funny

WTF Fun Fact 12731 – Cute Aggression

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Have you ever seen a chubby baby face or a fluffy bunny and thought about snuggling it to pieces? It’s called “cute aggression,” and it isn’t typically as violent as it sounds.

According to Forbes, “cute aggression” was first described by Yale researchers in 2015. It’s “actually pretty common and can encompass behaviors such as wanting to bite, nibble, squeeze, or smoosh the face of something extremely adorable.” In addition, “studies have long shown that people who view photos of tiny, adorable things often react with extremely aggressive language.”

Don’t worry – no one gets hurt

The good news is that no matter how many times we say “I just want to smush her cheeks” or “I want to cuddle that kitten SO HARD,” those words don’t actually translate into action. For the most part, we lay off the smushing and potentially painful cuddles. (Of course, toddlers and cats may not agree – they always act like a snuggle is about to kill them.)

Research into “cute aggression” was done by Katherine Stavropoulos, an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside. She’s also a licensed clinical psychologist and neuroscientist. Stavropoulos looked at the brain’s electrical activity as subjects viewed images of really cute creatures. She published the findings in an article titled “‘It’s so Cute I Could Crush It!’: Understanding Neural Mechanisms of Cute Aggression,” in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

Forbes states that “the new study backs up the hypothesis that these feelings may serve as a mechanism to prevent people from being overwhelmed (and thus incapacitated) by cute things. It’s basically what happens to your brain when you just can’t even.”

“Cute aggression” is all in your head

In other words, the electrical activity in our brains showed that we have a physiological reaction to cuteness. And it can be A LOT. In order to make sure we don’t actually smother baby animals (which were deemed to be the cutest things overall, producing the biggest neurological response), we use “violent” language to talk about snuggling things really hard.

That’s just how our brains respond to a cuteness overload.

Forbes also revealed that “Journalists have noted that this phenomenon is universal and that most languages have a word for this type of feeling – the Filipino language Tagalog, for example, has a word Gigil, which means gritting your teeth and trembling in an overwhelming situation.” In addition “Other studies have shown that cuteness aggression is felt far more acutely when people can’t physically touch the cute thing they’re seeing.”

That would help explain all the squealing when we see cute animal videos online. – WTF fun facts

Source: “The Science Behind Why You Want To Destroy Something Beautiful” — Forbes

WTF Fun Fact 12730 – Male Kangaroos Flex Their Biceps

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Male kangaroos and male humans have something in common – they flex their biceps to impress females. Researchers showed that male western grey kangaroos use their biceps both for combat and to compete for the ladies.

The Conversation interviewed kangaroo expert Rod Wells, who said that bigger biceps might mean an “additional advantage from either females finding big forelimbs sexy or alternatively the males which win the right to access the females are then strong enough to overpower any unwilling female.”

We’re not impressed by that last part.

Kangaroos have long been a symbol of strength. According to Smithsonian Magazine: “The Royal Australian Air Force used a boxing kangaroo starting in 1891. For a while, kangaroos would fight men in boxing rings. And, in fact, a male kangaroo biceps are a lot more impressive than you might think.”

Fighting and flexing kangaroos are a new concept to some of us. For example, in 2017, an Australian snapped a photo of a particularly jacked kangaroo he came across while taking his dog for a walk. While its musculature is not super common, it brought attention to the fact that kangaroos can get ripped.

According to Men’s Health: “Jackson Vincent, a 27-year-old gardener in Australia, was walking his dog Dharma on his grandmother’s property near Boodjidup Creek when he spotted the massive ‘roo. He said he’s seen kangaroos on the land since he was a kid, but few that have been that large, according to the Sun. The ‘roo was standing in the creek nearly fully submerged, and as Vincent started to take photos, it started to come at him.”

While we’re smart enough not to approach a wild animal we don’t know much about, we plan to be extra careful with kangaroos from now on. If you’re not convinced, you may want to check out the video below and watch them kick each other’s butts – it’s quite a sight!

– WTF fun facts

Source: “It’s Not Just Men Who Flex Their Biceps at Women—Kangaroos Do, Too” — Smithsonian Magazine

WTF Fun Fact 12720 – Let Them Eat Cake

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We’ll spare you some of the legal jargon, but we did actually read the 51-page judgment of an Irish court declaring that the bread used by restaurant chain Subway is now basically considered a confectionary in Ireland.

