wtf fun fact

WTF Fun Fact 12975 – Italy’s Oldest College Graduate

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In 2020, 96-year-old Giuseppe Paterno became Italy’s oldest college graduate. In 2022, at age 98, he did it again by getting a Master’s degree in history and philosophy from the University of Palermo.

The background of Italy’s oldest college grad

According to Reuters (cited below), Paterno was born in 1923 and “grew up in a poor family in Sicily and despite his love of books and studying, he wasn’t able to go to university as a young man…Instead, he served in the navy during World War Two from the age of 20 and went on to be a railway worker.” He is the youngest of seven children.

He enrolled in the University of Palermo in 2017 to get an undergraduate degree in philosophy and history, which he achieved in 2020.

In an interview with The Guardian in 2020, Palermo said “I’ve finally realized my dream…Being able to study has always been my greatest aspiration, but my family wasn’t able to pay for my education. We were a large family and very poor.”

About his college goals, he told the paper: “I came out unscathed from the war and took a job working for the state railway service. I wasn’t enthused about my job, but I knew I had to do it because by that time I was married and had a family to support. At the same time, I had an overwhelming desire to dive into books and read, study and learn.”

Paterno’s lifelong learning goals

Paterno did try to go back to school and take evening classes at age 31 but wasn’t able to balance family life, work, and college at the time.

It wasn’t until his 90s that he was able to really make time to study.

In 2020, he said: “I’d wake up at seven to study. I’d use an old typewriter to complete my assignments. I’d rest in the afternoon and in the evening I’d study until midnight. My neighbours used to ask, ‘why all this trouble at your age?’ But they couldn’t understand the importance of reaching a dream, regardless of my age.”

However, COVID nearly thwarted his efforts as he was forced to enroll in online classes to finish his undergraduate degree. But he made it, saying: “It’s one of the happiest days of my entire life. I only wish my wife were here to see me. She died 14 years ago.”

That’s when he made plans to get his Master’s degree, which he received in June of 2022.

Now Italy’s oldest college graduate plans to use his beloved typewriter to write a novel. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Italy’s oldest student graduates again aged 98” — Reuters

WTF Fun Fact 12974 – The Sex Lives of Constipated Scorpions

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The Ig Nobel Prizes have been awarded to 10 unusual (or unusually unuseful) scientific research projects each year since 1991. While it’s all in good fun, we couldn’t help but do a double-take this year at one of the winners – a team that published a study on the sex lives of constipated scorpions.

Constipated scorpions have it rough

Solimary García-Hernández and Glauco Machado of the University of São Paulo in Brazil won the 2022 Ig Nobel in biology for trying to discern whether being constipated affects a scorpion’s sex life. (To be fair, we can’t help but think being constipated is kind of a bummer for any creature.)

According to an Associated Press story on the prizes, “Scorpions can detach a body part to escape a predator — a process called autotomy. But when they lose their tails, they also lose the last portion of the digestive tract, which leads to constipation — and, eventually, death, they wrote in the journal Integrated Zoology.”

“The long-term decrease in the locomotor performance of autotomized males may impair mate searching,” they wrote.

Ok, maybe constipated humans don’t have it so bad after all.

Why even study this?

So, this particular study came about in an interesting way. The paper’s lead author Solimary García-Hernández had long been studying the scorpion species Ananteris balzani.

This species has an interesting characteristic – they shed their tails to help them escape a predator.

According to Smithsonian Magazine (cited below): “It was a big surprise in 2015 when she, while working as part of a larger research team, found that Ananteris scorpions are capable of shedding their tails. “Autotomy”—the process of dropping a body part to escape a predator—was until then known to have evolved in only a handful of animal lineages like starfish, spiders and certain lizards.”

Ok, so we totally understand wanting to look more closely into that interesting fact, especially since it turns out that when lizards shed their tails, it can impact their ability to walk but doesn’t kill them. However, scorpions are different.

When Ananteris scorpions shed their tails, their digestive tract backs up with feces, and they get swollen and die within around 8 months.

That’s weird since animals don’t typically adapt in a way that’s fatal to them unless it somehow helps their species. In this case, the extra months likely give them more time to reproduce. And that’s where studying their sex lives comes in.

The sex lives of constipated scorpions

García-Hernández decided to monitor the post-tail life of these scorpions to see how tail loss impacted their ability to reproduce.

