Useless trivia and facts

TinyArtist

Finland has the most heavy metal bands per capita.

lis

You could sweat when you're anxious to alert others. One theory suggests we've evolved to sweat whilst anxious to alert the brains of other people around us so they are primed for whatever it is that's making us anxious. Brain scans have revealed that when you sniff the sweat of a panic-induced person, regions of the brain that handle emotional and social signals light up. When you're anxious your sympathetic nervous system releases hormones including adrenaline, which activates your sweat glands.

TinyArtist

One of President John Tyler's grandsons is still alive today—even though the President was born in 1790. How is this possible? President Tyler, the 10th US president, was 63 when his son Lyon Tyler was born in 1853; Lyon's son was born when he was 75. President Tyler's living grandson, Harrison Tyler is 95, while Lyon's other son, Lyon Jr., passed away in 2020 at the age of 95. The Tyler family still maintains the President's home, Sherwood Forest Plantation, in Virginia.

lis

Dogs tilt their heads when you speak to them to better pinpoint familiar words. Your dog is tilting its head when you speak to it to pinpoint where noises are coming from more quickly. This is done to listen out more accurately for familiar words such as 'walkies' and helps them to better understand the tone of your voice. If a dog doesn't tilt its head that often (as those with shorter muzzles might), it's because it relies less on sound and more on sight.

lis

Football players spit so much because exercise increases the amount of protein in saliva. When you exercise, the amount of protein secreted into the saliva increases. A protein mucus named MUC5B makes your saliva thicker when you're exercising which makes it more difficult to swallow so we tend to spit more. It may occur during exercise because we breathe through our mouths more. MUC5B could activate to stop our mouths from drying out, therefore.

lis

Bananas are radioactive. Due to being rich in potassium, every banana is actually slightly radioactive thanks to containing the natural isotope potassium-40. Interestingly, your body contains around 16mg of potassium-40, meaning you’re around 280 times more radioactive than a banana already. Any excess potassium-40 you gain from a banana is excreted out within a few hours.

lis

Giraffes are 30 times more likely to get hit by lightning than people. True, there are only five well-documented fatal lightning strikes on giraffes between 1996 and 2010. But due to the population of the species being just 140,000 during this time, it makes for about 0.003 lightning deaths per thousand giraffes each year. This is 30 times the equivalent fatality rate for humans.

TinyArtist

Cartoonist Mort Walker, creator of Beetle Bailey, came up with names for the things we often see in comics and cartoons: "briffit" is the dust cloud a character makes when he runs away quickly; "plewds" are the beads of sweat when a character is under duress; and "grawlix" are symbols such as "#@*%" that stand in for curse words.

lis

There might be a cure for 'evil'. Well, a cure for psychopathy, anyway. Psychologists argue that aspects of psychopathy can be 'cured' by cognitive behavioural therapy, which is said to reduce violent offences by those with the condition. Preliminary research suggests that computer-based cognitive training could help a psychopath experience empathy and regret, too.

TinyArtist

Among lost works, this story might be even worse: Ernest Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, left a suitcase full of the author's writing on a train. When she went back to get it, it was gone. "I had never seen anyone hurt by a thing other than death or unbearable suffering except Hadley when she told me about the things being gone," Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast.

lis

The fear of long words is called Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia. The 36-letter word was first used by the Roman poet Horace in the first century BCE to criticise those writers with an unreasonable penchant for long words. It was American poet Aimee Nezheukumatathil, possibly afraid of their own surname, who coined the term how we know it in 2000.

TinyArtist

Pope John Paul II was made an honorary Harlem Globetrotter.

TinyArtist

This one is crazy

On average, 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens each year.

TinyArtist

There's a city named "Rome" on every continent except Antarctica.

TinyArtist

Frank Sinatra was offered the starring role in Die Hard when he was in his 70s.

I wonder why he turned it down

TinyArtist

New Jersey is the top producer of the world's eggplants.

TinyArtist

Antarctica has the largest unclaimed territory on Earth.

TinyArtist

There are about the same number of stars in the observable universe as there are grains of sand on all of Earth's beaches.

TinyArtist

Why?

Queen Elizabeth II was a trained mechanic.

TinyArtist

Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first class.