broke away from Africa millions of years ago; about a third of its plants exist nowhere else, including the umbrella-shaped dragon blood tree that bleeds red sap.

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Roman concrete has lasted nearly 2,000 years and can self-heal cracks: lime clasts from hot-mixing dissolve and recrystallise when water seeps in. MIT identified the mechanism in 2023.

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Best-selling phone makers, Nokia's reign then collapse after the iPhone.

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José Prudencio Padilla had 22 ships against Spain's 32 at Lake Maracaibo - and one secret weapon. The Catatumbo lightning strikes the same Venezuelan sky up to 28 times a minute, lighting up the Spanish fleet in the dark.

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Octopuses have three hearts and blue, copper-based blood. About two-thirds of their neurons sit in their eight arms, which can taste, touch and act semi-independently, and they can edit their own RNA.

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The biggest movie franchises of all time by box office, ending on the MCU.

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Lake Natron in Tanzania is so alkaline (pH up to 10.5) and hot (up to 60°C / 140°F) that animals that die in it get preserved and coated in mineral salts - their calcified carcasses inspired Nick Brandt’s famous posed-statue photos.