“The team then set up a series of matings between stump-tailed and intact scorpions. García-Hernández predicted that autotomized male scorpions would be less successful at mating than their fully endowed counterparts, since the tail plays an important role in their complicated mating ritual.”

Male scorpions use their tails both to show off to mates and during intercourse, so not having a tail should make mating difficult. However, it turns out they just used their stump and were just fine.

It was a different story for females, however.

According to Smithsonian, “when the team explored the reproductive costs paid by stump-tailed females, the story was different. They found that tailless females, while able to mate successfully, went on to have 20 percent fewer offspring than intact females.

The reason for this difference? The five-month scorpion pregnancy provides a lot of time for females to get more and more constipated, says García-Hernández. She hypothesizes that the buildup of feces caused by the loss of the anus is either toxic to the embryos or that the feces simply crowds out the developing scorplings. This latter hypothesis is supported by the fact that a severely constipated scorpion can weigh 30 percent more than it did before it lost its tail. By comparison, that’s equivalent to a 150 pound person gaining 45 pounds of poop weight.” — WTF fun facts

Source: “For Constipated Scorpions, Females Suffer Reproductively. Males, Not So Much.” — Smithsonian Magazine

WTF Fun Fact 12972 – Lonnie Johnson and the Super Soaker

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The tale of NASA engineer Lonnie Johnson and the Super Soaker is one of intelligence, perseverance, and creativity. And who knew the iconic sibling-drencher was invented by accident?!

Lonnie Johnson’s story

Johnson was born in Mobile, Alabama in 1949 to parents who supported his ambitions to find out how things worked. Even as a kid, he played with rockets (and nearly burned down the house trying to make rocket fuel on the stove one day).

By the time he was in high school, he was trying to build his own robots. Despite going to a segregated school, he found ways to excel in the sciences and won a 1968 science fair for a robot created out of scrap metal. However, despite the attention that would have normally earned a young inventor, the University of Alabama showed no interest in admitting a Black student. So Johnson attended Tuskegee University, graduating in 1975 with a degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s in nuclear engineering on an ROTC scholarship.

After university, Johnson joined the Air Force, and during his service he received his first patent for a “Digital Distance Measuring Instrument.” According to Biography.com (cited below): “Simply put, it was an early version of DVD-reading technology, an innovation he later called “’he big fish that got away’ because he did not pursue it further.”

Lonnie Johnson’s accidental invention of the Super Soaker

In 1979, Johnson was recruited by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In addition to his illustrious career in engineering (he was part of NASA’s Galileo mission that sent an unmanned spacecraft to Jupiter), he’ll likely be remembered for an invention that was largely an accident.

One day he was experimenting with new ideas for a refrigeration system that could use water instead of freon (which is hazardous). He happened to be in the bathroom at the time and hooked up a nozzle to the bathroom sink, accidentally shooting water across the room.

That’s when he realized it would make a great water gun toy. But it would be years before that toy would make it to shelves because Johnson rejoined the Air Force to help build B-52 stealth bombers in Nebraska.

The birth of the Super Soaker

At night, Johnson would work on his water gun, giving the first prototype to his 7-year-old daughter, Aneka. She quickly became the hit of the Air Force base with her new toy and Johnson knew it would do well in stores.

He was originally quoted $200K for the manufacturing of the first 1000 toys, which was more than he could afford. That meant he had to find a partner.

Biography.com explains that it was a company called Larami that helped Johnson launch the Super Soaker: “Larami put the first line of the gun, then known as the Power Drencher, on shelves in 1990. It was an instant hit, and after it was redesigned and rebranded Super Soaker the next year, sales went through the roof, with more than two million units sold in the summer of 1991.” — WTF fun facts

Source: “How Lonnie Johnson Invented the Super Soaker: The engineer tuned toy inventor gamed up the idea for the water gun while preparing for a NASA mission” — Biography.com

WTF Fun Fact 12971 – Tsundoku

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Do you love books? Do you buy them to display in your home? Plenty of us do! But do you actually read them all? Probably not. In this case, you may be interested to know there’s a word for that – at least a Japanese one. Tsundoku is a person who engages in collecting a lot of unread books.

But it’s not an insult. Book lovers just really like to be around books!

Does this sound like you?

