Mankind has probed nearly 14 billion miles outward from Earth via Voyager I, but has only drilled 7.5 miles into Earth itself. – WTF Fun Facts
Source: https://www.space.com/17688-voyager-1.html & https://edition.cnn.com/2012/10/01/tech/mantle-earth-drill-mission/
Terry Davis was a schizophrenic programmer who spent 10 years of his life programming a DOS-like operating system called TempleOS. He did so because God told him to build a successor to the Second Temple in the form of an operating system. – WTF Fun Facts
Source: https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis
Towards the end of World War 2, the Japanese began to use pine oil from pine tree roots to fuel their airplanes. Heating the roots and distilling the pine oil took 12 hours and only resulted in ~4 percent crude fuel. – WTF Fun Facts
Source: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_fSaDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA258&lpg=PA258&dq=pine+tree+sap+japan+airplanes+ww2&source=bl&ots=A4mzEMlgAt&sig=ACfU3U1_WZom0qKd86pF_ZJcoGmFy8nzfw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj67OHlvoPnAhUBTBUIHbWUDfMQ6AEwGHoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=pine%20tree%20sap%20japan%20airplanes%20ww2&f=false
In 2009, a four year old British boy and his father were searching a field in Hockley with his father’s metal detector and discovered a 16th century golden pendant estimated to be worth $4 million. – WTF Fun Facts
The servant of Philon was an ancient Greek humanoid figure capable of automatically filling a wine cup when placed in its hand. It accomplished its task using a pneumatic system that was very advanced for its time. – WTF Fun Facts
Source: http://kotsanas.com/gb/exh.php?exhibit=0401001
Researchers in France have developed a brain-controlled robotic suit that has allowed a paralyzed man to walk again. A tetraplegic man has spent two years moving a virtual avatar in a video game in order to train a decoding algorithm, which translates the signals into movements. – WTF Fun Facts
Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/04/health/paralyzed-man-robotic-suit-intl-scli/index.html
Sport Utility Vehicles or SUVs, with their higher front-end profile, are at least twice as likely as cars to kill pedestrians; higher SUV sales have led to huge increase in pedestrian fatalities in the US during the past decade. – WTF Fun Facts
Source: https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/2018/06/28/suvs-killing-americas-pedestrians/646139002/
In Toronto, Canada, a small company has developed vegan leather made from apple peels that are recycled from the juicing industry. – WTF Fun Facts
Source: https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/fashion-designers-replace-plastic-based-vegan-leather-with-apple-fabric/
People didn’t always say ‘hello’ when they answered the phone. When the first regular phone service was established in 1878, Alexander Graham Bell suggested answering the phone with ‘Ahoy!’ – WTF Fun Facts
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/05/garden/great-hello-mystery-is-solved.html
The Antikythera Mechanism is the oldest known “computer” in the world. It was used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses for calendrical and astrological purposes and was developed in the second or first century BC. – WTF Fun Facts
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
The first cell phone was the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X aka ‘The Brick’. It was designed by Rudy Krolopp in April of 1984 and sold in the United States for just under $4,000. It weighed two pounds. – WTF Fun Facts
Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/7432915/ns/technology_and_science-wireless/t/first-cell-phone-true-brick/#.Xdf1WdXgpPZ
Facebook created two AI chatbots named Alice and Bob but shut them down when they stopped communicating in English because it wasn’t as efficient as the language they developed themselves. – WTF Fun Facts
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/06/what-an-ais-non-human-language-actually-looks-like/530934/
Oceanographers and engineers in California have created ‘snotbots’, which are drones that collect spray from whales’ blowholes. – WTF Fun Facts
Source: https://shop.whale.org/pages/snotbot
In 2019, the world’s first human-monkey hybrid was created in China. Scientists injected human stem cells into the monkey embryo to create the animal-human hybrid. The experiment was stopped before the birth. – WTF Fun Facts
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/human-monkey-hybrid-china-organ-transplant-stem-cells-embryo-a9037506.html
You receive a higher dose of radiation living next to a coal plant than you do a nuclear plant. This is due to the fly ash emitted by the power plant which is 100x more radiation than a similar nuclear plants waste. – WTF Fun Facts
Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first computer with a hard disk drive (HDD) in September 1956. The HDD weighed over a ton and stored 5MB of data. – WTF Fun Facts
Source: http://ed-thelen.org/RAMAC/Myths.html
Mark Zuckerberg created an AI assistant for his home named Jarvis, after the butler in Iron Man, that is voiced by Morgan Freeman. – WTF Fun Facts
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38390798
In 1936, Vladimir Lukyanov built a water (integrator) computer. It was the world’s first computer for solving (partial) differential equations for Russia. – WTF Fun Facts
Source: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/338106