The Great Fire of London (1666): Strange Facts Behind the Famous Disaster
The Great Fire of London wasn’t just a disaster—it was full of odd decisions and strange moments. Here are the quirkiest facts from 1666.
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Think You Are Dead? You’ll Want to Read This
Read more: Think You Are Dead? You’ll Want to Read ThisThe Cotard Delusion is a rare psychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that he or she is dead, does not exist, is putrefying or has lost their blood or internal organs. Rarely, it can include delusions of immortality. In 1788, Charles Bonnet reported one of the earliest recorded cases of Cotard’s…
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Which Would You Rather Eat From — Your Desk or Your Toilet?
Read more: Which Would You Rather Eat From — Your Desk or Your Toilet?The typical office desk harbors 20,000 germs per square inch, 400 times more than the regularly cleaned toilet.
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Is There Intelligent Life Out There?
Read more: Is There Intelligent Life Out There?The Drake equation is a probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial life civilizations in the Milky Way. Designed by Frank Drake, he estimated between 1,000 and 100,000 civilizations could be in our galaxy.
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Legos: Imagine the Possibilities
Read more: Legos: Imagine the PossibilitiesThe rise in popularity of LEGO bricks can be attributed to the amount of imagination a child can use to build something with the bricks. The bricks are so versatile that the LEGO Group has calculated that just six eight-stud bricks can be arranged in 915,103,765 different ways.
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I Can’t Wait to Use tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq In a Conversation
Read more: I Can’t Wait to Use tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq In a ConversationThe word Yupik describes a family of five languages, spoken by residents of Siberia and Western Alaska. Each one of those languages is similar, but different—if two people from a different region met, one might not be able to understand the words spoken by the other, but because of the sentence structure and similar phonetic…
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The Endangered Archi Language and the Race to Understand Its Extreme Rules of Verb Conjugation
Read more: The Endangered Archi Language and the Race to Understand Its Extreme Rules of Verb ConjugationWith just a handful of people remaining who know the Archi language, it is one of the world’s endangered languages. Learn about Archi and the efforts to preserve it.
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Not a Bunch of Frogs; Knot a Bunch of Toads
Read more: Not a Bunch of Frogs; Knot a Bunch of ToadsA group of toads is called a knot. source
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Imagine The Size of the Keyboard
Read more: Imagine The Size of the KeyboardThe first written language, cuneiform, had about 3,000 characters. It was developed by the Sumerians around 3100 BC. source
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Royal Roominess
Read more: Royal RoominessBuckingham Palace’s 775 rooms include 78 bathrooms, 92 offices, 52 royal and guest bedrooms and 188 staff bedrooms. source
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Nice Catch, Ernest. Why Is That Fish Full of Holes?
Read more: Nice Catch, Ernest. Why Is That Fish Full of Holes?Author Ernest Hemingway was an accomplished fisherman. He caught 7 marlins in one day — a world record at the time. Some of his techniques were not very sportsmanlike, however, such as shooting sharks with a submachine gun. source
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Picky About Parents
Read more: Picky About ParentsIf a baby stork is unhappy with how it is being reared, it will leave its nest and choose another, to be adopted by the new family.
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Maybe Just One More Bite…
Read more: Maybe Just One More Bite…You may not have used the word before, but it’s quite likely that you have experienced it. Shemomedjamo is a Georgian word for when you’re really full, but you can’t stop eating because the food is so delicious. source
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Picky Pests
Read more: Picky PestsMosquitoes prefer to bite children over adults and blondes over brunettes. No one knows why.
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A Buttload is an Actual Unit of MeasurementFebruary 5, 2020
