Former World Chess Champion G. Kasparov described Hungarian female chess player Polgár as a “circus puppet” and said that women chess players should stick to having children. Later in September 2002, in the Russia versus the Rest of the World Match, Polgár defeated Garry Kasparov.

Mercy dogs were trained during World War I to comfort mortally wounded soldiers as they died in no man’s land.

Simone Segouin was a French Resistance fighter in WWII that was only 18 when Germany invaded. She took part in large-scale missions, such as capturing German troops, derailing trains, and other acts of sabotage. And she is still alive and just celebrated her 95th birthday.

The youngest French resistance hero was a little boy who acted as a courier for resistance fighters, slipping past enemy patrols and carrying messages. In 1950, he was posthumously awarded the rank of sergeant of the resistance. He was Marcel Pinte, and he died for France at the age of 6.

Russian President Boris Yeltsin once got so drunk at a state dinner that he drummed on Kyrgyzstan President Askar Akayev’s bald head, using dinner spoons.

Judith Catchpole, a young maidservant in the colony of Maryland, who was tried in 1656 for witchcraft and killing her newborn child. The judge summoned an all-female jury, who determined that Judith did not kill her child – in fact, there were no signs that Judith had even been pregnant.

In the 1830s the Swedish Navy planted 300 000 oak trees to be used for ship production in the far future. When they received word that the trees were fully grown in 1975 they had little use of them as modern warships are built with metal.

Saudi Arabia accidentally printed thousands of textbooks containing an image of Yoda sitting next to King Faisal while he signed the 1945 UN charter.

There is still someone in the US living in an iron lung.

Edvard Munch’s famous painting “The Scream” was painted on cardboard.

Waverly Woodson, a black medic who treated at least 200 injured men on D-Day while injured himself. As he hit the beach a shell tore apart his landing craft, filling him with shrapnel. Despite this, he set up an aid station and treated wounds for 30 hours, at one point even amputating a foot.

The great smog of London in 1952 was so bad that pedestrians couldn’t even see their feet. Some of the 4,000 who died in the 5 days it lasted didn’t suffer lung problems – they fell into the Thames and drowned because they could not see the river.

A French soldier who was taken as a POW and fed only potatoes during his captivity, and survived. Feeling like he should have died, he made it his life’s mission to convince the world of the nutritional value of potatoes, and his tomb in France is decorated with potatoes as a tribute.

Mary Ann Brown Patten, who took command of a merchant vessel in 1856 when the captain, her husband, became ill and the first mate was found to be sabotaging the voyage to win a bet he’d placed on a competitor. She defeated a mutiny attempt and brought the ship safely back to port.

30 years ago you had 15-17 minutes to escape a house fire. Nowadays you only have 3-5 minutes (due to more plastics & petroleum-based products in the house as well as more open floor plans, bigger rooms, & higher ceilings)

If you grind a marine sponge through a sieve into salt water, it’ll reorganize itself back into a sponge. It’s the only animal that we know of that can do that.

Four high-school students in the ‘70s are the reason we no longer have pay toilets in America. They created an organization called CEPTIA, and were able to successfully lobby against the issue. 8 years later, pay toilets were all but nonexistent throughout the US.

One of the 2 co-owners/founders of Macy’s died on the Titanic, along with his wife, because he refused to board rescue ships before women and children were helped. His wife chose to stay behind because she did not want to abandon her husband, so they both died together aboard the Titanic.

During the Danish Colonization of Greenland, missionary Hans Egede found that local Inuit had no concept for what bread was and so he changed the Lord’s Prayer to say “Give us this day our daily seal”.

Although Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture was written to include cannons firing and cathedral bells, synchronising them with an orchestra proved all but impossible. It wasn’t until 1954 that composer Antal Doráti mixed a studio recording with cannons and bells, finally playing it as intended.

If you get a zebrafish drunk and put it in a tank of sober zebrafish, the sober fish will adopt it as their leader and follow the drunk fish around the tank.

Car trunks got emergency release handles because a middle aged woman and her husband escaped being kidnapped and fought for it until it became a requirement.

In 2007 a man in a wheelchair was hit by an 18 wheeler. The handles were ensnared within the grill of the truck and he was pushed at over 60 mph for several miles on the highway. Amazingly, he escaped without injury.

Britain’s worst nuclear accident, would have been much worse, were it not for Sir John Douglas Cockcroft. Whom insisted on installing filters onto the exhaust shaft of the Windscale Nuclear Power Plant. When the accident happened the radioactive dust was reduced by 95%.

Reagan and Gorbachev Agreed to Pause the Cold War in Case of an Alien Invasion.

Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry Potter in the film series was allergic to his own glasses. He had a nickel allergy and suffered for weeks with mysterious bumps around his eyes, where the glasses touched his face. The nickel glasses were quickly replaced with hypoallergenic specs.