It wasn’t exactly riveting, but it was enlightening. And to summarize – it all had to do with paying taxes. Otherwise, we doubt Ireland would have bothered to consider it any more closely. And no one is saying you can’t call it bread – the judgment is only referring to how the bread is categorized for tax purposes.

This started when an Irish Subway franchisee, Bookfinders Ltd. filed a suit claiming that they were due a refund for value-added tax (VAT) payments between January 2004 and December 2005.

Their argument hinged on 2 paragraphs of the Value Added Tax Act of 1972, which described which goods and services should have VAT added to them. Bookfinders claimed that the majority of their goods fell into the category requiring a 0% rate (rather than the 13.5% they had paid).

That category includes: “chocolates, sweets and similar confectionary (including glacé or
crystallised fruits), biscuits, crackers and wafers of all kinds, and all other confectionary and bakery products whether cooked or uncooked, excluding bread…”

And “bread” is specifically defined as “food for human consumption manufactured by baking dough composed exclusively of a mixture of cereal flour and any one or more of the ingredients mentioned in the following subclauses in quantities not exceeding the limitation, if any, specified for each ingredient…”

To spare you more jargon, we’ll just say that the subclause in question is the one that says that in order to be considered bread, the weight of any fat, sugar, or “bread improver” cannot exceed 2% of the weight of the flour included in the dough.

It actually gets pretty complicated since there are different tax rates for different items and part of the argument is about averaging out tax rates, how tax rates might differ for businesses offering primarily take-out goods, and whether the temperature of the food makes a difference when it comes to taxing it.

This might be the very best (and by best we mean absurd) sentence: “They [Bookfinders] also submitted that the 1972 Act breached the principle of legal certainty by making the difference between ambient air temperature and the temperature of the food central to their VAT classification.”

Anyway, in the end, the fact that Subway’s bread had too much sugar in it (5 times as much as allowed by the tax code), means it is not considered bread for tax purposes.

Subway was pretty miffed at the implication that their bread was not bread, saying:

“Subway’s bread is, of course, bread. We have been baking fresh bread in our restaurants for more than three decades and our guests return each day for sandwiches made on bread that smells as good as it tastes.”

Our favorite commentary on the matter is this Tweet:

If anything, people got a warning that their sandwich bread had a lot of sugar in it, but there doesn’t seem to be much proof that anyone cared. — WTF fun facts

Source: “For Subway, A Ruling Not So Sweet. Irish Court Says Its Bread Isn’t Bread” — NPR

WTF Fun Fact 12718 – Crickets Can Tell You The Temperature

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Let’s get one thing out of the way up front. While we call the method of measuring temperature using cricket chirps “Dolbear’s law,” the idea was first laid out in 1881 by Margarette W. Brooks. Her report “Influence of temperature on the chirp of the cricket” was published in Popular Science Monthly, it just wasn’t noticed until after Amos Dolbear published an 1897 article called “The Cricket as a Thermometer” 16 years later.

Regardless, it’s known as Dolber’s law, and it states that there is a connection between the air temperature and the rate at which crickets chirp. And it’s accurate for the field cricket within about 1 degree Fahrenheit.

It’s kind of like counting the seconds between lightning strikes and thunder, except way more inconvenient.

However, it is true that crickets chirp more speedily as the weather warms up. Dolbear realized this because crickets chirp consistently – that makes it possible to use the numbers in an equation.

In the original paper, Dolbear said you can get the approximate temperature in degrees Fahrenheit based on the times a cricket chirps in 1 minute – but you have to do some more math.

T_{F}=50+\left({\frac {N_{{60}}-40}{4}}\right).
In other words, T = 50+[(N-40)/4]
T = temperature
N = number of chirps per minute

If you want a shortcut for Celcius, you can use the number of chirps in 8 seconds and add 5.

Of course, there are many types of crickets, and Dolbear realized they each had a different rate of chirping. So he created new equations for other species. The problem for us is that we have to know which type of cricket we’re dealing with.

In fact, the common field cricket really isn’t the best cricket to use since its age, and whether it’s mating season can also affect the speed at which they chirp (so they’re not entirely consistent). But they’re probably good enough for a quick experiment. –WTF fun facts

Source: “How to Use Crickets to Calculate Temperature” — Thought Co.

