WTF • Fun • Fact    ( /dʌb(ə)lˌju/  /ti/   /ef/ • /fʌn/ • /fækt/ )

     1. noun  A random, interesting, and overall fun fact that makes you scratch your head and think what the...

WTF Fun Facts 12584 – Largo di Torre Argentina

Largo di Torre Argentina is a popular Roman tourist destination. It holds a great deal of ancient history, but that’s not why everyone goes. Many people come to see the cats. There are dozens of them climbing and napping on the ancient ruins, and while no one is supposed to feed them, you can always find cans of cat food nearby.

The location is crumbling at an alarming rate, so Rome has recently made some renovations. After all, it does hold the site of Julius Caesar’s murder by members of the Roman Senate.

Luxury fashion house Bvlgari will pay around $1.1 million to clean the ruins and build walkways through the site. Before this, people could only look down into the ruins from the street. We’re not sure how the cats feel about all this, but we will guess “cranky.” Many are not fond of people.

You might wonder how such an important historical location ended up in such disrepair in the first place, but that’s the price of expanding a city. The site was largely lost until Italian dictator Benito Mussolini set out to unearth ancient Rome and tie his dictatorship into the lore of the Roman Empire as part of a propaganda effort. They found four temples and part of the Theater of Pompey, the site of the Roman senate.

During World War II, the Largo di Torre Argentina became neglected once again, and Rome lacked the funding to restore it until recently.

And don’t worry about the cats – the feline colony is protected by the laws of the State and the Municipality. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Site Where Julius Caesar Was Stabbed Will Finally Open to the Public” — Smithsonian Magazine

WTF Fun Fact 12583 – How California Got Its Name

California is named after a 16th-century Black Queen of an island of women. The only catch is that she’s fictional.

Real or not, she’s still the inspiration behind the state’s name.

Queen Calafia was a character in Castillian author Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s Las Sergas de Esplandián, an early 16th-century adventure-romance novel. A Black warrior queen, Calafia ruled a mythical island called California inhabited only by Black women.

Calafia was also a fierce queen with quite an arsenal – armor made of fish bones, weapons made of gold, and an army of griffins (because, hey, why not?).

Needless to say, many people are surprised by this origin story. At the very least, it was rare for a man during the Renaissance to write in such a triumphant way about a woman, much less a Black woman. There is no sense of racial inferiority (which was a common trope) in her story.

So how did an American state come to be named after a mythical character?

Well, the novel was so famous in Spain that when conquistadors arrived on the tip of what is now the Baja Peninsula, they thought they had found the mythical island of California. So that’s what they called the whole area.

And while the name stuck, Calafia has been largely forgotten until recently.

An excerpt from the book reads:

“Now I wish you to know about the strangest thing ever found anywhere in written texts or in human memory. […] I tell you that on the right-hand side of the Indies there was an island called California, which was very close to the region of the Earthly Paradise. This island was inhabited by black women, and there were no males among them at all, for their life style was similar to that of the Amazons. The island was made up of the wildest cliffs and the sharpest precipices found anywhere in the world. These women had energetic bodies and courageous, ardent hearts, and they were very strong. Their armor was made entirely out of gold—which was the only metal found on the island—as were the trappings on the fierce beasts that they rode once they were tamed. They lived in very well-designed caves. They had many ships they used to sail forth on their raiding expeditions and in which they carried away the men they seized and whom they killed in a way about which you will soon hear. On occasion, they kept the peace with their male opponents, and the females and the males mixed with each other with complete safety, and they had carnal relations, from which unions it follows that many of the women became pregnant. If they bore a female, they kept her, but if they bore a male, he was immediately killed. The reason for this, inasmuch as it is known, is that, according to their thinking, they were set on reducing the number of males to so small a group that the Amazons could easily rule over them and all their lands; therefore, they kept only those few men whom they realized they needed for their race not to die out.“

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Our Origin Story’: Queen Calafia Returns to California in New Theatre Production” — KQED

WTF Fun Fact 12582 – Blessing a Sneeze

When someone sneezes, it seems rude not to acknowledge it in some way. In fact, saying “bless you” or “God bless you” has become a part of modern etiquette.

But where did this come from?

Most people have been told that the habit comes from the belief that the soul momentarily separates from the body during a sneeze. Therefore, “bless you” is a way of sending your best wishes their way in case the soul doesn’t come back. Some also believe that blessing the soul prevents it from being snatched up by evil spirits while it was disconnected from the body during a sneeze.

But it’s likely that the origin of “God bless you” goes back to 590 AD when a plague was ravaging Europe. Sneezing was often the first sign that someone was ill (and while they didn’t realize it at the time, it was also the way the plague spread). In order to bless the would of those who may get deathly ill, Pope Gregory the Great commanded that sneezing people be given a quick blessing.

While “God bless you” and “bless you” go back to the 6th century, the acknowledgment of a sneeze goes back even further – by hundreds of years. Roman author Pliny the Elder wrote in his 77 AD Natural History:

“Why is it that we salute a person when he sneezes, an observation which Tiberius Caesar, they say, the most unsociable of men, as we all know, used to exact, when riding in his chariot even?”

