Here are 25 kickass random facts. For part 645, click here
1-5 Kickass Random Fact
1. When constructing a walkway for the Hyatt Regency, the original design was replaced by a cheap one, which was never checked by an engineer. The new plans only had 1/3 the strength needed. The walkway collapsed and killed 114 people, the deadliest accidental structural failure in US history – Source
2. As a prank, a man once climbed Mount Hood in the middle of the night and surreptitiously left a morning newspaper and a quart of milk for his friends, who were spending the night on the summit. – Source
3. Cicada’s wings have an anti-bacterial surface that kills bacteria not by chemicals, but by using a nanopattern made of nanopillars that shreds the bacterial membrane. – Source
4. Home teams in basketball wear white uniforms because the home team had access to laundry facilities. By wearing grey or another dark color the visiting team was better able to conceal the stains that had accumulated on their uniforms over the course of the series. – Source
5. When a plane was hijacked over Switzerland in 2014, the neighboring countries of Italy and France had to send their own fighter jets to the scene because the incident happened outside of the Swiss Air Force’s business hours, and even hijackings weren’t important enough to pay for overtime. – Source
6-10 Kickass Random Facts
6. Capybaras, the largest extant rodent, have adapted well to urbanization in South America, and they can be found in many urban parks and lakes. Capybaras are quite docile and often allow humans to pet them though it is discouraged as the mammals’ ticks can carry the Rocky Mountain spotted fever. – Source
7. Alexender Graham Bell tried to eliminate American sign language and deaf schools in the U.S because he was afraid of a deaf race emerging from it. – Source
8. In 2018, an electrical engineer on board the Bellingshausen Research station in Antarctica stabbed a fellow coworker in the chest multiple times because the colleague had been giving away the endings of books available in the research station’s library. – Source
9. In 1929, determined to prove his hypothesis, Dr. Werner Forssmann tricked a nurse by inserting a catheter through his own arm, and walked with the inserted tube to an x-ray lab to photograph his discovery, thereby inventing cardiac catheterization and winning a Nobel Prize for it later. – Source
10. Bakersfield and Fresno were built on top of a former lake, Lake Tulare, which was the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. It was drained for Agriculture after the Civil War and was completely gone by WWI. – Source
11-15 Kickass Random Facts
11. Kris Kristofferson went into music after studying at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He moved to Nashville and made ends meet as a helicopter pilot. After trying unsuccessfully to get Johnny Cash to hear some of his songs, he finally got Cash’s attention by landing a helicopter on his lawn. – Source
12. British banknotes increase in size as they increase in value to help blind people tell them apart. – Source
13. When a male fruit fly is sexually rejected by a female fruit fly, it will seek out more alcohol than those that have successfully mated. – Source
14. There are no commercial king crab farming operations because, in part, these crabs go through violently cannibalistic adolescence and have to be housed individually to survive it, which is too expensive large scale. – Source
15. Graça Machel was married to the President of Mozambique until he died in a plane crash, she later married Nelson Mandela while he was President of South Africa. She is the only person in modern history to be the First Lady of two different countries. – Source
