Welcome to our daily dose of captivating facts! In this edition of “facts of the day”, we embark on a thrilling journey through some remarkable tidbits that will expand your understanding of the world. Each day brings new opportunities to uncover fascinating and random facts, and today is no exception.
Facts of the Day
1. In 2003, the Russian government sent a special forces death squad to kill a human rights activist in retaliation for her filing a complaint in the European Court of Human Rights. – Source
2. Bad acoustics in school classrooms may cause learning problems for students, as well as higher rates of sore throats and stress for teachers. – Source
3. After having his hat shot from his head, bullets tear through his coat, and two horses shot from under him George Washington was able to ride 40 miles through darkness to summon reinforcements while suffering from a severe case of dysentery. – Source
4. The Maldives suffered a coup d’état in 1988 that Tamil mercenaries partook in, the coup was reversed within hours by Indian military intervention. – Source
5. In 1962, French explorer Michael Siffre spent two months in complete isolation buried in a cave below a glacier with no natural light, to show that humans do, indeed, have an internal body clock. His sense of time collapsed but his body continued to maintain a daily rhythm. – Source
6. Greenland Vikings abandoned farming and hunted seals like the Inuit. – Source
7. Exercising makes you both more productive and happier for the day that you exercise. It affects your brain function and memory, and the positive effect lasts for the entire day. – Source
8. The Euro currency was designed featuring imagery of fictitious bridges to represent architectural styles throughout time in Europe. They had to be careful not feature one country over the others, though, but the Netherlands then built the bridges in real life anyway. – Source
9. Between 1949 and 1952, the White House was completely gutted, leaving only the outer walls around a shell. The mansion was then rebuilt using concrete and steel beams in place of its original wooden joists. – Source
10. A village in Peru settles their grudges by fist fighting on the Christmas day, then go drinking and start the New Year off on a clean slate. – Source
11. The Cincinnati Library has 3D printers, audio and visual equipment, laser cutters and engravers, sewing machines, cameras and other hardware and software tools that patrons can use for free. – Source
12. The NHL was started because five of the six team owners in the National Hockey Association didn’t like the sixth guy and wanted to start a league without him. – Source
13. Oxford dictionary inserted a fictitious word “Esquivalience” in order to protect copyright of the publication. The fake entry was included in dictionary.com. – Source
14. The Pony Express only lasted from April 3, 1860 to October 1861, before the telegraph made it obsolete. – Source
15. Curiosity Rover captured a solar eclipse from the surface of Mars in 2013. – Source
16. La Rinconada, Peru the highest elevated city on earth has a goldmine where miners work for 30 days without pay. On the 31st day, they are allowed to take as much ore as they can carry on their shoulders. – Source
17. The guy who discovered Pluto’s moon Charon made up the name to resemble his wife’s name, Charlene. He later discovered that in Greek mythology, Charon was the ferryman who brought the souls of the dead across the river Styx to Hades, AKA Pluto. – Source
18. In 2009 China canceled the debts of 32 African countries. – Source
19. The Battle of Salamis is believed to be one of the most significant battles in human history. Some historians believe that a Persian victory would have hamstrung the development of Ancient Greece, and by extension western civilization. – Source
20. An Israeli team of researchers invented a breathalyzer that can detect 17 different diseases, including two types of Parkinson’s, Crohn’s, multiple sclerosis, kidney disease, and cancers including lung cancer, colorectal cancer, prostate cancer, and ovarian cancer. – Source
21. In 2014, scientists created Vantablack, a substance made from carbon nanotubes, which absorbs 99.965% of radiation in the visible spectrum making it the blackest substance known. – Source
22. After the release of ‘Top Gun’, the US Navy stated that the number of young men who joined wanting to be Naval Aviators went up by 500 percent. – Source
23. Ruth Graves Wakefield, the woman who invented chocolate chip cookies sold the idea to Nestlé in return for a lifetime supply of Nestlé chocolate. – Source
24. You can tell identical twin babies apart from their navels, since navel is a scar and thus they’re different. – Source
25. There are approximately 10 quintillion (that’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000) insects on our planet or roughly 200 million insects for each human. – Source
26. On April 1, 2011, an April Fools Day joke from Google Enterprise said that Contoso (Microsoft’s fictional company) abandoned many of Microsoft’s technologies in favor of Google Apps. – Source
27. There is a flower that is said to bloom every 3,000 years and is associated with the coming of a new king in Buddhism. – Source
28. Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule and Nobel Prize laureate, sent a letter accompanied by a cheque for 10 guineas to Winston Churchill, saying that the money should be used for the establishment of a brothel at the Cambridge University, instead of a chapel. – Source
29. Keanu Reeves has a private cancer foundation to help children’s hospitals and cancer research, but he does not attach his name to it. He also has spent over 5 million dollars to help his sister in her fight against leukemia. – Source
30. Japan has a conviction rate of more than 99% – Source