The superstition predates the pope, but Pliny offers no explanation as to why the sneeze was acknowledged.

Of course, there are secular ways of acknowledging a sneeze as well. Those who don’t believe in disembodied souls can keep it polite with a quick “gesundheit.”

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Why We Feel Compelled to Say ‘Bless You’ When Someone Sneezes” — The New York Times

WTF Fun Fact 12581 – The Shrinking Human Brain

All jokes about human intelligence these days aside, it’s true that humans have smaller brains than ever before.

The human brain has been shrinking in size for tens of thousands of years (so we can’t blame video games or reality TV or politics). According to anthropologists, the brain volume of Homo sapiens has decreased by about 10% over the last 40,000 years.

We’re used to hearing about the increasing size of brains as humans evolved, but that is a trend that goes back millions of years in human evolution.

And to be fair, our brains may be smaller today, but they are still about 3x bigger than other primates based on body weight.

Anthropologists estimate the brain sizes of our ancestors by measuring the amount of room in the skull. The oldest ancestors of humans had brains the size of a modern chimp’s. The skull cavity could hold about 1.5 cups (to put it in quantities that are easier to picture).

Then, between 2 and 4 million years ago, craniums (and therefore brains) got bigger, distinguishing humans from other primate ancestors. They could hold about 2 cups.

If you go back “just” 1 million years (to our ancestors Homo erectus), their brains could hold 4 cups. And Neanderthals and Homo sapiens (going back about 130,000 years) had craniums that could hold 6 cups.

So if you go back far enough, you see that brain size did increase, up to a point. After that, they began shrinking in size.

Today, the average human brain holds around 5.7 cups. But why? We can only make assumptions.

For starters, human bodies got smaller once the Ice Age was over, and so did skulls and brains.

But Discover Magazine claims that the most convincing hypothesis comes from anthropologist Brian Hare, which he calls “survival of the friendliest.”

This hypothesizes that Stone Age societies valued different, more domestic traits – specifically, ones that made humans more social. Social behavior is regulated by hormones that also affect brain and body size. So when we selected for these behaviors (by breeding with more social humans), we also chose genes that made bodies and brains smaller.

A reduction in skull and brain size isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It may be that we needed less brain volume as we began to live in collectives, cooperate, and rely on our communities. In other words, now we share the burden of survival with others, so our brains don’t have to hold every element of survival. – WTF fun facts

Source: “The Human Brain Has been Getting Smaller Since the Stone Age” — Discover

WTF Fun Fact 12580 – African Elephant Poop

Elephants are the largest land mammals in the world. So it’s logical to believe that they would do everything in a big way. We just didn’t realize HOW big.

Looking at the facts, it makes sense that an adult African elephant could produce over 300 pounds of poop per day. Males can grow up to 13 feet high and weigh 7 tons (that’s 14,000 pounds!). Females weigh about half of that.

It’s no surprise that they produce so much poop, considering how much they eat and how their digestive systems work. African elephants eat about 4-7% of their body weight in grasses, herbs, fruit, plants, and trees each day. And that vegetarian diet must be doing something right because they can live to be around 70 years old.

Of course, that same diet is also hard to process, so most of it comes out in their waste products. The rest is absorbed for nutrients while they sleep.

And sometimes, those elephants need those calories when they’re on the move – they can walk up to 120 miles a day (but their average is closer to 15 miles). If necessary, they can also use that energy to run. In fact, an elephant can run much faster than a human, reaching speeds of 40mph!

But back to the fact at hand. Elephants produce about 300 pounds of dung per day. So much that 1) we’re glad we don’t have to clean it up, and 2) some animals (such as dung beetles and specific monkey species) have evolved to eat this feces. The latter makes sense since much of the food is not digested and would still contain some nutrients.

 – WTF fun facts

Source: “African Elephant Facts” — Elephants for Africa

WTF Fun Fact 12579 – Viruses Aren’t Living Things

There’s really not that much disagreement in the scientific community – in fact, what constitutes being “alive” is more of a philosophical question. But at some point, it’s both helpful and fascinating to think about what really counts as “being alive.”

In many ways, viruses simply don’t make the cut, even though we talk about them as if they were alive. But that’s because we tend to use metaphors of living things to describe them.

Why not? Well, here are a few reasons:
– They cannot carry out any metabolic processes on their own (generally the definition of being alive)
– They cannot reproduce on their own, only replicate within a host cell.
– They don’t have ribosomes (in fact, they don’t even have cells)
– They cannot produce energy or control the environment in which they exist (only replicate in it).
– They cannot independently form proteins from messenger RNA
– They’re just so darn small (which, to be fair, is not a big part of the argument but something to consider).

In the end, they are just a jumble of protein and RNA that needs a spark of life from somewhere else to do anything at all.

