The Best Interesting Random Facts
The headmaster at Harry Potter’s school shares his name with an early term for the common bumblebee. Dumbledore, bumblebee, and humblebee could be onomatopoeic attempts to re-create the bee’s buzzing sound. Rowling said she chose the name Dumbledore, which is an Early Modern English word for “bumblebee”, because she “imagined him walking around humming to […]
Are you a cat owner? Do you really want to know if cats would eat their owners if they died? If not, skip to the next question, and we’ll meet you down there in a second. Okay, then. As you know, there have been dozens of stories of loyal dogs standing guard over their owners’ […]
The Australian dragonfly is the Fastest Insect in the World. A dragonfly is a type of insect with large multifaceted eyes, two pairs of transparent wings, and an elongated body. Dragonflies are similar to damselflies, but the wings of most dragonflies are held away from the body when at rest. They are not capable of […]
From 1930 to 1937, the United States suffered its worst drought in history. Across 50 million acres (20.25 million hectares) of land in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, dry weather and winds caused massive dust storms that carried particles as far as New York City. In 1933 and 1934, the […]
The Buick Motor Company originated as the Buick Auto-Vim and Power Company in 1899, and was named after David Buick. He had the bad luck and poor business sense to found two successful companies and sell them both before reaping the rewards. By the end of his life, he couldn’t even afford a telephone in […]
The bell we now call the Liberty Bell was originally ordered by the Assembly of the colony of Pennsylvania from a foundry in England. When the bell arrived from England in 1752 and was hung in the State House in Philadelphia, it was simply called the State House Bell. The first time that the new […]
Dogs are not color-blind like previously assumed, they can see colors, just not all colors. Color comes in red, blue, and green spectrums. Canines have a type of color-blindness called deuteranopia, meaning they lack the ability to discern the green spectrum. While dogs do recognize some red, it’s really the blue spectrum they’re best at […]
The expression “possession is nine-tenths of the law” is from the eighteenth century. The old adage means that in the pursuit of justice possession in a dispute over property outweighs these nine other essential elements of a good court case. A lot of money, a lot of patience, a good cause, a good lawyer, good […]
Hoot Gibson was born on August 6, 1892 in Tekamah, Nebraska, and was an American rodeo champion and a pioneer cowboy film actor, director and producer. Cowboy movie star Hoot Gibson takes us way back. Born Edmund Richard Gibson, the silent movie star was also known as the Smiling Whirlwind because of his boyish smile […]
Drinking birds, also known as dipping birds, are toy heat engines that mimic the motions of a bird drinking water. The drinking bird was invented by Miles V. Sullivan in 1945 and patented in 1946, and is not a perpetual motion device. Sullivan was a Ph.D. inventor-scientist at Bell labs in Murray Hill, NJ, USA, […]
Where owls make their nests depends on the owl. Some like trees, others like rafters in barns and attics, and still others make their nests in the ground. Burrowing owls, which live throughout the U.S., from Canada to Florida, usually recycle old, empty animal burrows instead of making their own. They’ve been known to inhabit […]
The name Wildebeest means “wild beast” in Dutch, but you can’t believe every tag the Europeans gave animals, see gophers, aardvarks, groundhogs, etc. Also called the gnu, the wildebeest a hooved, or ungulate mammal. The wildebeest is a large antelope that roams through grassy plains of southern Africa, grazing in huge, usually placid herds. They […]
The amazing but deadly little insect we know as a house fly actually has a remarkable body. Even though that body is responsible for spreading diseases, it is so wonderfully made and can do such unusual things that it is an insect to be marveled at. Most amazing of all is probably the house fly’s […]
For the longest time, scientists thought there were only two different species of elephants, the African and the Asian. They believed that the African elephant had two subspecies, the savannah elephant and the forest elephant. However, some scientists began to doubt that classification. For one thing, forest elephants are smaller than savannah elephants. Furthermore, their […]
