Treasure

Your brain literally shrinks while you sleep. At least the synapses do. Doctors Chiara Cirelli and Giulio Tononi discovered that the brain shrinks by about 18% after a few hours of sleep, and by shrinking helps improve cognitive ability. So... having a small brain is apparently a good thing!

Scientists thought turtles were deaf and mute until they recently discovered that many turtles talk in low "clicks, clucks, and hoots." Some baby turtles even talk to each other while in the egg. Scientists think this is to help them all hatch at once. I think it's for something to do. Can you imagine how boring it'd be inside an egg? I'd be more curious about what they talk about than why.

Parboiling is a method of partially boiling rice to maintain the nutrients and lessen cooking time and was invented by German chemist Erich Huzenlaub. The “Huzenlaub Process” also stopped bug infestation. This quick-cook, bug-free rice (known as Converted Rice) was airdropped to troops during World War 2. It was later rebranded Uncle Ben’s Original Converted Brand Rice and has been on the shelves since 1947.

Nigel Richards (53) has won the World Scrabble Championship 5 times! He is the only person currently to have won the title more than once; he's won the French, the US, and the UK championships a few times; and he's memorized the entire French dictionary at 386K words and doesn't speak a word of French. I'm still not sure I have the alphabet memorized in my own language.

If you love Nike shoes, you have waffles to thank. Bill Bowerman was a track coach in the 50s who thought running shoes were slowing down his runners. Then one morning while eating waffles with his wife, he was struck with the idea that the waffle pattern would be perfect to give his shoes that all-terrain tread he wanted. One has to wonder about the texture of those waffles that they got him thinking about shoes.

Two months+, 68 days, 1632 hours, 97920 minutes, 5875200 seconds, and lots of milliseconds since I last posted an interesting fact on here. Maybe I should pick it up again. I guess that is a (sort of) interesting fact in of itself.

Ever heard of the Go Go's? They are an all-girl band from 1978 to present day. I don't know a lot about their music, but I do know that as of today, they are the ONLY all-female band that writes and performs their own music to reach Number One on the Billboard Charts. That was in 1981. That's pretty special! And kind of sad.

The first known novel is The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, written in the 11th century. There are 54 beautiful and intricately crafted chapters introducing you to the world of the aristocracy of that time... until it stops mid-sentence. One translator says that's how it's supposed to end, and another says we're missing some pages. I don't know how they define "novel" considering there are

The first commercial passenger flight took place in 1914 and consisted of Tony Janus the pilot and Abram Pheil the former mayor of St. Petersburg. Pheil paid $400 (8,500 in today's money) to fly across the water from St. Petersberg to Tampa, Flordia, and the flight paved the way for air travel as we know it! It also lasted only 23 minutes to cross 21 miles of water. Talk about an expensive puddle-jump!

I'm not much of a sports person, but I have always found baseball to be one of the most tolerable. I'd especially find it tolerable if I got to sit in a rocking chair 20 feet behind home plate like how the umpires used to sit. Yep, umpires used to recline in rocking chairs in the 19th century, and that sounds pretty comfortable to me, although it did take until 1878 for them to get a minimum wage of $5 a game.

Word evolutions are funny, fascinating, and weird. What can start out meaning one thing can mean something completely different a couple of hundred years later. For example, the word "Peculiar" used to mean "set apart, exclusive, singular." And the word "fizzle?" That we now use so innocently in the phrase, "fizzle out?" It originally meant, ahem, "to break wind quietly." I'll just leave that there.

Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ron Wayne signed the papers to found the Apple Computer Company on April 1, 1976 in their garage, but it wasn't fully incorporated until Jan. 3, 1977. Thirty years later, they renamed the company Apple Inc, and in 2018, it became the country's first trillion-dollar company. That's some April's Fool's joke!

In 2015, the Italian Space Agency worked with an Italian coffee maker to send coffee capsules and an espresso machine up to Samantha Cristoforetti in the International Space Station. So the first Italian woman in space gets the first coffee maker in space and becomes the first space barista! That's a lot of firsts. I'm still left wondering how she drinks that piping hot liquid in zero gravity...

Who founded Father's day is still a bit of a mystery as three people have been credited, but most refer to a woman by the name of Dodd in 1910. In Thialand, Father's day is celebrated in December on the birthday of one of their kings, and in Germany, Fathers drink all day in beer gardens for celebration. In the USA, about 12.7 billion is spent on Father's day, and 21 billion on mother's day.

Shovel combat. It exists. And is still practiced across much of the world (usually with props, like medieval combat practice sessions use fake swords), except Ireland, where a shillelagh is allowed but beating someone to death with a shovel is inhumane. Shovel combat. Huh. I wonder if there are any practice sessions near me?

@KenżaSheep, thanks for teaching me something new!

How do you maintain this daily fun fact frenzy?

Imagine an aquarium. The first one to open was created in England in 1921 and opened in 1924 to give the average ticket-buyer a look at the deep blue sea! Jeanne Villepreux-Power invented the first recognizable glass aquarium in 1832, and the idea of preserving fishies in containers can be traced back all the way to Summaria, but the first aquarium for public viewing did not come into fruition until 1921.

Fun Fact! One of the most famous classical composers ever never learned how to multiply or divide. Yep, Beethovan only knew how to add and subtract, meaning that one time when he needed to multiply 62 by 50, he wrote 62 down 50 times and added them all together. I don't wanna know how long that took. There, kids, a practical reason to learn maths in school. It makes your life just a little bit easier!

Pigeon poop is the property of the British Crown, as of an 18th-century edict from King George the 1st. He even put guards at the common gathering places of pigeons to enforce that fact. Okay, as weird as that sounds, he had a good reason. Back then, pigeon poop was used in manufacturing gunpowder, so he was keeping the commoners pigeonholed. It's still gross and weird.

Pretty much everyone knows, the Terminator movies, right? "I'll be back!" and all that. What's not as well known is the fact that the script for this famous franchise was sold for $1. The now-famous James Cameron sold the script for $1 and the promise that he'd get to direct it, and that movie was his big break to go on to direct a lot of other award-winning movies. Talk about paying off in the long run!