TV’s inventor on TV
The inventor of television, Philo Farnsworth, had only one notable television appearance.
Category: Sciences
Hybrids of lions, tigers, jaguars, and leopards
You’ve probably heard of the liger and the tigon, offspring of a lion and a tiger together. But what about tiguars, tigards, liguars, lipards, jaggers, jaglions, jagupards, leogers, leopons, and leguars?
Will Rogers paradox
Someone (not Will Rogers) once joked that “When the Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, they raised the average intelligence level in both states.” This quirk of statistics has some surprising implications for cancer survival rates.
Daylight robbery
New Zealand entomologist George Hudson proposed modern daylight saving time so that he could catch more bugs.
The origin of green
A billion years ago or longer, a photosynthesising bacterium found its way into a proto-plant cell. The bacteria and the cell became symbiotic, each helping the other to survive and thrive. All land plants today are descended from that chance meeting.
The dead marsh
A stand of trees dead for six hundred years stick out of the Namib Desert in the claypan called the Deadvlei.
Let the buyer beware of magic stones
The famous legal phrase caveat emptor (“let the buyer beware”) entered common law because of a 17th century dispute over a magic bezoar stone.
Mario’s surname
The Nintendo video game character Mario has gone through a number of name changes throughout the years – including, controversially, whether he has a surname or not.
The other binary
In binary, 010 is equal to 2. But what if it were 3 instead?
The blob from the stars
The 1958 horror film The Blob was inspired by a real event in 1950: a close encounter between four police officers and a star jelly.
Longest elevator fall
In 1945 an Air Force bomber crashed into the side of the Empire State Building. An elevator cab carrying Betty Lou Oliver fell 75 floors straight down; she, incredibly, survived.
Space probe software bug
NASA lost contact with the space probe Deep Impact in 2013 because of a single software bug.
The last smallpox survivor
In October 1977, Ali Maow Maalin was the last person to contract naturally occurring smallpox. He died thirty six years later while coordinating a polio vaccination drive.
Animal helmets
The Vikings may not have worn horned helmets, but the ancient Greeks had helmets covered in boar tusks and the Dayak of Borneo had helmets covered in fish or pangolin scales.
The Yale blackboard rebellion
In 1830, nearly half of the mathematics class at Yale was expelled for refusing to use a blackboard in their exams.
Castaway rabbits and cattle
Rabbits and cattle were introduced to a remote island near Antarctica as food for shipwreck survivors; they bred there in isolation for more than a century.
The Generalist Academy 