Harvard research showed that having no friends is as deadly as smoking. Researchers have discovered a link between loneliness and the levels of blood-protein which can cause heart attacks and strokes.

The life expectancy number we know for the midde ages includes the infant mortality, so 13th-century English nobles had 30 year life expectancy at birth, but when they reached the age of 21, they would normally have a expectancy of 64.

In 2012, a survey in eastern Germany (regions formerly part of East Germany/GDR) was unable to find a single person under the age of 28 who believed in God.

The phrase “Turn a blind eye” (willfully ignore information) originated from Admiral Lord Nelson in 1801, who used his injured eye to see through his telescope during the Battle of Copenhagen when he wished to ignore his commander’s signals, which resulted in their victory.

Hermann Göring’s brother strongly opposed the Nazi party, and forged his brother’s signature so people could leave the country. Once, he joined Jews who had to scrub the streets, so the SS officer stopped the activity in order not to humiliate Hermann Göring.

In 1933, Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt were at a White House event when they whimsically abandoned their guests for a joyride. Both took turns flying and Roosevelt later stated, “It does mark an epoch, doesn’t it, when a girl in an evening dress and slippers can pilot a plane at night.”

Squanto was taken from his home village, transported to Europe, conscripted into slavery, escaped and made his way back to his homeland, only to find he was the last of his tribe.

Jesús García Corona made the decision to sacrifice his own life to save the people of Nacozari by driving a dynamite laden train that had caught fire away from the town instead of jumping to safety, Mexico, November 7th, 1907.

The Latin name of a ferret is Mustelidae putorius furo, which translates to “stinky mouse thief”

‘Death by GPS,’ or the deaths of people who follow their GPS systems off cliffs, into lakes, and deep into the desert. These deaths are mainly attributed to “uncritical acceptance of turn-by-turn commands and paying more attention to the navigation system than what is in front of them.”

When Princess Diana died in 1997, the funeral’s broadcast attracted an estimated 2.5 billion people worldwide. Which makes it one of the biggest televised event in history.

Stanford researchers showed that mealworms can safely consume various types of plastics including toxic additive-containing plastic such as polystyrene with no ill effects. The worms can then be used as a safe, protein-rich feed supplement.

A majority of the people Christopher Walken interacted with as a child were non-native English speakers, including his father. Walken attributes his unique halting speaking style to watching people hesitate to think of the right English word.

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s mother was also assassinated, and his brother was found dead in a swimming pool at age 38.

Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930 and further investigated it across his lifetime. He died in 1997 aged 90, less than a decade before the New Horizons launch to Pluto. To honour his wishes his ashes were launched inside the spacecraft, making it the longest post mortem fight ever recorded.

Subway Rolls Contain So Much Sugar They are Not Considered Bread In Ireland.

Years after her death, an archive of Marilyn Monroe’s poems, letters, notes, recipes, and diary entries surfaced. The archive included Monroe admitting that her first marriage, at the age of 16, was to keep her out of the orphanage when her caretaker was in the psychiatric hospital.

St. Marina the Monk was a crossdressing Catholic saint who joined her widowed father in the monastery. “Brother Marinos” was accused of impregnating a girl, and rather than reveal her sex to save face, humbly let herself be cast out and supported the child like a father.

French telecom CEO Didier Lombard, who was found guilty of moral harassment after 18 employees committed suicide under his leadership from 2008 to 2010, including an employee who stabbed himself in the stomach during a staff meeting and a woman who threw herself out of a window.

Civil War General John Sedgwick was killed when he stood up behind Union fortifications and proclaimed “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance!!” and was promptly shot by a Confederate sniper.

Bobby Darin wrote “Splish Splash” after a DJ bet him that he couldn’t make a hit song that started with “Splish Splash, I was takin’ a bath”

In 2012 doctors around the world voted the 1846 paper describing anesthesia as the most important discovery in modern medicine, ahead of things like antibiotics and X-Rays.

The idea caffeinated coffee & tea dehydrate you is misunderstood. It’s true that caffeine can be a weak diuretic – (stimulates urination) – but the loss is negated by the water in the drink itself. You’re ingesting more fluids than urinating when drinking a cup of caffeinated coffee or tea.

A man named George Raveling holds Martin Luther King, Jr.’s manuscript for the “I Have A Dream” speech. Raveling volunteered as a security guard at the event and asked for the document. King gave it to him, and Raveling, now 83, still has it today. He’s turned down $3 million for it.

In 1986, two Russian airline pilots got into an argument over whether one could land the plane without vision. The main pilot pulled the curtains over the windows, insisting he could. Then, the plane missed the runway, flipped and killed 70 of the passengers.

