Here are some fun facts!
1.There's a statue of Jason Voorhees, the “Friday the 13th” serial killer, chained to the bottom of a Minnesota lake.
2. Venus and Uranus are the only planets to spin clockwise.
Venus spins almost completely upside down, completing one full rotation in 243 Earth days. Uranus spins on its side, with its axis of rotation tilted over 98° compared to its orbit.
3. Abraham Lincoln was the only President to be a licensed bartender.
4. Allodoxaphobia is the fear of other people’s opinions.
5. The real name for a hashtag is an octothorpe.
6. The first person processed at Ellis Island was a 15-year-old girl from Ireland, Annie Moore on January 1,1892.
A statue of Annie Moore and her two brothers stands in the Irish harbor they departed from.
7. Napoleon Bonaparte was once attacked by a swarm of rabbits.
8. The liver is the only human organ that can fully regenerate itself.
9. The oldest continuous sporting event in the U.S. is the Kentucky Derby. The first race took place on May 17, 1875, at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky.
10. The Terminator” script was sold for $1. James Cameron sold the rights and script for The Terminator to producer Gale Anne Hurd for $1 in 1983.
This deal allowed Cameron to secure his first major feature film directing job, overcoming studio resistance that wanted the script but refused to trust an unknown director.
11. There were active volcanoes on the moon when dinosaurs were alive.
Physical evidence reveals that the Moon was still spouting lava as recently as 120 million years ago, overlapping perfectly with the Cretaceous period when dinosaurs like the T. rex and Triceratops roamed Earth.
12. Coco Chanel is credited for originating the little black dress back in the 1920s. In 1926, Coco Chanel published a simple, calf-length black sheath dress in American Vogue.
The magazine dubbed it "Chanel’s Ford," comparing it to the accessible, democratic nature of the Model T automobile.
13. Lobsters have blue blood. Unlike human blood, which is red because it relies on iron-based hemoglobin to transport oxygen, lobster blood (hemolymph) is copper-based. They use a protein called hemocyanin.
14. The longest over-water flight without alternate airports is from the coast of California to Honolulu, Hawaii (I’ve flown this flight many times!).
The flight from the California coast to Honolulu is one of the most famous long-haul over-water routes, spanning roughly 2,400 miles over the open Pacific Ocean.
15. The first successful electric car in the U.S. was made by chemist William Morrison in 1890.
It was built as a six-passenger wagon, modified from a standard horse-drawn carriage provided by the Des Moines Buggy Company.
The vehicle utilized a 24-cell storage battery and was driven by an electric motor attached to the rear wheels.
It boasted a top speed of roughly 14 mph and could travel up to 50 miles on a single charge.
16. Clarinets are made almost entirely out of wood from the mpingo tree.
Billets of Mpingo wood at various stages of clarinet production. Photo courtesy of Mitchell Estrin
The wood's high density (it is so heavy it sinks in water) and tight, uniform grain provide excellent projection and rich, warm tonal qualities favored by classical and jazz musicians.
Mpingo: The Endangered Tree
Mpingo behaves more like metal than wood during machining and resists warping and cracking when exposed to the moisture and temperature changes that happen while playing.
Baby Mpingo tree
17. Australia is wider than the moon. Australia's width spans approximately 4,000 kilometers (about 2,500 miles) from east to west.
Who’s your daddy??
This is notably wider than the Moon, which has a diameter of just 3,474 kilometers (about 2,159 miles).
18. A group of owls is called a parliament. This delightfully poetic collective noun ties into the owl's long-standing mythical association with wisdom and contemplation, qualities historically linked to ancient deities like the Greek goddess Athena.
A Parliament
19. Neptune has the strongest winds in the solar system reaching up to speeds of 1500 miles an hour. These winds blow faster than the speed of sound. For comparison, the speed of sound on Earth is about 767 miles per hour.
The planet is almost entirely fluid with no solid landmasses, allowing these massive storms (like the famous Earth-sized dark vortices) to whip around the globe without anything to slow them down.
20. Somewhere between 50% and 80% of earth's living organisms are in the ocean. The oceans contain roughly 99% of the habitable space on the planet by volume.
Marine organisms (like phytoplankton, algae, and cyanobacteria) produce between 50% and 80% of the oxygen we breathe.
Despite holding the majority of Earth's species, scientists estimate that we have only explored about 20% of the ocean. In fact, nearly 90% of the ocean's volume is a dark, cold environment.
