• April 11, 1954 was dubbed the most boring day in history – nothing of any importance happened on that day. (Which makes it rather unusual.)
  • Winston Howes, a farmer in South Gloucestershire, England, planted thousands of oak trees to create a heart-shaped clearing as a tribute to his deceased wife Janet.
  • Fingers prune in water to give you a better grip. Just another clever evolutionary trick.
  • If you eat polar bear liver you might die – and rather horribly, too, with the skin peeling off your body. The reason for that is too much vitamin A – humans just can’t handle that much.
  • If you’ve ever wondered what to call the phenomena when three astronomical bodies line up, it is “syzygy”.
  • Giraffes have the same number of teeth as humans.
  • Quite a few lip balms contain salicylic acid, a substance that causes your lips to peel – which is in turn causing you to go and buy more lip balm.
  • The camel protects his eyes against the ever-present sand with three eyelids.
  • The first plant to have flowered and produced seeds in space was Arabidopsis, grown in 1982 by the crew of the Soviet Salyut 7.
  • Do you know the difference between poisonous and venomous snakes? It is surprisingly simple. If you bite the snake and you die, the snake was poisonous. If the snake bites you and you die, the snake was venomous. Enjoy.
  • An interesting simile of why pearls are the best gifts for the angry girlfriend – oysters actually make pearls to get rid of a nagging pain. When a parasite or a grain of sand or debris gets inside their shell and causes their soft bodies discomfort, they coat it with multiple layers of “nacre”. Eventually, a beautiful pearl is born.
  • The Alaskan Wood Frog spends the harsh Alaskan winter frozen solid – with no heartbeat and no breathing. When the thawing rays of the sun arrive with the spring, it simply unfreezes and hops off on its way.
  • No dinosaur has ever killed a human being.
  • Leonardo Da Vinci was a vegetarian and was known to buy caged birds simply to let them free. He was also questioning man’s superiority over animals and his right to raise them for slaughter – this attitude was unheard of in his time.
  • Considering the work and processes our bodies are constantly doing, they are remarkably quiet.
  • In Russia, there are 44 “closed cities” (“closed administrative-territorial formations”) where no foreigners are allowed. The total population of these towns amounts to 1.5 million; they are administered either by the Ministry of Defense (75%), or the Russian Federal Atomic Energy Agency.
  • The human eye can pick out over 10 million colors.
  • The highest doctor per patients ratio (least patients per doctor) is in Cuba.
  • Steve Jobs’ father was a Syrian immigrant.
  • It is illegal to step on money in Thailand, because you’d be insulting the king by stepping on his picture.