1. The longest time between two twins being
born is 87 days .

2. The world's deepest postbox is in Susami
Bay in Japan . It's 10 metres underwater.

3. In 2007, an American man named Corey
Taylor tried to fake his own death in order to
get out of his cell phone contract without
paying a fee. It didn't work.

4. The oldest condoms ever found date back
to the 1640s (they were found in a cesspit at
Dudley Castle), and were made from animal
and fish intestines.

5. In 1923, jockey Frank Hayes won a race at
Belmont Park in New York despite being dead
— he suffered a heart attack mid-race, but
his body stayed in the saddle until his horse
crossed the line for a 20–1 outsider victory.

6. Everyone has a unique tongue print , just
like fingerprints.

7. Most Muppets are left-handed. (Because
most Muppeteers are right-handed , so they
operate the head with their favoured hand.)

8. Female kangaroos have three vaginas .

9. It costs the U.S. Mint almost twice as much
to mint each penny and nickel as the coins
are actually worth. Taxpayers lost over $100
million in 2013 just through the coins being
made.

10. Light doesn't necessarily travel at the
speed of light. The slowest we've ever
recorded light moving at is 38 mph .

11. Casu marzu is a Sardinian cheese that
contains live maggots . The maggots can jump
up to five inches out of cheese while you're
eating it, so it's a good idea to shield it with
your hand to stop them jumping into your
eyes.

12. The loneliest creature on Earth is a whale
who has been calling out for a mate for over
two decades — but whose high-pitched voice
is so different to other whales that they
never respond .

13. The spikes on the end of a stegosaurus'
tail are known among paleontologists as the
"thagomizer" — a term coined by cartoonist
Gary Larson in a 1982 Far Side drawing .

14. During World War II, the crew of the
British submarine HMS Trident kept a fully
grown reindeer called Pollyanna aboard their
vessel for six weeks (it was a gift from the
Russians).

15. The northern leopard frog swallows its
prey using its eyes — it uses them to help
push food down its throat by retracting them
into its head.

16. The first man to urinate on the moon was
Buzz Aldrin, shortly after stepping onto the
lunar surface.
NASA/Newsmakers

17. Some fruit flies are genetically resistant to
getting drunk — but only if they have an
inactive version of a gene scientists have
named "happyhour".

18. Experiments show that male rhesus
macaque monkeys will pay to look at pictures
of female rhesus macaques' bottoms.

19. In 1567, the man said to have the longest
beard in the world died after he tripped over
his beard running away from a fire .

20. The Dance Fever of 1518 was a month-
long plague of inexplicable dancing in
Strasbourg , in which hundreds of people
danced for about a month for no apparent
reason. Several of them danced themselves
to death.

21. Vladimir Nabokov nearly invented the
smiley .

22. In 1993, San Francisco held a referendum
over whether a police officer called Bob
Geary was allowed to patrol while carrying a
ventriloquist's dummy called Brendan
O'Smarty. He was.

23. Sigurd the Mighty, a ninth-century Norse
earl of Orkney, was killed by an enemy he
had beheaded several hours earlier. He'd
tied the man's head to his horse's saddle,
but while riding home one of its protruding
teeth grazed his leg . He died from the
infection.

24. The Dutch village of Giethoorn has no
roads; its buildings are connected entirely by
canals and footbridges.

25. A family of people with blue skin lived in
Kentucky for many generations. The Fulgates
of Troublesome Creek are thought to have
gained their blue skin through combination of
inbreeding and a rare genetic condition
known as methemoglobinemia.

26. Powerful earthquakes can permanently
shorten the length of Earth's day , by moving
the spin of the Earth's axis. The 2011 Japan
earthquake knocked 1.8 microseconds off our
days. The 2004 Sumatra quake cost us
around 6.8 microseconds.

27. The first American film to show a toilet
being flushed on screen was Alfred
Hitchcock's Psycho.

28. Melting glaciers and icebergs make a
distinctive fizzing noise known as "bergy
seltzer" .

29. There is a glacier called "Blood Falls" in
Antarctica that regularly pours out red liquid,
making it look like the ice is bleeding. (It's
actually oxidised salty water .)
30. In 2008 scientists discovered a new
species of bacteria that lives in hairspray .

31. The top of the Eiffel Tower leans away
from the sun , as the metal facing the sun
heats up and expands. It can move as much
as 7 inches.

32. Lt. Col. "Mad" Jack Churchill was only
British soldier in WWII known to have killed
an enemy soldier with a longbow. "Mad Jack"
insisted on going into battle armed with both
a medieval bow and a claymore sword.

33. A U.S. park ranger named Roy C. Sullivan
held the record for being struck by lightning
the most times, having been struck — and
surviving — seven times between 1942 and
1977. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot in
1983.

34. The longest musical performance in
history is currently taking place in the church
of St. Burchardi in Halberstadt, Germany. The
performance of John Cage's "Organ²/ASLSP
(As Slow As Possible)" started on Sept. 5,
2001, and is set to finish in 2640. The last
time the note changed was October 2013; the
next change isn't due until 2020.

35. There's an opera house on the U.S.–
Canada border where the stage is in one
country and half the audience is in another.

36. The tiny parasite Toxoplasma gondii can
only breed sexually when in the guts of a cat.
To this end, when it infects rats, it changes
their behaviour to make them less scared of
cats .

37. The katzenklavier ("cat piano") was a
musical instrument made out of cats .
Designed by 17th-century German scholar
Athanasius Kircher, it consisted of a row of
caged cats with different voice pitches, who
could be "played" by a keyboardist driving
nails into their tails.

38. There is a single mega-colony of ants that
spans three continents, covering much of
Europe, the west coast of the U.S., and the
west coast of Japan.

39. The largest snowflake ever recorded
reportedly measured 15 inches across .

40. An epidemic of laughing that lasted
almost a year broke out in Tanganyika (now
Tanzania) in 1962. Several thousand people
were affected, across several villages. It
forced a school to close. It wasn't fun,
though — other symptoms included crying,
fainting, rashes, and pain.

41. The Romans used to clean and whiten
their teeth with urine. Apparently it works.
Please don't do it, though.

42. There are around 60,000 miles of blood
vessels in the human body. If you took them
all out and laid them end to end, they'd
stretch around the world more than twice.


But, seriously, don't do that either.



SOURCE: Buzz feeds