Did you know? Wtf facts

Untitled Part 27

-The longest time between two twins being born is 87 days.

-. In 2007, an American man named Corey Taylor tried to fake his own death in order to get out of his cell phone contract without paying a fee. It didn’t work.

-In 1923, jockey Frank Hayes won a race at Belmont Park in New York despite being dead — he suffered a heart attack mid-race, but his body stayed in the saddle until his horse crossed the line for a 20–1 outsider victory.

-Light doesn’t necessarily travel at the speed of light. The slowest we’ve ever recorded light moving at is 38 mph

-Casu marzu is a Sardinian cheese that contains live maggots. The maggots can jump up to five inches out of cheese while you’re eating it, so it’s a good idea to shield it with your hand to stop them jumping into your eyes.

- The northern leopard frog swallows its prey using its eyes — it uses them to help push food down its throat by retracting them into its head.0-0

- Experiments show that male rhesus macaque monkeys will pay to look at pictures of female rhesus macaques’ bottoms. 0-0

-The Dance Fever of 1518 was a month-long plague of inexplicable dancing in Strasbourg, in which hundreds of people danced for about a month for no apparent reason. Several of them danced themselves to death.

-Sigurd the Mighty, a ninth-century Norse earl of Orkney, was killed by an enemy he had beheaded several hours earlier. He’d tied the man’s head to his horse’s saddle, but while riding home one of its protruding teeth grazed his leg. He died from the infection.

-The Dutch village of Giethoorn has no roads; its buildings are connected entirely by canals and footbridges.

- Powerful earthquakes can permanently shorten the length of Earth’s day, by moving the spin of the Earth’s axis. The 2011 Japan earthquake knocked 1.8 microseconds off our days. The 2004 Sumatra quake cost us around 6.8 microseconds.

-The first American film to show a toilet being flushed on screen was Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

- There is a glacier called “Blood Falls” in Antarctica that regularly pours out red liquid, making it look like the ice is bleeding. (It’s actually oxidised salty water.)

- In 2008 scientists discovered a new species of bacteria that lives in hairspray.

- The longest musical performance in history is currently taking place in the church of St. Burchardi in Halberstadt, Germany. The performance of John Cage’s “Organ²/ASLSP (As Slow As Possible)” started on Sept. 5, 2001, and is set to finish in 2640. The last time the note changed was October 2013; the next change isn’t due until 2020.

-There’s an opera house on the U.S.–Canada border where the stage is in one country and half the audience is in another.

-The tiny parasite Toxoplasma gondii can only breed sexually when in the guts of a cat. To this end, when it infects rats, it changes their behaviour to make them less scared of cats.

-The katzenklavier (“cat piano”) was a musical instrument made out of cats. Designed by 17th-century German scholar Athanasius Kircher, it consisted of a row of caged cats with different voice pitches, who could be “played” by a keyboardist driving nails into their tails. (-.-)

-The Romans used to clean and whiten their teeth with urine. Apparently it works. Please don’t do it, though.

-There are around 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body. If you took them all out and laid them end to end, they’d stretch around the world more than twice. But, seriously, don’t do that either.