Erwin Kreuz, a German tourist who planned to visit San Francisco but accidentally disembarked early, and then spent days looking for the Golden Gate Bridge and other Bay Area landmarks in Bangor, Maine. Amused and touched, Maine residents turned him into a local celebrity.

That from 1906-1920, there was a movement in the US to remove all silent letters and irregular spellings from the English language (eg: although->altho), funded by Andrew Carnegie and supported by Teddy Roosevelt.

In the 90s, video game designer Kenji Eno learned he had blind fans, who played his games with great effort. So he designed a blank-screen game just for them: “Real Sound: Kaze no Regret.” He made Sega send 1000 consoles (w/ the game) to blind people. It is still a popular game for the blind.

After a Far Side cartoon featured a chimpanzee referring to Jane Goodall as a “tramp”, the cartoonist received a letter from Goodall’s lawyers calling the comic an “atrocity”. Goodall herself later saw the cartoon and loved it, and wrote the introduction to one of the Far Side collections.

Pronoia is the opposite of paranoia. A paranoid person thinks everyone in conspiring against them, whereas a pronoid person thinks everything is secretly conspiring to help them.

In the 1920s, one reason corsets went out of style was because they were made of lots of metal which was needed for tools during WWI. The U.S War Industries Board even asked women to stop buying them which helped them save enough metal to build two battleships.

In 1986, Optimus Prime was actually killed off in the Transformers movie, in order to make way for new and more expensive toys. He was eventually resurrected due to Hasbro underestimating the backlash over his death.

The famous photo of the Soviet flag being raised during the Battle of Berlin in 1945 was actually doctored. Photographer Yevgeny Khaldei added smoke to make it seem more dramatic, and also removed one of two watches from a Senior Sergeant’s wrist, as it would have implied looting.

Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels had severe depression and mourned his birthday by wearing black clothes.

In 2017, a man in Texas purchased a working Sherman tank and parked it outside his house. After sending a “sternly worded letter” and realizing that they couldn’t tow the vehicle, the local HOA began issuing parking tickets on the tank. The owner left it there for two more weeks out of spite.

David Dunbar Buick was a plumber who invented the process for adhering enamel to cast iron, clearing the way for cast iron bathtubs in homes. He would later start the Buick Motor Company.

Ants sleep by taking about 250 one minute naps throughout their day. It totals just under 5 hours of sleep. This allows for 80% of their colony to be awake, working and prepared at any given moment.

A 1992 Japanese TV show combined English lessons with gymnastic exercise programs. On the show, three gymnasts would perform synchronized exercises while chanting phrases like, “Hasta la vista, baby,” “Spare me my life!”, “I was robbed by two men!”, and “I have a bad case of diarrhea.”

At Frank Sinatra’s birth, the doctor thought he was a stillborn. Blue and not breathing, the doctor laid him on the counter while he attended to Sinatra’s mother. It was only when his grandmother picked up the newborn, ran him under cold water and slapped his back that Sinatra started breathing.

Martin Luther King Sr was also a civil rights activist who lived until 1984.

Between 1978 and 1983, John Williams won six Grammy Awards for Best Score in a row. He won them for Star Wars, Close Encounters, Superman, Empire, Raiders, and E.T.

Rock music has died out in the UK so much that the Rock & Metal Number One spot consists of practically nothing but Don’t Let the Bells End around every Christmas, and Bohemian Rhapsody for the rest of the year.

In 2016, the Swedish Tourism Council created a single phone number that connected the caller to a random Swede for you to have a conversation with. In the 79 days it was open, almost 200,000 calls were made with a combined 367 days worth of conversations.

African surgeons are often advised to treat hippo bites as a crushing injury rather than a penetration wound, due to the severity of damage to bones and internal organs. A majority of hippo attack survivors are left with a disability. Amputations are very common.

Johnny Cash’s brother, Jack, died when he was 14 after getting mangled by a table saw after cutting wood. Johnny, who admired his brother a lot, was heartbroken. According to his sister, Johnny helped dig Jack’s grave.

iTunes helped save “The Office” when it reached four of the top five slots for downloaded TV shows in the platform. That’s when the people behind the show learned that their audience skewed young, rather than the white-collar workers they thought would be watching.

Popcorn, being relatively inexpensive, became popular during the Great Depression. It became a source of income for many struggling farmers, including the Redenbacher family. In fact, when sugar was rationed during WWII, Americans ate three times as much popcorn as they had before.

The Inca did not have a written language but they did store and transfer information via a system of knots in rope that is still being decoded.

Jan Davis, who protested the banning of BASE jumping at national parks due to safety concerns, by BASE jumping off El Capitan. Her parachute failed to open and she died.

Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, refused to license his characters for toys or other products. He made an exception for a 1993 textbook, Teaching with Calvin and Hobbes, which is now so rare that only 7 libraries in the world have copies. A copy sold for $10,000 in 2009.

