In the near future, you can spend up to 30 nights on the International Space Station for $35,000 per night (transportation not included). Wi-Fi is also extra but is a reasonable $50 per gigabyte.
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The Argentine Football Association published a cultural manual ahead of the 2018 World Cup that included a section on how to seduce Russian women.
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In Japanese culture, shaving your head is a common form of public apology or an acknowledgement of failure.
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Actor Jonah Hill was hospitalized with bronchitis after snorting too much fake cocaine during the filming of The Wolf of Wall Street.
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Prince Charles had engineers modify his Aston Martin Volante to run on biofuel made from white wine.
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Laid end-to-end, an adult's arteries, veins and capillaries would stretch for about 100,000 miles, enough to wrap around the world nearly four times.
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The first assassination attempt on Archduke Ferdinand failed spectacularly. The bomb bounced off the car and exploded under the wrong vehicle. The assassin then fled, diving into a nearby dry riverbed and eventually vomiting up his own suicide pill.
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Researchers found that the price paid for something impacts the way we taste and enjoy it. For example, paying a lot more money for the same bottle of wine gives the drinker more pleasure because the higher price causes more blood and oxygen to be sent to the part of the brain responsible for feeling pleasure.
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The "seeds" on the outside of the strawberry are not actually seeds but ovaries called achenes that contain a separate fruit with a single seed inside it.
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A Chinese family adopted what they thought was a Tibetan mastiff but it turned out to be an Asiatic black bear instead.
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In 14th century England, they baptized children with cider because it was cleaner than the water.
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Urban Outfitters used to sell a board game called Ghettopoly with bonus cards that read: "You got yo whole neighborhood addicted to crack. Collect $50 from each playa."
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Instant ramen was invented by Momofuku Ando in 1958 and was voted Japan's greatest invention of the 20th century by the Japanese.
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The Sahara Desert is made of only 15% sand and sand dunes. Majority of the Sahara and other deserts is rock, rocky plateaus, and gravel covered plains. The sand is just a result of the wind eroding the rock.
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A scientist at McMurdo Station in Antarctica used Tinder to find a match with a camper 45 miles away in the Dry Valleys.
It's the first suspected match on that continent.
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Clinique and Crayola have teamed up to create a box of lipstick crayons that are color-matched to actual Crayola shades.
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The average energy expended during the ladies Wimbledon tennis final match adds up to 1.56kWh, which is enough power to keep an iPhone charged for a year.
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Mississippi only ratified the 13th amendment, which abolished slavery back in 1865, in 1995. However, they never officially notified the US Archivist and so it had to be corrected and was finally ratified in 2013.
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A 102-year-old German woman is the oldest to receive a PhD. She was banned from attending her final oral exam in 1938 by the Nazi influenced university because she was Jewish.
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France passed a 'right to disconnect' law in 2017, allowing people to ignore emails that arrive outside business hours.
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Latchkey incontinence is the increased feeling of "having to go" the closer you get to the restroom. It is a conditioned subconscious response similar to what Pavlov proved with his scientific experiment with his dog.
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Aretha Franklin always insisted on being paid upfront and in cash before performances. She'd keep the cash with her security team or occasionally in her purse which she brought on stage.
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In 2009, Saudi Arabia created a special "Anti-Witchcraft Unit" and a telephone hotline for the public to report magical misdeeds.
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Father's Day is historically the busiest day for collect-calls, while Mother's Day is the busiest day for regular phone calls.
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Dalmatians are the official firehouse dog because in the 18th century they would run alongside horse-drawn "fire engines" and prevent other dogs or animals from spooking the horses.
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Pop star Madonna at one point worked at Dunkin' Donuts but was fired for squirting the customers with jam.
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Parietal cells in your stomach produce hydrochloric acid which helps to break down food. This acid is so concentrated that one drop would eat straight through a piece of wood.
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The Australian Rainbow Lorikeet routinely gets drunk on the fermented crimson flower nectar from the Weeping Boer-bean tree and make loud noises during spring and summer.
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The most radioactive places at Chernobyl are no longer the #4 reactor area but the hospital room where they left all the first responders' clothes and the equipment they used to clean up all the debris from the explosion.