WTF Fun Fact 12709 – The Josh Fight

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It all started with a guy named Josh Swain who found a bunch of other Josh Swains on social media. Then it grew to encompass all Joshes. Now, anyone with a pool noodle and a good sense of humor can show up.

It’s The Josh Fight.

The Josh Fight is a now-annual event held in Lincoln, Nebraska (since that’s where the coordinates that the first Josh randomly picked out led people). The whole city is now in on the fun and the second annual The Josh Fight in 2022 had food trucks, games, and the traditional pool noodle fight. (Only soft, flexible pool noodles are allowed.)

Instead of getting out of hand in a bad way, the Joshes of the world really stepped up, crowning 5-year-old Josh Vinson Jr. as the Ultimate Josh. He returned to successfully defend his title.

According to Complex: “The event isn’t just for fun. With the pool noodle fight, the group raised almost $21K for Omaha’s Children’s Hospital and Medical Center. Some of those funds will be given to the Joshua Collinsworth Memorial Foundation. The Josh Cellars wine label also said it will match the same funds.”

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Hundreds of People Named Josh Once Again Gathered in Nebraska for Pool Noodle Fight to Select the No. 1 Josh” — Complex

WTF Fun Fact 12708 – Parents Sue For Grandchildren

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In a story that raised eyebrows around the world, a couple in India is telling their son and daughter-in-law that waiting six years for a grandchild is just too long (or at least long enough).

Sanjeev Ranjan Prasad and Sadhana Prasad paid for an education in the U.S. so their son could become a pilot, bought him a luxury car, and financed his lavish wedding and overseas honeymoon. And now they are looking for payback in the form of a grandchild to dote on.

The couple’s lawyer, Arvind Srivastava, seems to understand: “I feel very sorry for them because I am also an Indian and I can understand their pain,” he said. “This is an Indian parent thing.”

There are probably plenty of prospective grandparents around the world who can sympathize with the disappointment, but it’s the lawsuit (and the accompanying feeling of entitlement) that is…let’s say…puzzling.

They seem to feel that the money was an investment in their own child so they could get something back – in the form of a grandchild. They’ve expressed sadness, embarrassment, and now a bit of litigious rage that the couple seems to have no interest in having a baby after six years. And they seem to think that they are now owed $650,000 for the disappointment and humiliation they have endured.

The deal is that the young couple can now take a year to produce the heir or pay up, and a northern Indian court is overseeing the case (which, according to most legal scholars, will go nowhere).

But regardless of whether or not the case just goes away, it’s raising a debate about what kids owe their parents, legally and spiritually.

According to the NYT: “In the Hindu faith, as in other traditions, children have a duty to repay a moral debt to their parents by taking care of them in their old age. Having grandchildren is also seen as necessary to carry forward a family’s lineage and help one’s parents achieve enlightenment.”

Here’s an interview with the parents involved:

– WTF fun facts

Source: “No Grandchild? Six Years After Son’s Wedding, These Parents Are Suing” — The New York Times

WTF Fun Fact 12707 – The Role Of Goats In Argan Oil

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Maybe you’ve heard of argan oil. It’s very trendy in skin and hair products and the oil is quite expensive. It comes from the nuts of Argania trees, which are found in Morocco.

But argan oil isn’t so easily harvested from these nuts. In order to make the oil easier to harvest, you generally have to wait for the nut to pass through the digestive tract of a local mountain goat first. So, yes, what we mean here is that the nuts are eaten by goats, softened by their digestive tracts, pooped out, and THEN gathered by people for creating argan oil.

Of course, there are other ways of harvesting (humans doing the hard work of peeling them) and you’ll find many companies insisting that their argan oil comes from goat-free nuts. In those cases, the goats end up being a nuisance (and all because people are squeamish).

But frankly, it’s hard to know for sure how the nuts get into human hands. And it doesn’t really matter since the oil has no traces of goat poop in it by the time it gets to you.

The other fascinating thing about the mountain goats that helped launch the argan oil industry is that they became talented tree climbers precisely because the Argania trees bear fruit. There’s not much fruit on the ground in Morocco for goats, especially in summer. Once the goats eat all the low-hanging fruit, they have no other choice than to head upward.