No, people didn’t always sleep on what we would call a bed, and many people today still have never slept on a bed! Perhaps half of the world sleep on piles of rugs, or on mats or cushions. The beds used by the ancient Egyptians looked very much like couches, and were used during the […]
There were once sheep grazing on the White House lawn. Woodrow Wilson had a flock there during World War I, and sold wool to help raise money for the Red Cross. The sheep produced almost one hundred pounds of raw wool for the war effort. The flock of eighteen sheep also helped with White House […]
The term megafauna comes from the words mega, meaning “powerful, big,” and fauna, which means “animals.” While megafauna is most often used to describe the huge and now extinct Ice Age creatures like the woolly mammoth or the mastodon, the term can also be applied to the large African and Asian animals which are actual […]
The mammoth and mastodon were animals from the ice age, and were closely related to one another. Both the mammoth and mastodon were similar to each other in overall structure, and both looked similar to our modern-day elephant. However, there were a few differences. Mastodons were browsers while mammoths were grazers. The mastodon also had […]
Lightning strikes the earth and other objects around it more than 8.6 million times a day, or about 100 lightning strikes every second. Lightning is a discharge of electricity in the atmosphere accompanied by thunder. It usually occurs during thunderstorms, but can sometimes occur during volcanic eruptions or dust storms. A leader of a bolt […]
Not at all, bees are definitely not blind. Bees actually have 5 eyes; 3 simple eyes called ocelli, and 2 compound eyes. The compound eyes are made of lots of small, repeating eye parts called ommatidia. About 150 ommatidia in each compound eye specializes in seeing patterns. This allows bees to detect polarized light, something […]
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 […]
Girls reach their full height when they are about 18 years old, but boys keep growing taller for a few more years. There are two periods in your life when you grow very rapidly. The first period began right after you were born and lasted until you were about six months old. The second period […]
The chop is English, in the sense of “chipped” or “cut,” but the suey is Chinese sui, “bits.” Like the term itself, the concoction or comestible is of mixed origin. As explained to us, forty years ago, it was first devised by a Chinese operating a restaurant in Brooklyn, who composed it of bits of […]
The Puffer Fish, or Blowfish blows itself up to defend itself against its enemies. When it is threatened, the Puffer Fish will turn itself into a large ball covered with sharp spines. Hopefully, the enemy is unable to swallow the inedible ball and swims off. The spines stick out of its body only when it […]
Poor Butterfly! This beautiful, colorful insect does not have a mouth with which to chew like other insects have. But nature has given the butterfly another way to nourish itself. The butterfly has a long, thin tube, called a proboscis, through which it can suck up the sweet nectar from flowers, the same way you […]
Western Union developed the sentence, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” as a test for their telex operators, and it’s thirty-five letters long. However it isn’t the shortest English sentence ever created using all the letters of the alphabet. That honor of shortest English sentence created using all the letters of the […]
Most birds of prey have eyes on the sides of their heads, but owls have large forward-facing stereoscopic eyes that enable depth perception necessary for low-light hunting. The large eyes of an owl are for acute night vision, and they are also like pair of sunglasses. Being nocturnal, much of their hunting is done at […]
The giant squid is the second biggest squid and marine invertebrate in the world after the colossal squid. The giant squid is bigger than any octopus, and can grow up to 43 feet for females and 33 feet for males from caudal fin to the tip of the two long tentacles. There have been reports […]
When a light bulb is switched on, its delicate filament is hit with a triple whammy. The resistance of the metal filament rises with its temperature. When it is switched on, its resistance is less than a tenth of its usual working level so an initial current more than 10 times the rated value surges […]
“The pipe draws wisdom from the lips of the philosopher, and shuts up the mouth of the foolish,” wrote W.M. Thackeray a hundred years ago; and to this day, pipe smoking retains a certain connotation of sophistication. The hoi polloi may take their tobacco by cigarette or cigar, but a true connoisseur of the brown […]