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Pavarotti holds the record for curtain calls doing 165 after a performance of the Donizetti opera "L'elisir d'amore" at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1988.
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Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash once walked in on his mother naked in bed with David Bowie.
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Research in Canada has found that toddlers who learn how to lie early on are more likely to do better later in life. The study found only 1/5 of two-year-olds know how to lie.
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The Turritopsis Dohrnii aka immortal jellyfish can live forever by transforming back into their juvenile polyp state after reproducing. They retract their tentacles, their bodies shrink, and they sink to the ocean floor and start the life cycle all over again. They only die by being eaten by a predator or contracting a disease.
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Puffins are a local delicacy in Iceland. You can find them served smoked, grilled, or boiled.
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Coco Chanel, the founder of fashion and perfume empire Chanel, was a nazi spy during WWII with the code name of 'Westminster' due to her connections with British high society.
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Caffeine extracted from coffee beans to make decaf coffee is sold as crude caffeine to refiners and the pure caffeine is ultimately sold to soft drink makers like Coca Cola and Pepsi.
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In 2009, a man was arrested in Ireland after Slovakian security placed explosives in his luggage for training purposes and forgot to remove them.
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Adermatoglyphia, or immigration delay disease, is a genetic mutation that causes people to be born without fingerprints. Worldwide it affects only 4 known extended families.
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Google's parent company Alphabet Inc.'s web address is abc.xyz.
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The Election Commission of India sets up a polling station 25 miles inside the remote lion sanctuary of Gir Forest National Park so that a single person, the priest of a local temple, can vote.
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One in four people have a hole in their heart called a Patent Foramen Ovale (PFO), which has been there since they were newborns.
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In 2015, Snoop Dogg showed up 2 hours late for a concert in Haarlem, Netherlands and then proceeded to stream football on his laptop during the performance. He shared it all on his Instagram.
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There are only two sets of escalators in the entire state of Wyoming.
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The rules of golf at St. Andrews in 1812 state that if your ball strikes your adversary or their caddy then they lose the hole.
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Around 2200 B.C., the Egyptians created the first synthetically created color blue. This Egyptian Blue color glows under fluorescent lights allowing historians to identify the color even when it is not visible.
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Thieves stole a small horn shark from the San Antonio Aquarium using a baby stroller to smuggle the shark out.
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Research shows that you burn more calories taking a set of stairs a single step at a time instead of two at a time.
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The ancient Egyptians, while under the rule of Ptolemy II, would confiscate any books that arrived on ships and make a copy. They would then keep the original in the library of Alexandria and return the copied version to the owner.
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Americans spend an average of 37 minutes a day doing meal preparation and cleanup. This is roughly half the amount of time that was spent in the 1960's.
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The 18th century word lent means to urinate in an alcoholic beverage to increase its strength".
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Australia's first police force (the Night Watch) was made up of 12 of the best-behaved criminals.
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In 1941, Harvard University undergrad had an acceptance rate of 92%, compared to the 4.5% for the class of 2023.
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The famous Star Trek phrase "Beam me up, Scotty!" was never actually said in any of the Star Trek films or television shows.
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Americans eat 20 billion hot dogs annually, which is about 70 hot dogs per person. They are served in 95% of American homes.
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There was an actual tree in La Jolla which inspired Dr. Seuss's Trufulla trees in his book The Lorax. The ~100-year-old Monterey Cypress unexpectedly fell over in June 2019.
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The drug Viagra (or sildenafil) was originally intended to be a heart medication designed to treat angina by increasing blood flow to the heart, but it failed at that.
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The skating brand Supreme's logo is ironically based on propaganda artist Barbara Kruger's anti-consumerism works.
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King Tut is the only mummy from ancient Egypt known to have been mummified with an erection. His member subsequently broke off soon after the mummy was discovered.
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Twenty percent of all marriages globally are between first cousins.
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Retired Spanish cyclist Miguel Induráin had a resting heart rate of 28 beats per minute during his career. The normal range for people is 60-72 BPM.
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In 2020, OceanGate will begin tours of the Titanic via their private submarine Titan at a cost of $125,000 per person.
