Weird

This is our weird but true facts category.  These may be a little odd and a little strange, but they are all most definitely true facts!  If you are looking for weird fun facts then start scrolling!

WTF Fun Fact 12692 – The Monarchy Takes A Hostage

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The word “hostage” seems a bit harsh, but that’s precisely what a British tradition was meant to imply.

The British monarchy began to share power with a legislative branch of government way back in 1215, with the signing of the Magna Carta. But over the centuries, the royals have become less “heads of state” and more “figureheads.”

Even though relations between the monarchy and the British government are good, Buckingham Palace maintains a centuries-old tradition (going back to 1600) of taking a member of British Parliament “hostage” to ensure the monarch’s safe return when they make a speech at Parliament. Most recently, MP James Morris was taken “hostage” in May 2022 when Prince Charles delivered a speech on behalf of the Queen.

However, that wasn’t the case in the 1600s, when King Charles I argued back and forth with parliament about how much power they should have. The people wanted a constitutional monarchy and the royals…well, they didn’t for obvious reasons.

There’s lots of detail we’re leaving out here (like an entire English Civil War, and a Second English Civil War), but the important part is that, in the end, Charles I was delivered to Parliament, where they proceeded to try him for treason, convict him, and execute him. Then for good measure, they abolished the monarchy.

So, as you might imagine, the monarchy is a little sensitive about the whole thing and while it looks like a nice joke to the rest of the world now, it’s rooted in something much more serious. Still, all the “hostage”-taking is agreed upon in advance and no one is in danger these days.

But the whole reason we’re here is that this tradition came to light on May 2, 2022, when Prince Charles gave a speech at the opening of Parliament on behalf of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II. The Queen is suffering from intermittent mobility issues, so much of the royal family went in her place. And they did, indeed, take a ceremonial “hostage.” Conservative MP James Morris said he was the designated hostage this time around. Below, you can find him giving an explanation of the whole tradition. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Buckingham Palace has a centuries-old tradition of taking an MP hostage when the Queen or one of her representatives enter Parliament” — Yahoo News

WTF Fun Fact 12686 – RIP Sandy Island

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Sandy Island was 15 miles long, roughly the size of Manhattan. Or at least that’s what the maps showed in the decades leading up to 2012. It even showed up on Google Maps in the Coral Sea, east of Australia.

Discovered in 1876, the best we can guess is that there might have been a floating pile of pumice there at some point that made explorers think it was an island. In any case, they put it on a map, and there it stayed until 2012. That’s when a research crew passed by the site and realized the island wasn’t there.

It hadn’t been covered by water. There was no evidence at all that an island had ever been in that location. The water a mile down was free of any proof that a landmass had ever been in that location.

As if embarrassed, everyone from National Geographic to Google quickly and quietly removed the island from their maps. (Which, let’s face it, raises some questions about maps in general and what they encourage us to believe without asking further questions.)

The truth is, the island had been “undiscovered” even before 2012 as people reported that there was nothing there and some maps labeled Sandy Island “ED,” or “existence doubtful.”

Maybe it started with a false sighting or perhaps with a simple recording error, but that error was replicated in databases for over 100 years without anyone questioning it (or looking for proof via satellite).

David Titley, a retired Navy rear admiral who spent over three decades as an oceanographer and navigator, told The Washington Post:

“When we look at these computer displays, with the three-dimensional imagery and colorized, it can give you a sense that we know more than we do. A lot of people in the Navy don’t always understand the difference between having a chart and having the survey data that formed that chart.”

There is no longer a Sandy Island on modern maps. Scientists even published an obituary for it in 2013. – WTF fun facts

Source: “The Pacific island that never was” — The Guardian

WTF Fun Fact 12679 – OutHorse Your E-Mail

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Visit Iceland recently got a weird idea. They’ve launched an out-of-office email service called “OutHorse Your Email” so you can outsource to a horse.

So, apparently, you can get a horse to write your OOO emails.

This was all brought about by a survey that found that 55% of vacationers check their email at least once and 60% said their bosses expected a response. (Of course, we’re not sure how bosses respond to horse emails, but that’s a survey for the future.)

Check this out:

It seems like a joke, right? Well, there’s a website and all you need to do is select a horse and put in your email information to generate your email.

According to IFL Science:

“The huge typing platform is then placed outside with the stunning backdrop of Iceland to complement the tip-tapping of typing horses writing the OOO emails of lazy humans. You can get your own emails written via the Visit Iceland website where Litla Stjarna Star from Hvítárholt, Hrímnir from Hvammi and Hekla from Þorkellshó are waiting to assist you.”

