Something interesting you learned recently

I love sharing and hearing new interesting ideas, so I thought I would make a thread for folks to spread their newly learned facts.

I'll start with a few things I heard in the past few days that I found pretty fascinating:

1. The species of banana that we all eat (pretty much the only variety available to most people around the world), the Cavendish banana, is endangered and may go extinct in the not so distant future.

2. Before 2012, Pizza Hut was the largest purchaser of kale in the US, but they only used it as garnish for their salad bars.

3. Conservative people tend to be higher in disgust sensitivity (they are more easily disgusted in general) than liberal people.

So: what have you learned recently?

 

I learned from research on the matter that despite there being a ban on their service, the medical community at large backs transgender rights when it comes to insurance covering hormone therapy or transformative surgery as a means of alleviating gender dysphoria. That could mean that the government is picking and choosing whose medical needs to cater to.

 

What I learned recently is:

1. The species of banana that we all eat (pretty much the only variety available to most people around the world), the Cavendish banana, is endangered and may go extinct in the not so distant future.

2. Before 2012, Pizza Hut was the largest purchaser of kale in the US, but they only used it as garnish for their salad bars.

3. Conservative people tend to be higher in disgust sensitivity (they are more easily disgusted in general) than liberal people.

 

The United States Once Planned On Nuking The Moon


If you presumed that the reasoning behind such an act was “because we can”, you are entirely correct. The United States had vague plans to nuke the moon in order to one-up the Soviet Union, who were perceived as leading the space race at the time.

The project was labeled “A Study of Lunar Research Flights” or “Project A119″ and was developed by the U.S. Air Force in the late 1950s. It was felt that this would be a relatively easy thing to do and would also boost public perception of America’s position in the space race.

According to one of the leaders of the project, physicist Leonard Reiffel, hitting the moon with an intercontinental ballistic missile would have been relatively easy to accomplish, including hitting the target with an accuracy of about two miles. This accuracy would have been particularly important as the Air Force wanted the resulting explosion to be clearly visible from Earth.

 

A group of butterflies is called a kaleidoscope.

 

There's no collective noun for a group of koalas moving around together because koalas don't move around in groups like dolphins or some birds. They are fairly solitary creatures.

 

I learned that australia is about to go and vote in a new prime minister this saturday.

 

Frogs and other amphibians are dying at an alarming rate, with 90 species confirmed extinct already, due to a fungus called batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. The spread of the fungus is likely due to human activity due to the handling and selling of frogs as pets or for other purposes

I'm reading a book called The Sixth Extinction, about..the sixth major mass extinction. But the only one primarily caused by humans

 

So is the fungus eaten by the frogs, spreading because there are no frogs because they're being caught and sold, and then the extra fungai not being eaten, kills the smaller grouped frogs?

 

• There are dwarf galaxies and said galaxies can go through larger galaxies and the likelihood of impact between stars in galaxy interactions is astronomically low.
• Given that about a 1/3 of their albums were essentially odes to psychedelia, I was surprised to learn that John Lennon and George Harrison did not enjoy their first LSD trips.

 

It's a skin fungus and easily transmittable, an infected frog can swim around in some water and then the other frogs that are native to the area can easily catch the fungus just from swimming in the same water. So infected frogs that have been transported and sold and then released back into the wild have essentially spread the fungus to all corners of the globe

 

Reactor 3 at Chernobyl continued to be in operation until 2000???? Dafuq

Anyone else know that, I just assumed they shut the whole place down after the accident in 1986, reactor 4 was the one that went kaboom


....but nup, still producing electriciy

Only just found out after reading up on the place last night after watching the New HBO series Chernobyl

 

Ha!

Thats Iminmyunderwear level funny

 

How do you confirm something is extinct though? We are sure for every square inch of the planet there arent any of these things

 

Can you be sure that an endangered species has gone extinct?

 

1) A DARPA scientist just patented the first room temperature superconductor. (possibly quite cheap to make)

2) Coincidently, congress just gave DARPA a billion and a half dollars to investigate every fucking alternative to silicon.

3) Another scientist just created the first Maxwell's Demon capable of making ice cubes without using energy.

4) Its pointless for me to continue, because nobody would be believe me.

 

I guess there isnt any way to ever know with 100% certainty

 

Are you certain? If nothing else, there's something ironically comforting about knowing nobody can screw you like yourself.

 

Melania Trump can speak 5 languages

 

• My former classmate hit a game winning shot in a basketball game in Canada.