"What is a completely random fact?" –– This was today's burning question from Redditor Whispers_X, and it's proven to be a goldmine for anyone looking to bolster their trivia knowledge.
If you've ever wanted to know more about the Vikings (they had a particularly interesting way to assess the damage of certain wounds) or if you've simply got a thing for ants and how weird they are, then you're in luck.
"When a Viking..."
When a Viking received a gut wound, they would be fed strong onion soup. After some time, someone would smell the wounds elsewhere on their body. If they smelled like onions, there was damage to the intestines and no chance of saving them.
"Squid brains..."
GiphySquid brains are doughnut shaped, and their esophagus runs through it. If a squid eats something too big it can get brain damage.
"This means..."
Ants have a terminal velocity of 1.778 meters per second. This means they can fall from any hight and not harm themselves.
"After he got into the safes..."
At one point in time, all the details of the Manhattan project were in three safes, each locked with the code 27, 18, 28. Mathematicians would of course recognize these numbers as the euler number, 2.71828, a number that has wide importance in calculus.
Physicist Richard Feynman was able to crack into these safes after snooping around the secretary's desk and finding the number pi, 3.14159. After thinking, "Why would a secretary need to know the value of pi" he deduced it was probably a code so he tried it on the safes. After they didn't work he tried other numbers that mathematicians and physicists would use and sure enough, it worked.
After he got into the safes he thought to pull a prank on the director by leaving little notes in the safe to scare the director into thinking that a spy had gotten in.
"The original..."
The original Mr. Potato Head toy did not come with what we now consider the body. It was a set of parts with pins that children could stab into real potatoes.
"Once they identified..."
Crows hold grudges.
Once they identified the suspect in question, they would threaten them by diving down and swarming the person that they had felt threatened by years before.
"The ancestors..."
The ancestors of modern horses evolved in the Americas, then migrated to Asia and died out in the Americas due to an unsuitable climate. Thousands of years later, escaped Spanish colonial horses would repopulate their American plains with modern horses, who could now enjoy the perfect environment that their ancestors first evolved in all those years ago.
"A lot of flatworm species..."
A lot of flatworm species are hermaphroditic, meaning they have both male and female parts. When two of them meet up to mate, neither one of them wants to be the one screwed, so they do a little thing called Penis Fencing, where they go at each other with their "swords" out and try to stab the other one with it deep enough to inject sperm.
And female hyenas have pseudo-penises, which are larger than a male's authentic penis
"The last living member..."
The last living member of a species is called an "endling."
"The movie..."
The movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory from the '70s was financed by Quaker Oats to promote a new candy bar.