Of course, there are some arguments to the contrary. Those who believe viruses should be considered living things point out the following:
– They have genomes
– They can evolve
– Under the right conditions, they do have the ability to reproduce (even if it’s not on their own)

So perhaps viruses are in between somewhere, only being alive when they can reproduce. That’s something to consider, but only for fun really, since the answer won’t help us solve our viral issues. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Are Viruses Alive?” — The University of Texas at Austin Biodiversity Center

WTF Fun Fact 12578 – Mike the Headless Chicken

It’s hard – and gross – to think about, but the phrase “like a chicken with its head cut off” originates in a biological oddity of chickens.

You see, you can decapitate a chicken and it will continue to run. They aren’t zombies (because they’re not actually dead yet), it’s just that the animal’s spinal cord circuits still hold residual oxygen. It’s kind of a sick biological joke that the most decapitated animal has this odd feature if you think about it.

The circuits that still have oxygen to operate no longer have a brain to control them, so the spinal cord’s signals go to the legs, causing the chicken to run (typically for just a few seconds).

This is pretty rare since chickens are typically laying down when this happens, but it has certainly happened.

Now, Miracle Mike the Headless Chicken (as he was dubbed by Life Magazine in the 1940s) is a different story. Poor Mike’s owner left a tiny part of his brain stem intact with a messy chop.

On September 10, 1945, Lloyd Olsen was beheading chickens on his farm, and got a runner, but was surprised to see that he didn’t keel over immediately.

Olsen’s great-grandson, Troy Waters, told the BBC years later that his grandparents put the chicken on the screen porch for the night and were shocked to wake up and see “The damn thing was still alive,” according to Waters.

But this isn’t some sketchy legend. Headless Mike toured the country, drawing slack-jawed audiences at carnivals. It was photographed and recorded by the news in various towns and in Life Magazine.

The family had their share of interlopers who insisted on coming to see Mike but also got plenty of hate mail for not just putting him out of his (or perhaps just their) misery. – WTF fun facts

Source: How Mike the Chicken Survived Without a Head — Encyclopedia Brittanica

WTF Fun Fact 12577 – Catgut strings

While it may sound like many cats were harmed in the making of music, strings were once may from the entrails of animals (just probably not cats). The practice goes all the way back to Greek mythology (but later, was anything but a myth).

The Greek god Hermes was said to have strung his lyre with cow entrails. And in mythological fashion, he stole those cows from his brother Apollo who he then lulled into blissful acquiescence with his playing (to the point that Apollo gave him his entire herd).

Meanwhile (or, probably, prior), in Egypt, instruments strings were being strung with a material called catgut. The Egyptians loved their cats so much it’s unlikely they used cats (and that catgut is more than a bad translation), but the name stuck. And so did using animal intestines for string, especially later on for violins. Much later, a similar method of creating string from intestines was used for tennis rackets.

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, “catgut is tough cord made from the intestines of certain animals, particularly sheep, and used for surgical ligatures and sutures, for the strings of violins and related instruments, and for the strings of tennis rackets and archery bows.”

They continue with a little history lesson:

“The ancient Egyptians and Babylonians and the later Greeks and Romans used the intestines of herbivorous animals for much the same purposes. The origin of the term catgut is obscure; it is not known if the intestines of cats were ever put to such uses.”

Then some gruesome detail that animal lovers should probably skip:

“The intestinal tubes (called runners) of sheep are washed, cut in ribbons, and scraped free of mucous membrane and circular muscle tissue. The ribbons are placed in an alkaline bath for several hours and then stretched on frames. While still moist they are removed, sorted by size, and twisted into cords of varying thickness. A smoothing and polishing operation completes the process.“

Professional string players can still buy catgut strings and they have a lot of influence over sound quality. But the pros can “go vegan” with their strings, using ones with a synthetic core that sounds much like catgut strings and are also longer-lasting. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Are Violin Strings Really Made of Cat Guts?” — SHAR Music

WTF Fun Fact 12576 – We’re Fools About April Fools’ Day

With all the pranks and accompanying joy (and trauma!), you’d think we’d have a solid way of tracing the origins of April Fools’ Day back to its source. But it’s unclear who the original “fools” were.

It seems safe to say that the holiday is in some way tied to the Spring equinox, a time of celebration and merriment for many. But what’s with all the pranks? Are we still celebrating the ancient Roman festival of Hilaria with a 21st-century twist? Or perhaps something closer to India’s Holi festival?

Or did something else happy on April 1 in the distant past spark interest in celebrating this day with hijinx?

Some believe its roots lay in France in 1582 when some were deemed foolish for not knowing about the switch from the Gregorian calendar to the Julian calendar and therefore celebrated the new year on April 1 instead of January 1.

What’s interesting is that different parts of the world have other stories about the day and its tradition, providing a clue that it goes back quite far and spread around the world before people began writing about it.

So if anyone tries telling you they know the origins of April Fools’ Day, just remember that no one really knows. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Who Were the First Pranksters? No Jokes Here—All About the Origin of April Fools’ Day!” — Parade Magazine