The BBC (cited below) interviewed Prof Andrew Gerstle from the University of London about the phenomenon and the roots of the word in 2018.

“He explained to the BBC the term might be older than you think – it can be found in print as early as 1879, meaning it was likely in use before that. The word ‘doku’ can be used as a verb to mean ‘reading.; According to Prof Gerstle, the ‘tsun’ in ‘tsundoku’ originates in ‘tsumu’ – a word meaning ‘to pile up.'” (Like a tsunami of books?!)

The literal meaning of “tsundoku” is buying reading material and piling it up.

The first use of the phrase has been traced to a piece of satirical writing by writer Mori Senzo from 1870, who described a teacher who had lots of books he didn’t read.

“Curing” Tsundoku

Just because there’s a word for it doesn’t mean it’s problematic behavior. Books can be great conversation starters even when they’re sitting on shelves. They even serve as great decor.

Of course, spending money on something that goes unused can spell trouble for some people.

If you’re interested in “curing” yourself of this habit, you can always limit yourself to books that you’re immediately interested in reading, limit the amount of time a book sits in a pile before you read it or give it away, or give yourself a specific number of books you’re allowed to buy in a given period of time. And if you simply don’t have the space, you can always donate your books to someone else with tsundoku. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Tsundoku: The art of buying books and never reading them” — BBC

WTF Fun Fact 12969 – Manatees Fart to Swim

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Do you know a kid who loves to share fun facts about animals and just won’t stop telling you everything you never wanted to know about lizards or sharks or bugs? Well, it’s time to blow their minds with your superior animal knowledge and show them adults reign supreme in the world of truly fun facts. Manatees fart to swim.

Do manatees really fart to swim?

We’re totally serious. We even looked it up on Snopes because it seemed too good to be true.

While manatees are aquatic animals, they aren’t like fish, which can live underwater but also have something called a “swim bladder” to control their buoyancy. Instead, manatees need to float – and if you live in the water but need to stay atop it, you have three choices – be built to sit upon it (like a duck), tread water like your life depends on it (like a human), or have a mechanism that makes your body buoyant.

And since the animals we lovingly call “sea cows” eat about 100 pounds of vegetation a day, let’s just say staying perched upon a wave isn’t really an option for them. That’s why manatees developed a different mechanism to stay afloat. Farts.

Fart like your life depends on it

At Captain Mike’s Swimming with the Manatees in Crystal, Florida (whose website we’ve cited below), you’ll get a great explanation of how the fart propulsion actually works.

According to the experts who swim with the flatulent sea cows all day, all the vegetation they eat creates the same reaction in their bodies as it does in ours. Farts. Gas. Flatulence. Whatever you want to call it.

“For manatees, there is always enough gas in the body…The gas produced during digestion is stored in intestinal pouches ready for use in swimming,” note the experts.

And how does that lead to the ability to swim?

“The gas produced during digestion is lighter than water. So when the animals hold in a substantial amount of gas in intestinal pouches, they lower their overall density and float in water. On the contrary, releasing the gas from the body makes a manatee relatively denser than water and to be able to readily sink. That is why manatees fart to swim. For they have to continuously hold in enough gas in their bodies to be able to come to the surface to breathe. Then soon after, they have to fart in order to release some gas, become less buoyant, and sink underwater.”

Hold your breath

Manatees can actually hold their breath for up to 20 minutes (don’t try that one at home!). But rather than use the breath trick, they can use farts with a lot less effort.

So next time you’re in the pool, you can see how this works (without the farts – don’t use the farts). Take a big, deep breath, hold it, and then float on your back. Then release the air (from your nose or mouth, please) and notice that you sink a bit.

Then you can tell everyone around you to be grateful that you’re not a manatee. Otherwise, they would have seen a lot of bubbles from your backside. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Do manatees fart to swim?” — Swimming with the Manatees

WTF Fun Fact 12968 – Edible Burrito Tape

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Do you love burritos but hate the mess they make when they’re not expertly rolled into a magical self-sealing pocket? Well, edible burrito tape could be the weirdest invention you never knew you needed.

What’s the deal with edible burrito tape?

Leave it to college students to solve this age-old conundrum.

It turns out that a group of Engineering majors at Johns Hopkins taking a product design course have found a way to make your burritos delicious and more convenient.

