The Best Interesting Random Facts
The bald eagle is like a thug when it comes to feeding, and loves to eat fish such as trout and salmon. Although bald eagles are capable hunters, they would rather scavenge for food. Bald eagles are kleptoparasites, or opportunistic feeders. They hang around and steal the catches of other animals, like coyotes and younger, […]
Crayons are sticks of colored wax, charcoal, chalk, or other materials used for writing, coloring, and drawing. A crayon made of oiled chalk is called an oil pastel. A grease pencil or china marker is made of colored hardened grease and is used for marking hard, glossy surfaces like glass. Water-soluble crayons are made by […]
The woodpecker pecks, or beats its strong bill, into tree trunks or limbs for several reasons. First, this rapid drumming is used as a mating call. Second, the pecking creates a hole for a nest, with the wood chips it leaves forming a cushion for the woodpecker’s eggs. But most of the woodpecker’s pecking is […]
In 1946, a crowd gathered in Lewiston, Maine, to watch a boxing match between Ralph Walton and Al Couture. When the bell rang to begin the first round, Couture dashed across the ring and swung at Walton before Walton had left his corner. The blow knocked Walton down, and he was counted out. The entire […]
“I believe,” wrote Alexander Graham Bell in 1878, “that in the future wires will unite the head offices of the Telephone Company in different cities, and a man in one part of the country may communicate by word of mouth with another in a distant place. I am aware that such ideas may appear to […]
In 1881, a worker at Procter and Gamble forgot to turn off the machine that whipped a little air into the soap mixture. He ran the “ruined” batch through production and packaging anyway instead of pulling it. Consumers went wild. They loved the way the bar floated instead of sinking to the murky bottom of […]
Punctuation marks are symbols which indicate the structure of written language, and is important in comprehending the meaning of sentences. The earliest writing had no capitalization, no spaces and few punctuation marks. The oldest known document using primitive punctuation is the Mesha Stele from the 9th century B.C. The Greeks had punctuation marks with vertically […]
A cow can drink about a bathtub of water each day, which includes the moisture it receives from the wet grasses it eats. Cows are ruminants, which means that they have a digestive system that reuses partially digested food by regurgitating and re-chewing them as “cud”. Onions could definitely cause a cow’s milk to taste […]
Yes, flamingos come in different colors besides pink. Flamingo babies, for example, are born white with gray streaks and take one or two years to develop their pinkish color. And depending on which of the five flamingo species you look at, the color will vary in intensity to the point that some of the lighter […]
Rabies is a virus, and the usual route of transmission to humans is by the bite of an infected animal. Rabid dogs are the main transmitter of the illness in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. In the United States, where vaccination of pets has controlled the disease, the infection is uncommon, and when it does […]
Jinglebobs, heel chains, and rowels are parts of a cowboy’s spurs. A spur is a metal tool worn in pairs on the heels of riding boots. It’s used to direct a horse to move forward or sideways while riding. It’s also used to supplement the riding aids or commands and to back up the natural […]
When an Octopus is threatened by a predator it will squirt ink, change skin color as camouflage, and jet away. As good a job as the ink does of hiding something as hard to hide as an octopus, it’s also poisonous to some creatures and stuns others, even when diluted in the vastness of the […]
It would be best not to complain about how basketball got its name, it could have easily been called “box ball” or even “trash can ball.” In 1891, when James Naismith was inventing the game for bored, snowbound students at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts, he intended to use wooden boxes for his targets. But […]
There are several different species of cuckoo birds, and they got their names from the call of the Common Cuckoo, which is also familiar from cuckoo clocks. The American cuckoo is about a foot long and, unlike other birds, has two toes that point forward and two that point backward, most birds have three forward, […]
The lynx is a medium-sized wild cat with long ear tufts and a short tail with a black tip. It has large paws that help it walk in deep snow and has thick fur that make it appear larger than it really is. Lynx are usually solitary, but small groups of lynx may occasionally hunt […]
