A Walmart store in Springfield, Missouri sells more Duct tape per person than any other place in the world. Springfield, Missouri is also considered the “Duct tape capital of the world”. Reference
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Petyl asks: Where does the word robot come from? The word robot was coined by artist Josef Čapek, the brother of famed Czechoslovakian author Karel Čapek. Karel Čapek was, among other things, a science fiction author before there was something officially known as science fiction, in subject matter along the same vein as George Orwell. He introduced the word in […]
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Komodo dragons, hammerhead sharks, Brahminy blind snakes, water fleas, certain types of bees, scorpions, wasps, and even some types of birds, among others, are capable of reproducing asexually, if necessary. References
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Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) once worked in advertising with his most famous ad campaign being one he created for Standard Oil who owned “Flit”, a popular insecticide of the day. The campaign slogan was “Quick, Henry, the Flit!”, which was more or less the “Got Milk?” or “Where’s the Beef?” of its day. Source
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Mirrors in ancient times were typically just small pools of collected water with the vessel containing the water having a dark color to it. As early as 6000 BC in Turkey people started manufacturing non-water mirrors. These early mirrors were usually made of obsidian, which is a naturally occurring volcanic glass. These pieces of obsidian would be cut appropriately and […]
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Earthworms can consume about 1/2 to 1 times their body weight every day. They also will eat just about any dead organic matter along with processing a variety of garbage and even tiny rocks that have organic matter on them, grinding the rocks into a paste that will enrich the soil. They are quite literally nature’s garbage disposals. Earthworms also […]
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Eric Marlon Bishop, better known as Jamie Foxx, picked this somewhat androgynous name due to the fact that early in his career he noticed that female comedians, also known as comediennes, often got picked to perform over male comedians at comedy clubs. Reference
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About 1.7 million tons of almonds are produced every year world-wide with California producing about 80% of the world’s almonds and near 100% of the U.S.’s commercial supply of almonds. Close to one million bee hives, which is about 50% of the U.S.’s total number of bee hives, are used to pollinate California’s almond groves. Source
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In the early days of the World Wide Web, one of the most popular alternatives to the Web (and indeed more popular for a time), Gopher, looked like it was destined to dominate the Internet. Then the University of Minnesota announced in 1993 that they would no longer let people use their Gopher server implementation for free. Instead, licensing fees […]
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The ancient Romans once used dolphins to help them fish. The dolphins were trained to drive fish towards fishermen. Once a large enough group of fish was near the fisherman, the dolphins would signal the fishermen to cast their nets. Fisherman in Santa Catarina, Brazil, still train dolphins to do this. Source
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