According to TODAY (cited below), “The all-female team of Tyler Guarino, Rachel Nie, Marie Eric and Erin Walsh came together and decided to solve one of life’s most frustrating problems: preventing a burrito from unraveling and making a mess. Their solution: an edible tape that keeps all the delicious ingredients inside the tortilla instead of on your plate or lap.”

The first step was to investigate what made tape, in general, work well (turns out the answer is twofold – a backbone and an adhesive compound). The next step was to make those components edible.

“Tastee” Tape

Student Tyler Guarino told TODAY: “We tried tons of different combinations, and formulations and really did a lot of trial and error until we were able to get a product that was clear in color, tasteless, didn’t have a noticeable texture, but was still strong enough to hold a big fat burrito together.”

It took the women a few months of trial and error to figure out how to make a cookable, edible burrito tape. After that, they set about making it pleasant to eat (not just edible). That meant playing around with the taste and texture.

They decided on a final product that carried little to none of it’s own taste or texture so people could just enjoy their burritos. The product is known as Tastee Tape.

“You simply just peel the piece off of the sheet,” Guarino said. “You wet it to activate it, and then you apply it to your tortilla.” 

The students aren’t keen to share their recipe, however. They’re looking to patent it. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Johns Hopkins students develop edible tape to make burritos easier to eat” — TODAY

WTF Fun Fact 12967 – Bats and Tequila

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There’s a little-known but critical relationship between bats and tequila. In fact, without bats, we may not be able to create tequila at all!

How are bats and tequila connected?

If you’re a tequila fan, you probably know the crucial ingredient in the spirit is agave. This spiky plant is native to the desert regions of North and South America (but mostly Mexico). Agave nectar is also harvested to be used as a sweetener.

One of the many interesting things about the agave plant is that it has very few natural pollinators. (And you likely know that in order for plants to produce, they need to be pollinated by things like birds, bees, etc.)

The agave plant’s primary pollinator is bats. No bats, no agave. No agave, no tequila.

Is the tequila supply in danger?

To make matters even more complicated for agave plants, only a few species of bats are pollinators. These bats are being threatened by industrial farming and other threats to their natural habitats.

But while the bats and agave plants are increasingly threatened, our thirst for tequila has only gone up. According to NPR (cited below), the tequila industry has grown by 60% over the last decade. That means we need more agave plants than ever.

You might think that industrial farming would simply increase the amount of agave being grown, but it hasn’t worked out that way.

How do you solve a problem like agave?

NPR interviewed Micaela Jemison of Bat Conservation International, who said that the problem with commercial agave production is that agave stalks are harvested before they can reproduce. “That means no tasty pollen for hungry bats. And instead of plants that reproduce through bats spreading pollen from stem to stem, major tequila companies use cloned agave.”

If you only care about tequila, you might not think this is a big deal, but there are some major unintended consequences of handing a natural process over to a business.

“Growing genetically identical plants is easy and cheap for big companies, but cloned agave is vulnerable to fungus or disease that could wipe out entire crops. Bats can solve this problem by creating genetic diversity. Instead, their ecosystem has been disrupted. Fewer agave plants are allowed to flower and growers use powerful agrochemicals that can hurt the three kind of bats that feed on agave.”

The Mexican long-nosed bat and the lesser long-nosed bat are two of the major agave pollinators listed as endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and a third, the Mexican long-tongued bat, is a species of concern.

To help spread appreciation for the relationship between bats and tequila, the Tequila Interchange Project (which is made up of bartenders, scientists, industry consultants, and plain old tequila fans) is trying to promote Bat Friendly Tequila and Mezcal™. These approved brands give some of their proceeds to agave farmers who welcome the bats and help maintain their populations.

Bat-friendly tequila

The coalition notes that “Given that Tequila is a two billion USD a year industry, and that the economy of 40,000 families is linked to blue agaves (and to bats and other pollinators), it is in the best interest of all stakeholders, from producers to the government to the individual consumer and everyone in-between, to protect the future of tequila and mezcal agaves by adopting sustainable practices and protecting pollinators and genetic resources.”

