Loneliest trees
The loneliest tree in the world was knocked over by a drunk driver in 1978. The new loneliest tree in the world is very close to the southernmost point of New Zealand.
Category: Sciences
Exploding lake
On August 21, 1986, seventeen hundred people who lived around Lake Nyos in Cameroon suffocated overnight – victims of an extremely rare and silent natural disaster.
Vomit chocolate
Mass-produced American chocolate has a distinct flavour that non-Americans describe as tasting a bit like vomit. It’s Milton Snavely Hershey’s fault.
Secret printer dots
Since the 1980s most colour printers and photocopiers add a set of secret near-invisible dots to every page they print. The dots uniquely identify the origin and timestamp of that printout.
Locust extinction
In 1875, trillions (yes, trillions) of Rocky Mountain locusts swarmed over the western United States. Thirty years later, they were extinct.
Apocalypse fuel
Ever see a post-apocalyptic film where people are driving cars years after the fall of civilisation? Sorry, car fuel doesn’t work like that.
Blood rainbow
At dusk or dawn, you might someday see an all-red rainbow.
Tunnelling through the Atlantic
Bridges go over water. Tunnels go under water. How about the Archimedes bridge, a hypothetical tunnel design that goes through water instead?
Black bones
Some breeds of chicken – like the Kadaknath of India and the Ayam Cemani of Indonesia – are extremely black. Their feathers, beaks, skin, meat, internal organs, and even bones are black.
A thousand flavours
The Heladería Coromoto ice cream parlour in Merida, Venezuela offers nearly a thousand different flavours of ice cream, including avocado, garlic, onion, sweetcorn, and crab.
Fatal insomnia
You can’t die from lack of sleep. Except when a genetic mutation prevents you from sleeping at all.
The equation of time
When a day is longer or shorter than 24 hours you need to use the equation of time to bring it back into sync.
Right of acorns
In the Domesday Book of 1086 the economic value of forests is not measured in the amount of wood they could provide, but in the amount of pigs they could feed.
Ghost in the painting
Artists sometimes change or improve paintings by painting over old versions. Through careful examination or special imaging, we can sometimes see these ghosts of lost art again.
The long winter
In Norse mythology Fimbulwinter is the great winter immediately preceding Ragnarök. It may have been inspired by the horrifying real-life events of 536 CE.
Invisible programming
The esoteric programming language Whitespace uses only three characters: tabs, spaces, and line breaks. That makes it effectively invisible to the naked eye.
The Generalist Academy 