Hummingbirds use spiderwebs and dandelion down to build their nests. As fast and small as the hummingbirds are, you’d think they’d be hard for scientists to keep track of, but we actually know quite a bit about them. A nesting hummingbird attaches dandelion thistles to the top of a tree branch under overhanging leaves, using […]
Many weird religions would say the chicken came first without hesitation, claiming that their god created the animals and birds complete and without evolution or change. However, evolutionary evidence more strongly supports the egg-first theory. Genetically, chickens can be traced back to an earlier bird found in Indochina called the red jungle fowl. Over time, […]
True crabs are crustaceans that have a short projecting “tail” or reduced hidden abdomen, while others such as hermit crabs, horseshoe crabs and crab lice, are not true crabs. Crabs can be found in oceans all over the world, and many crabs in tropical regions live in freshwater and on land. They are usually covered […]
Steamboat geyser, which can hurl its super hot water 300 feet in the air, is one of two geysers that seem to be tied for this title of most powerful geyser on earth. Steamboat geyser is located in Yellowstone National Park. The only trouble with Steamboat is that, unlike Old Faithful, which erupts on an […]
High up in the air above the treetops, the two Bald Eagle lovers look deep into each others eyes. They then suddenly twist around, locking their talons together and holding onto each other for dear life as they plummet to Earth, spinning, turning, and diving with wild abandon. At the last minute, right before the […]
Japan’s population is expected to drop to 95 million by 2050. In 2011 about 127,960,000 lived in Japan, and in the 2010 census the population of Japan was 128,056,026. Yup, that means the country’s population decreased. The main reason for the decline can be blamed on a low birth rate, Japan’s birth rate has been […]
In general, cactus plants are the slowest growing plants on earth. One kind of cactus, the saguaro, grows just one inch in the first ten years of its life. The saguaro cactus doesn’t grow a branch until it’s 16 years old, and after that, it grows just an inch a year. But some pine trees […]
Camels actually have quite a long history in the United States. Many natural history experts believe camels actually originated in North America 40 million years ago and migrated north and west through Alaska and into Asia along with many other large animals prior to the Ice Age. More recently, though, camels were used as pack […]
Before humans learned the secret of glassmaking, nature was the world’s only glassmaker. Lightning striking sand melted it into long, thin tubes of glass, and volcanoes erupting melted rocks and sand into glass. The earliest glass made by humans was probably a glaze on ceramic pottery made somewhere around 3000 B.C. Today, three inexpensive ingredients, […]
Llamas are not too picky about their food and will eat hay, grass, and grain. Domesticated Llamas are usually fed a mixture of bromgrass hay, alfalfa hay and corn silage, and a llama owner has a wide variety of commercial and farm based food products to choose from. Young llamas, which are still growing, require […]
An ostrich egg is about four inches tall and four to five inches wide, and weigh over three pounds. Ostriches are oviparous, and females will lay their fertilized eggs in a single communal nest, in a pit. The eggs are glossy cream-colored, with thick shells marked by small pits. There’s about as much yolk and […]
Sheep are born with very long tails, long enough to reach the ground. When a lamb is born, the owner puts a rubber band tightly around the base of the lamb’s tail so that the circulation to the rest of the tail is stopped. In about a week or two, the tail, made mostly of […]
Dogs were bred for specific functions, making intelligence a difficult thing to measure. For example, if you see herding ability as a sign of intelligence, a collie will beat a beagle any day. But if tracking is your sign of smarts, then the collie will lose to the beagle. That said, however, some neuropsychologists insist […]
These days, only special time travel will provide a chance of becoming a samurai warrior. The samurai began as a class of warriors in feudal Japan and stayed in power through the 17th century. But even if you could transport back to the days of the samurai, chances are you wouldn’t have measured up. Few […]
In 1923, South Dakota’s tourism board got the idea to carve western heroes Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, and John Colter into a mountain to attract out-of-state tourists. They approached John Gutzon Borglum, who had just accepted a commission to carve Robert E. Lee on the side of Georgia’s Stone Mountain. Borglum hated the idea of […]