According to the website, some of the bat-friendly brands include:
– Tequila 8
– Tequila Tapatio
– Tesoro de Don Felipe
– Siembra Valles Ancestral
– 7 Leguas
– Siembra Metl Cupreata
– TOCUZ Alto
– Don Mateo de la Sierra Cupreata
– Mezcal Vago Pechuga

— WTF fun facts

Source: “Bats And Tequila: A Once Boo-tiful Relationship Cursed By Growing Demands” — NPR

WTF Fun Fact 12966 – Yacouba Sawadogo

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Yacouba Sawadogo is a farmer – and an environmental hero. Hailing from Burkina Faso, he and his family helped stop the desertification of his village by planting their own forest.

But there’s so much more to his efforts and what we can learn from them about the importance of trees (and caring about the land around us).

Yacouba Sawadogo, the man who stopped the desert

Sawadogo’s village, in the northern part of Burkina Faso (in the Sahel Belt), suffered from a long drought from 1972 to 1984. The land was further impacted by overfarming and overgrazing by animals, and the resulting famine killed hundreds of thousands of people.

He used an ancient African technique called zai. Zai involves planting specific trees and enriching the soil, resulting in faster forest growth and improved soil quality. But his fellow farmers who saw him planting trees in the desert thought he was losing his mind.

He and fellow farmer Mathieu Ouédraogo proved them wrong.

“Yacoub Zai”

Sawadogo has no formal science education but used traditional knowledge to plant what is now a nearly 100-acre forest with 96 tree and 66 plant species. There are edible and medicinal plants in his forest, and it’s now home to previously endangered animals.

According to LifeGate (cited below), Yacouba Sawadogo recalled getting his nickname: “Thomas Sankara [President of Burkina Faso between 1983 and 1987] launched an appeal to develop initiatives to stop the advancement of the desert, and when he came to see my work, he asked me what technique I was using, and I told him it was zai. That’s why I’m also known as Yacoub Zai”.

Trouble in the forest

There is a 2010 documentary (The Man Who Stopped the Desert) about his life, and he won the Right Livelihood Award in 2018 and the Champions of the Earth award in 2020. However, Sawadogo was still fighting for the land until very recently.

In the early 2000s, the nearby city of Ouahigouya annexed the forest as part of a larger municipal land grab. Officials offered Sawadogo and each of his family members just 1/10th of an acre of the land and no other compensation. Then, people began erecting settlements on the plot.

Sawadogo began raising money in 2008 to buy the land and keep it safe. But the value of the land (thanks to his own efforts) made it extremely valuable – more than he could afford, even with fundraising. Finally, in 2021, the environmental arm of the local government erected a protective fence around the forest to preserve it, thanks to Sawadogo’s ongoing efforts. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Yacouba Sawadogo, the African farmer who stopped the desert” — LifeGate

WTF Fun Fact 12965 – The New Moon

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Have you ever heard that there was a new Moon only to look up at the sky and see no moon at all? Well, that’s because the Moon cycle is starting all over again.

Types of Moons

We obviously only have one Moon, but it goes through lots of phases. A “new” Moon is the opposite of a full Moon. During a full Moon, the sun is fully illuminating one side of the big ball. That’s what makes it glow so brightly in the night sky.

During the time when the Moon is “new,” we are seeing the side that is not illuminated by the sun. The Moon is still up there, but without the sun shining on it, we can’t see it in the night sky.

According to Farmer’s Almanac (cited below) “When the Moon is “new,” it’s located between the Earth and the Sun. In other words, the Moon is in line with the Sun, and the Sun and Earth are on opposite sides of the Moon. (Note that when the Moon is perfectly aligned in front of the Sun, it blocks out the Sun, giving us a solar eclipse.)”

Lunar cycles and the new Moon

The new Moon is the beginning of the lunar cycle. This lasts 29.5 days, and it’s the amount of time it takes for the moon to orbit the Earth.

The Moon cycle used to be used to measure months (each new moon signaled a new month).

Another fun fact: the new Moon always rises close to the time of sunrise.

And according to The Farmer’s Almanac:

“As the new Moon crosses the sky during the day, rising and setting around the same time as the Sun, it’s lost in the solar glare…The new Moon is also lit up from behind, showing us its dark side. It’s doubly invisible. New Moons generally can’t be seen with the naked eye.”

About a day (maybe two) after a new lunar cycle begins, you’ll be able to look up at the night sky and see a slim crescent off to the West after the sun sets. These crescent moons are often very bright. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Learn All About the New Moon” — Almanac