a woman named Frances Perkins was outside the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory during the fire and saw dozens of people jump to their deaths due to unsafe work conditions. She went on to become the first female Secretary of Labor and founded the Factory Investigating Commission to improve work safety

a bus driver in Paris kicked all the passengers out when they refused to make space for a wheelchair bound man

Queen Elizabeth once hid in a bush with her corgis to avoid talking to Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife.

about BACA, a biker gang that will defend kids who were abused or bullied, give them their own vest, take them the school, and will even guard a house 24/7 to make sure the kid can sleep

Gillian Lynne did so badly in school teachers thought she had a learning disorder & her mom took her to a doctor. Lynne began dancing to his radio; the doctor said: She’s not disordered, she’s a dancer; put her in dance school. Lynne became a world-renowned dancer & music theater choreographer.

that three german students got sued by their alma mater for 10,000€ because they graduated "too fast". They completed their bachelors and masters degree within 4 instead of 11 semesters by attending different lectures and sharing notes. Then they founded a ghostwriting agency!

an Intern at NASA once stole a safe full of moon rocks, sprinkled them on a hotel bed, and had sex with his girlfriend on top of them. He was sentenced to 8 years

before any details of Pixar’s ‘Soul’ were public, a Black chauffeur told Kemp Powers (the film’s co-writer & co-director) that he knew Pixar was making a Black movie because he had never driven so many Black people to Pixar before.

Pope Benedict XVI resigned in 2013, but announced it in Latin. One reporter got the scoop and broke the story because she understood Latin. Most other reporters waited for official translations.

that the Quran references Jesus's mother Mary 70 times and holds her in very high regard, identifying her as the greatest of all women

Gorillas hum happy songs when they eat. “And if it’s their favourite food, they sing louder.”

on several late 60's recordings, prominent jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman used his 10-year-old son to play drums, though he could have employed high-profile adult jazz drummers. He prized the child's joyful child musical curiosity over a more technically skilled adult

For millennia, Europeans did not know where birds went in Winter time. The mystery was partly solved in 1822, when a German hunter shot down a stork. The stork had a 80cm long Central African spear impaled in its neck. This provided the first evidence that they migrated to Africa.

That in the late 1780's, an Irishman met an impressive performing bear while travelling France. When the bears owner prodded him with a stick, the bear shouted something in Irish, which led to the discovery that the performing bear was actually another Irishman who had been sown into the suit.

unlike in the movie Die Hard, the escape hatch on an elevator can't be opened from the inside; by law, it's bolted shut from the outside. It’s there so that emergency personnel can get in, not so passengers can get out. If an elevator is in trouble, the safest place to be is inside the elevator.

that the Venus flytrap naturally grows in very few areas in the Carolinas, so park rangers have to keep most of their grow sites a secret to keep them safe from poachers.

In 1980 a dingo ate an Australian couple's baby while camping, causing the mother to sentenced to life in prison for murder. Three years later, the babies clothes were found near a dingo lair.

in 1998, a married couple was left behind during a diving trip to the Great Barrier Reef. Two days passed before anyone realized what had happened. Despite a 5-day search, the couple was never found. A dive slate was later recovered which read "... rescue us before we die..."

that "Jazz" is statistically the hardest word to guess in hangman. It has to do with it being a short word, having only one vowel, and using "j" and "z"---letters that people rarely guess in hangman.

the Adamites were a 2nd century Christian sect that sought to re-create the innocence of the Garden of Eden. To this end they called their church “Paradise”, practiced nudism, rejected marriage and claimed they could do whatever they wanted because they had no knowledge of good/evil.

(Memorial day) 61% of U.S troops killed in Vietnam were younger than 21 years old. Many had been drafted

Amazon Web Services offers a service called Snowmobile, where they will bring you a truck with 100 Petabytes worth of hard drives, copy your data, then drive it to its destination, bypassing the internet entirely. Transferring this much data over a 1Gbps line would take 20 years.

that Utah’s Great Salt Lake used to be the home of a single flamingo named Pink Floyd, who escaped from the zoo and would be seen wintering in Utah socializing with seagulls

after their characters unsuccessfully flirted in Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum and Laura Dern actually dated and got engaged

that "ringworm" is a fungal infection and no actual worms are involved

that the Bermuda triangle isn't statistically more dangerous than almost any other place on the world's oceans per capita, the traffic there is just much higher.

that veterinarians kill themselves at rates 2.5 to 3.5 times the general population, due in part to online trolling and threats from pet owners who blame them for the death of a pet, and easy access to lethal medicines

Stephen King sells the rights to some of his short stories for just $1, allowing aspiring filmmakers and students to adapt them into movies. This arrangement is known as the Dollar Baby.

about the mysterious worldwide epidemic of Encephalitis lethargica. The disease attacks the brain, leaving some victims in a statue-like condition, speechless and motionless. Between 1915 and 1926, 500,000 dead or incapacitated from it. It disappeared as mysteriously as it came in to the world.

that there's a rare turtle in Australia that was discovered in 1990, when Steve Irwin found it in a crocodile catching trip. It was named after him.