13 fascinating facts for your brain
Nathan Johnson
Published
05/19/2016
in
wow
interesting stuff
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1.
A 4 yo kid named Bobby Dunbar disappeared on a family trip, 8 months later they rescued him and reunited him with his family and they lived happily ever after. Nearly a hundred years later, DNA proved conclusively that the kid they rescued wasn’t Bobby Dunbar. After an eight-month nationwide search, investigators believed that they had found the child in Mississippi, in the hands of William Cantwell Walters of North Carolina. Dunbar’s parents claimed the boy as their missing son. However, both Walters and a woman named Julia Anderson insisted that the boy with him was Anderson’s son. The court system eventually sided with the Dunbars and they retained custody of the boy, who proceeded to live out the remainder of his life as Bobby Dunbar. The photo on the left was sent out by the Dunbars on circulars at the time the Dunbar child disappeared. The one on the right is the boy now held by the Dunbars as their child, taken from Walters. The defense contends the photos are mute evidence that the boy held by the Dunbars is not the lost child. -
2.
A man named Dean Karnazes has a physiological advantage in that he doesn’t seem to have a lactate threshold; thus was able to run 350 miles in under 81hours without sleep. He started ultra-marathon running after having a drunken epiphany/mid-life crisis on his 30th birthday while running away from a bar to avoid cheating on his wife. He proceeded to run over 30miles in his underwear while smashed drunk and decided to have a career change. -
3.
The shoshinsha mark is a green and yellow symbol that new Japanese drivers must place on their cars for a year; conversely, the fukushi mark (orange and yellow) is for elderly drivers. Both marks warn other drivers that the marked driver is not very skilled due to inexperience or old age. -
4.
A college student aligned his teeth successfully by 3D printing his own clear braces for less than $60; he’d built his own 3D home printer but fixed his teeth over months with 12 trays he made on his college’s more precise 3D printer. -
5.
In 1987, FBI agent Robert Hanssen was tasked by his superiors to find a mole within the agency after the FBI’s moles in the KGB were caught. In reality, he was the mole, working with the KGB since 1979. On October 1, 1985, Hanssen sent an anonymous letter to the KGB offering his services and asking for US$100,000 in cash. In the letter, he gave the names of three KGB agents secretly working for the FBI: Boris Yuzhin, Valery Martynov and Sergei Motorin. Unbeknownst to Hanssen, all three had already been exposed earlier that year by Aldrich Ames. Martynov and Motorin were executed, and Yuzhin was imprisoned for six years before he eventually emigrated to the U.S. Since the FBI blamed Ames for the leak, Hanssen was not suspected nor investigated. The October 1 letter was the beginning of a long, active espionage period for Hanssen. Hanssen was recalled yet again to Washington in 1987. He was given the task of making a study of all known and rumored penetrations of the FBI in order to find the man who had betrayed Martynov and Motorin; this meant that he was looking for himself. -
6.
There was a man-made mouse utopia called Universe 25. It started with 4 males and 4 females. The colony peaked at 2200 and from there declined to extinction. Once a tipping point was reached, the mice lost instinctual behaviors. Scientists extrapolate this model to humans on earth. Lone females retreated to isolated nesting boxes on penthouse levels. Other males, a group Calhoun termed “the beautiful ones,” never sought sex and never fought—they just ate, slept, and groomed, wrapped in narcissistic introspection. Elsewhere, cannibalism, pansexualism, and violence became endemic. Mouse society had collapsed. -
7.
Mr. Rogers would announce what he was doing because a blind girl asked him to do so in a letter. The Letter: Dear Mister Rogers, Please say when you are feeding your fish, because I worry about them. I can’t see if you are feeding them, so please say you are feeding them out loud. Katie, age 5 (Father’s note: Katie is blind, and she does cry if you don’t say you that you have fed the fish.) -
8.
When confronted by police, a man took his pit bull off the leash, pointed at the cops and yelled “Kill’em boy, kill’em.” The dog responded by biting him in the butt and chasing him into a nearby apartment where the officers promptly arrested him. -
9.
In 1981, a tenant was evicted in Germany after spreading Surströmming (fermented Baltic Sea herrring) brine in the stairway. The landlord was taken to court, where he brought a can of Surströmming as evidence. After being opened, the court unanimously ruled in his favor because of the smell. -
10.
Theodore Roosevelt was seen as dangerously loud-mouthed and was given the Vice-Presidency to make sure he was politically powerless. On September 6, 1901 President McKinley was shot by an anarchist acting alone while in Buffalo, New York. Initial reports suggested that his condition was improving, so Roosevelt, after visiting the ailing president, embarked for the west. When McKinley’s condition worsened, Roosevelt rushed back. McKinley died on September 14, and Roosevelt was sworn in at the Ansley Wilcox House -
11.
50 % of female US marines failed the minimum requirement of 3 pulls ups -
12.
23 year old, Joe Arridy, a intellectually disabled man with an IQ of 46, was wrongfully executed in 1939. He was known for playing with his toy train that the prison warden gave him as a present while on death row. Guards and Inmates described him as “the happiest prisoner on death row”. When questioned about his impending execution he showed “blank bewilderment” and it was clear that he didn’t realize the meaning of the gas chamber telling the warden “No, no Joe won’t die.” Joe was reported to have smiled while being taken to the gas chamber and was only momentarily nervous until the warden grabbed his hand and reassured him. -
13.
Drug overdose deaths, driven largely by prescription drug overdose deaths, are now the leading cause of injury death in the United States – surpassing motor vehicle crashes.
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