While there are other goats around the world that climb trees, many of the pictures we see of multiple goats in trees are probably Moroccan mountain goats getting their fruity dinners.

And because they’re goats, they end up eating the nuts as well. Since they can’t digest those, the nuts end up on the ground later on (via poop mostly, but some goats will spit them out after trying to chew them). – WTF fun facts

Source: “Tree goats” — CBS News

WTF Fun Fact 12704 – The World’s Oldest Wine

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It turns out we’ve always loved fermenting grapes!

The evidence is an archaeological find around 20 miles away from Tbilisi, Georgia (the country!). Amidst low, mud-brick houses, there is a mound called Gadachrili Gora where Stone Age farmers lived around 8,000 years ago. Archaeologists found pottery decorated with grapes and a pollen analysis conducted on the surrounding hillsides found evidence that grape vines were grown there. (It turns out we’ve always liked to draw grapes on things as well!)

In a 2017 paper published in PNAS, called “Early Neolithic wine of Georgia in the South Caucasus,” an international team of archaeologists laid out the proof that the people who lived around Gadachrili Gora were likely the world’s earliest vintners. And while we could have guessed the area, it was hard to believe how early in human history people were producing, storing, and enjoying wine on a large scale – since 6000 BCE! We were still prehistoric and used stone and bone tools (hopefully not while drinking).

National Geographic explained the evidence and talked to the archaeologists involved in the dig (which began in the 1960s but was only finished up recently):

“When the samples were analyzed by University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Patrick McGovern, he found tartaric acid, a chemical “fingerprint” that shows wine residues were present in fragments of pottery from both sites.

Combined with the grape decorations on the outside of the jars, ample grape pollen in the site’s fine soil, and radiocarbon dates from 5,800 B.C. to 6,000 B.C., the chemical analysis indicates the people at Gadachrili Gora were the world’s earliest winemakers. (Tipplers at a Chinese site called Jiahu were making fermented beverages from a mixture of grains and wild fruit a thousand years earlier.)

Because they didn’t find many grape seeds or stems preserved in the village’s soil, archaeologists think the wine was made in the nearby hills, close to where the grapes were grown.

“They were pressing it in cooler environments, fermenting it, and then pouring it into smaller jugs and transporting it to the villages when it was ready to drink,” says University of Toronto archaeologist Stephen Batiuk, who co-directed the joint expedition alongside archaeologist Mindia Jalabdze of the Georgian National Museum.” – WTF fun facts

Source: “Oldest Evidence of Winemaking Discovered at 8,000-Year-Old Village” — National Geographic

WTF Fun Fact 12701 – Like A Fish Out Of Water

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We may not all love bees, but we can’t live without them since they pollinate the crops that make the food we eat (among other integral ecological roles). That makes protecting them integral to our future.

In California, that means considering them “fish” for conservation purposes.

The law is a weird thing sometimes. In this case, it required some creative thinking in order to make sure bees got protected status under the California Endangered Species Act (CESA).

Others had argued that the Act protects only “birds, mammals, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and plants” – in other words, not insects like bees. They won the original court case, but it was just overturned by a Sacramento Court of Appeal.

According to Reuters:

“While ‘fish’ is ‘commonly understood to refer to aquatic species, the term of art employed by the Legislature … is not so limited,’ Associate Justice Ronald Robie wrote for the appeals court.
CESA itself does not define “fish,” but the law is part of the California Fish and Game Code. The code’s definition includes any ‘mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate (or) amphibian,’ Robie wrote. All those categories ‘encompass terrestrial and aquatic species,’ and the state legislature has already approved the listing of at least one land-based mollusk, the opinion said.
‘Accordingly, a terrestrial invertebrate, like each of the four bumblebee species, may be listed as an endangered or threatened species,’ Robie wrote, joined by Acting Presiding Justice Cole Blease and Associate Justice Andrea Lynn Hoch.'”

The case is Almond Alliance of California et al. v. Fish and Game Commission et al, Xerces Society For Invertebrate Conservation et al, intervenors; California Court of Appeal, Third Appellate District, No. C093542.

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Bees are ‘fish’ under Calif. Endangered Species Act – state court” — Reuters