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The city of Vancouver has banned door knobs on all new home construction. They must instead use levers.
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There is a road in Sweden that charges electric cars as they drive on it. The project is called eRoadArlanda and works in rain or snow as well.
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The Roncalli Circus in Germany has replaced live animal acts with holograms created by 11 specialized projectors displaying from multiple angles to create a flawless visual for all guests.
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Up until 2008, the chemical TBT was used in ship's anti-fouling paint, which caused female snails to grow penises and ultimately explode because they couldn't shed their eggs.
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The original word for bear has been lost because our ancient ancestors were so worried saying the name of the animal would cause it to come after them. Instead they used the term bruin, meaning the brown one, which then segued into bear.
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There's a Swedish startup company called Cangaroo who wants you to rent app-enabled pogo sticks to get around your city.
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A 2011 study found that there is a genetic mutation in half the world's population which causes brussels sprouts to taste very bitter to them.
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The original artist of Scooby-Doo, Iwao Takamoto, drew the Great Dane with features that are the exact opposite of what is considered desirable by breeders, including a hump back, bowed legs, and a small chin.
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French artist, Gentil Garçon, worked with a paleontologist, François Escuilié, to create a skull of the pellet-gobbling video game icon, Pac Man.
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The US has roughly 100,000 patients waiting for a kidney transplant and yet over 2,000 kidneys are discarded each year, 1/5th of them because a recipient couldn't be found.
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The British monarch celebrates two birthdays, one on their actual birthday and then officially in the summer when the weather is nice enough for a parade.
A missing Indonesian woman was found clothed and entirely intact when local villagers dissected a 23-foot-long reticulated python.
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Piranha soup is a popular dish and considered an aphrodisiac in Brazil.
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Playing the electronic song 'Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites' by Skrillex reduces mosquito bites and also hinders their ability to mate.
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The original 'friendship tree' between US President Trump and French President Macron died in quarantine once uprooted after the ceremonial planting. Macron is sending a replacement oak tree.
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Before refrigerators, Russians and Finns would put live brown frogs in their milk to keep it from spoiling.
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The wreck of the RMS Titanic was found during the Cold War as part of a secret US Naval investigation of two sunken nuclear submarines. The Navy never expected the oceanographer to actually find the Titanic.
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A Texas man was sentenced to 50 years in jail for stealing $1.2 million worth of fajitas.
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The national bird of Peru is the Andean cock-of-the-rock.
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Juan Pujol García was a rogue spy during WWII. Britain's MI5 declined his offer to be their spy and he went and spied on Germany anyways as a double agent. He lived in Lisbon and made up an elaborate network of fictional agents and reports based on tourist guides and other public sources. He is one of the only people to be awarded a medal by both the Axis and Allies.
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There's an iPhone app to detect a ripe watermelon. You repeatedly knock on the fruit with phone's microphone nearby and it analyzes the sound.
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The Big Dipper which makes up part of the constellation Ursa Major is known as The Plough in the UK and Le Casserole in France.
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There's a persistent lava lake in Mount Michael, a volcano on Saunders Island in the Antarctic, which has been there since at least 2003.
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In 2012, at a pop-up shop in London's St. Bart's Pathology Museum, STD decorated cupcakes were showcased in an effort to promote safe sex. The cupcakes feature scabs, boils, green-colored genital discharge and warts.
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Marie Curie, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and first person to win two, wasn't legally allowed to attend college as a woman.
Instead, she attended the secret Polish Flying University.
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Before Edgar Allen Poe sold his poem The Raven for $9, or roughly $300 in today's dollars, to The American Review, the owner of Graham's Magazine gifted him $15 after turning Poe down because he thought the poem was a cry for help.
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John Willis is one of only a few white members in Ping On, Boston's Chinese mafia. He was introduced to the group by a young Asian man he defended. John later learned Chinese, became the boss's chief bodyguard, and received the nickname "White Devil". He is currently in a federal prison for drug trafficking.
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A Ugandan man saw his father lose their land in a legal fight at age 6. He spent 18 years in school and became a lawyer and won back the land 23 years later.
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Glossy magazines are radioactive. They are made with a white clay called kaolin which contains elevated levels of uranium and thorium.
