Modern horses first evolved in North America, roaming from present day Idaho to Florida. They spread out and eventually migrated over the land bridge to Europe and Asia. 10,000 years ago they went extinct in America for unclear reasons and only returned with the Spanish in 1490s.

In the 2010s, PB&Js became very popular in the NBA, with many teams offering them in the locker room. In 2015, the Warriors hired a nutritionist who tried to outlaw the PB&J. The team had a mutinee, got their sandwiches back and the nutritionist lasted just 1 yr in the position.

NASA plans to send the ISS into the Pacific Ocean in 2031, when it’ll be replaced by private sector spacecraft. It’ll crash in Point Nemo, which is the point of ocean furthest at away from land where lots of space debris lands—3k miles from New Zealand and 2k from Antarctica.

The reason mug means face, as in "mug shot" dates (according to a popular theory) to 18th century Britain, where people loved "Toby jugs" which were mugs with a character's giant face on them. Therefore, mug became synonymous with face.

In the 1300s, sugar was imported to Britain by Arab and Venetian traders and cost about $650/kg (in today's dollars). It was so valuable that sugar was in the dowries of queens. Today, you can get almost 2kg at Walmart for $3.24.

April 11, 1954 is the most boring day in history since 1900, according to True Knowledge, an Internet database of 300 million facts. The most noteworthy things that happened were an election in Belgium and the birth of Turkish academic Abdullah Atalar.

Lance Bass was set to go into space on a Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station in 2002 as a part of a reality TV show and even completed cosmonaut training in Russia. The show fell through and its funders failed to pay Russia for his seat on the flight.

Different countries have their own generation names separate from boomer, gen z, etc. Norway has The Irony Generation (b. 60s/70s) and Generation obedient (80s/90s). South Africa has the Born Free (b. after apartheid) and the UK has Maggie’s Children (b. post Margaret Thatcher).

1 in 18 people have a third nipple or “polythelia.” It comes from the fact that we still have genes to produce multiple pairs of nipples (like other mammals) but they are normally inactivated. A mutation on one of those genes causes the extra nipple.

Until 2019, the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal was operated with floppy disks. Still now Boeing 747s use floppy disks, so do the animatronic musicians at Chucky Cheese and the San Francisco public transit system.

Baarle-Hertog/Nassau is a border town with a Medieval style checkerboard map where bits of the town are in Belgium and others are the Netherlands. The border winds all through town into houses and across roads and restaurant patios.

The Zone of Death is a 50 sq mile strip of Idaho where—a Michigan St. legal scholar argued—you could murder someone and not even face a trial because of a loophole in the Constitution. It’s the little part of Yellowstone National Park that is in Idaho and it’s uninhabited.

Several unmarried presidents appointed someone besides their wife as First Lady: Grover Cleveland’s sister Rose, James Buchanan’s niece Harriet Lane, John Tyler’s daughter-in-law Priscilla, and most recently Woodrow Wilson briefly had his daughter Margaret step in between wives.

The word avocado comes from the Aztec word for testicle. When the Spanish first encountered them the Aztecs thought of them as an aphrodisiac and called them āhuacatl, in Spanish it became aguacate.

Different parts of the world have different ways of doing tally marks, although the major ones use groups of 5. Languages that use Chinese characters form the character 正 (with 5 strokes), people in France, Brazil and others do four sides of a box then strike through it.

In the US, we have so many miles of aging water pipes beneath our feet that over the next 20 yrs, we need to spend $420 billion to replace/repair them. The big question is: what material is best? Plastic brings health concerns, but clear info on the topic can be hard to find.

One of my favorite places in the world to be is a market in Latin America. I wrote about one in Lima for SAVEUR's newsletter. Still I dream of the egg/papaya smoothie, stuffed rocoto pepper, coca leaves, and 1000 weird potatoes/veggies/fruits you can't find anywhere else.

In the future it could be possible to use gene therapy to replace missing photopigments in all eyes to give us this tetrachromacy? Giving our eyes a new 100 million K tv? The point here is that our sensory & perceptual scopes are deficient in comparison. x.com/anthonyjwallac…