Researchers successfully killed MRSA (the antibiotic resistant superbug) with a blue laser and peroxide. They found a blue light can “bleach” the protective layer of the MRSA membrane which then makes it more vulnerable. This weakened it enough for hydrogen peroxide to finish the job.

The proposed Titles of Nobility Amendment to the US Constitution, which has been pending for 210 years. The Amendment would strip US citizenship from any citizen who accepts a title of nobility from a foreign country.

The world record for longest stare (40 minutes, 59 seconds) was set in 2011 at an Australian staring competition. At 17 minutes, the crowd became angry. At 30 minutes, contestants said they were bored.

Weird Al wrote “The Saga Begins” before Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace came out. He gathered most of the information from online leaks, and was surprised at how accurate he was after seeing a charity pre-screen of the movie. He made minor alterations to the song after seeing it.

Jerry Seinfeld is banned from the New York soup stall that he used for the basis of The Soup Nazi episode of Seinfeld. Weeks after the episode aired, Seinfeld went in for lunch, and chef Al Yeganeh asked him to leave, unhappy with the moniker the show had given him.

After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, which killed 200.000 people, UN peacekeepers from Nepal were sent to the country. Sadly, the peacekeepers brought cholera with them leading to a massive outbreak which infected 800.000 people, and killing at least 9000.

The word “gorilla” comes from the Greek word meaning, “savage hairy women.”

Molière’s legendary death: collapsing on stage while performing in the last play he had written, insisting on completing his performance, collapsing again, died hours afterwards.

There was a caste in medieval France and Spain who had to use separate entrances to churches and were fed communion at the end of the spoon because they were thought to be contagious. We’re still unsure why they were persecuted, because they were not ethnic, religious, or linguistic minorities.

Ruby-throated Hummingbirds are able to fly across the Golf of Mexico, a distance of 500 miles, in one 20-hour non-stop flight. This requires more calories than the bird’s weight, so they prepare by doubling their fat mass. They expend the entire caloric reserve during the flight.

Buddy Holly asked his wife out on their first meeting and proposed to her on the second. His manager disapproved of the relationship saying it would upset his female fans, so during his tours she was presented as his secretary.

Larger crocodiles can go for over a year without eating a meal. In extreme situations, crocodiles appear to be able to shut down and live off their own tissue for a long period of time.

A chess tournament in which a grandmaster by the name of Jan-Krzysztof Duda lost every single game he played against his opponents, until the very last one: a win against Magnus Carlsen, the current world chess champion, ending Magnus’ 2-year, 125-game winning streak.

Alex Zanardi, who in 2001 crashed his racing car which ripped off his legs. Two years later he had recovered enough to complete his remaining 13 laps with the help of prosthetics and hand controls. Zanardi overcame his injuries and resumed full time racing again in 2004.

Within 24 hours of the Pearl Harbor attack, Japan successfully invaded the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), much of New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Guam, and other strategic areas all over the western Pacific.

Gut fermentation syndrome (called auto-brewery syndrome) is a rare disorder in which intestines produce ethanol from carbohydrates. If you have this disease, you’re drunk all the time.

Stan Lee, the co-creator of comic book characters including Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Daredevil and the X-Men which have populated a film series that has grossed more than $11bn worldwide, was a victim of elder abuse by his business manager Keya Morgan.

In the film Gladiator (2000), Emperor Commodus was killed by Maximus in the Colosseum. In reality, Commodus was strangled to death in the bath by the wrestler Narcissus. In the film, Marcus Marcus Aurelius was murdered by Commodus. In reality he died from the Antonine Plague.

There is no actual difference between frogs and toads, with the popular comparison being used only informally with no taxonomic or evolutionary history. All toads are frogs and toads are just species or families of bumpy frogs.

When the Rolling Stones were forced to make another single to fulfill their contract, they recorded a vulgar song known as “C**ksucker Blues.” In retaliation, their former label released an album of the band’s greatest hits – despite the Stone’s renunciation, it hit top 10 on UK charts.

Although they failed to find missing pilot Steve Fossett for years, in the days following his disappearance, they DID find EIGHT other previously unidentified crash sites.

The original job of the Senate Sergeant at Arms was not to protect the senators, but rather to make sure that the senators could not leave the chamber while business was being conducted.

In the film Psycho (1960), an actress was flushing a toilet, with its contents (torn-up note paper) fully visible the first time. It was a concern, since no flushing toilet had appeared in mainstream film and television in the United States at that time.

The story of the Chernobyl power plant didn’t end with the tragedy of 1986. There was actually a second fire that broke out on Reactor 2 in 1991, and it wasn’t until 2000 that the last operating reactor was fully shut down.