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Cats have a dominant paw very similar to how humans have a dominant hand. These preferences also differ by sex same as in humans. Males tend to prefer their left paws, whereas females were more likely to be righties.
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A mouse's sperm is much, much larger than an elephant's sperm.
However, the fruit fly produces the longest sperm known to science.
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A 74-year-old Japanese man dressed as a ninja and burgled 254 homes and stole $260,000 worth of goods before finally being caught by local police.
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The Miracle Berry, or synsepalum dulcificum, is a fruit from West Africa which contains the taste modifier Miraculin. When you eat the fruit, the miraculin molecules bind to the tongue causing sour foods to taste sweet.
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Umami is the recently identified fifth taste. It is described as a savory flavor and is caused by glutamate, an amino acid. It is associated with foods like tomatoes, meat, cheese, mushrooms, and more.
*** a There is a Wait Calculation for interstellar travel. It attempts to determine the minimum number of years it should take us to travel somewhere, such that a future mission doesn't pass the previous one due to advances in propulsion technology.
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Penn & Teller created a video game in 1995 called 'Desert Bus'. In the game, the player drives an 8-hour bus route in real time between Tucson and Vegas. The scenery never changes from rocks and road signs and once the player reaches the destination, they have to turn around and drive back.
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The amniotic fluid in a mother's womb, which can be nearly a liter of fluids at 30+ weeks, is replaced every 3 hours towards the end of pregnancy.
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The band Foo Fighters started with just Dave Grohl alone playing all the instruments and singing all the vocals. He hoped the name would keep him anonymous and make people think there were multiple band members. He now a thinks it's a terrible name.
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There's a book called 'Fat Brad The Cookbook'. It is based on all the foods that actor Brad Pitt has eaten in his movies.
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J.R.R. Tolkien was nominated by fellow author CS Lewis for the 1961 Nobel Prize in Literature, but was overlooked because the jury said the quality of his storytelling wasn't good enough.
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In molecular physics, there is a principle called Van der Waals Forces, which are the tiny attractive forces between atoms and molecules. This is what allows geckos to stick to and climb almost anything.
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Thomas Jefferson helped popularize mac and cheese in America by serving it to his dinner guests during his Presidency. He even had his own recipe.
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Starting in 1948, a man wore giant 3-toed lead shoes and stomped around Florida beaches, leading locals to believe there was a giant penguin inhabiting the area. He did this randomly for the next 10 years. The prankster finally revealed himself and his shoes 40 years later.
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The made-up name of Khaleesi from George R. R. Martin's 'A Song of Ice and Fire' novels only became popular after HBO's release of Game of Thrones. In 2012, 146 babies were named Khaleesi in the US.
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The term's original definition was "to kill one in 10". The practice was used by the Roman army in the fifth century BC as a way to inspire fear and loyalty. If any of a cohort's soldiers acted cowardly or deserted, then lots were drawn and one unlucky soldier out of every 10 in that cohort would be killed by their own comrades.
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There is a group of sea wolves on Vancouver Island that can swim for miles and 90% of their diet is seafood. They primarily eat salmon but also forage on barnacles, lams, herring eggs, seals, and river otters.
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Ruth Wakefield was the original creator of the chocolate-chip cookie.
She sold the recipe for the Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie to Nestlé for one dollar and a lifetime supply of chocolate.
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In 2012, a designer from Georgia created a fake Louis Vuitton condom and sold them for $68 apiece.
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Three seals were trained to copy sounds which subsequently resulted in them performing a several-note rendition of Star Wars and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
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There is a colorless and odorless liquid you can breathe in which is called perfluorohexane. Animals can be submerged in it without drowning.
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Despite some broader urban legends, studies show Polar bears are the only type of bears known to be attracted to women menstruating.
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An inflatable of the famous "Tank Man" was put in Taiwan to mark the anniversary of Tiananmen Protests in Beijing, China.
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Wheelchair athletes with spinal injuries would intentionally injure the lower part of their body to increase their blood pressure which would enhance their performance. This practice is called 'Boosting' and has been banned by the International Paralympic Committee since 1994.