We’re sure your boss will be pleased. –  WTF fun fact

Source: “In Iceland, Horses Will Write Your “Out Of Office” Emails For You” — IFL Science

WTF Fun Fact 12672 – Beware the “Sharkcano”

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Your mother probably warned you not to swim around acidic shark-infested volcanoes, but in case she didn’t, we’re telling you now not to try it!

Only once have scientists been able to explore the Kavachi volcano in the Solomon Islands. It’s a submarine (aka underwater) volcano and it actually erupts almost constantly. But in 2015, it took a break, giving researchers the chance to check it out.

And boy did they find some stuff! It’s no surprise that they found high levels of sulfur (because it is a volcano, after all), but they were surprised to see that despite extremely acidic conditions, some creatures have managed to thrive in the craters.

There are microbial species that are common in sulfuric environments. There are also “gelatinous animals and small fish.” Oh, and a whole bunch of angry sharks.

According to IFL Science, oceanographic researchers said this is “raising new questions about the ecology of active submarine volcanoes and the extreme environments in which large marine animals can exist.”

And while that’s really cool, we’re more interested in the phenomenon they dubbed “sharkcano.” The researchers wrote: “Two species of shark, the scalloped hammerhead Sphyrna lewini and the silky shark Carcharhinus falciformis, approached the baited camera multiple times in an aggressive pattern; in some cases, sharks appeared to be swimming from greater depths inside the crater.”

Now, before you picture thousands of sharks spewing out from the depths of the ocean floor (which is the first thing we pictured), it’s definitely not going to be that wild if this volcano has a major eruption. It will, however, be a really bad time to go swimming in that area.

NASA images showed a plume developing in late May, so we may be in for a sharkcano eruption sometime soon and we’ll be able to see precisely what that entails. –  WTF fun fact

If you want to learn more:

Source: “NASA Warns Acidic “Sharkcano” Is Starting To Erupt” — IFL Science

WTF Fun Fact 12670 – Thieves Return Plundered Temple Artifacts

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In May 2022, thieves unwisely stole 16 statues of Lord Balaji (an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu). And if you know anything about Vishnu, you’d know that was a particularly bad idea. Vishnu is known as the preserver and protector of the universe, and it is said that he will return to earth in troubled times to restore the balance of good and evil.

However, the belief is that Vishnu has been incarnated 9 times already and his 10th reincarnation will signal the end of the world. So, seriously, do not make him come down here!

Lucky for the rest of us, the thieves got some personal punishment rather than triggering the apocalypse.

Most of the statues were returned a week later to the temple in the Chitrakoot district in Uttar Pradesh, India along with a confession, apology, and plea for forgiveness. It turns out the thieves had been plagued with such terrible nightmares and bad luck during the time they held the statues that they felt they had no choice but to return them and come clean.

“We have been suffering from nightmares since we committed the theft and have not been able to sleep, eat and live peacefully,” the thieves said in the accompanying letter, the Times of India reported (in translation). “We are fed up with the scary dreams and are returning your ‘amaanat’ (valuables).”

Returning stolen temple items is actually somewhat common because of feelings of guilt and misfortune – but, somehow, they still justified keeping two of the stolen items!

Sweet dreams! –  WTF fun fact

Source: “Thieves Return Stolen Treasure To Temple After Being Haunted By Nightmares” — IFL Science

WTF Fun Fact 12668 – The Gates of Hell

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There are a couple of places on earth that are referred to as the Gates of Hell, or something similar. But we’d never heard of the one in Turkmenistan (then again, there’s not a lot of news coming out of Turkmenistan). Apparently, this particular version of the Gates of Hell really needs to be put out – if that’s even possible.

The fire put has been burning for over 50 years and no one is quite sure why. However, in January of 2022, the amazingly-named leader of Turkmenistan, President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, announced that he was asking officials to find a way to extinguish it. It’s not only using up natural resources (it’s burning gas deposits) but a giant burning greater isn’t great for air quality either.

According to an interview with Atlas Obscura, an explorer named George Kourounis has actually descended into the firery pit and gathered soil samples But he also found a big problem: “As I was digging into the ground [at the bottom of the crater] to gather these soil samples, fire would start coming out of the hole I just freshly dug because it was creating new paths for the gas to come out of the crater. So even if you were to extinguish the fire and cover it up, there’s a chance that the gas could still find its way out to the surface and all it would take is one spark to light it up again.”

Oh, and did we mention that the origins of the fire are unclear? Locals tell stories of a Soviet gas accident in 1971 and someone trying to light a collapsed rig on fire, but geologists have traced the crater back to the 1960s and the fire to the 1980s.

We may never know exactly what happens because of Turkmenistan’s isolation from the rest of the world. –WTF fun fact

Source: “The Quest to Extinguish the Flames of Turkmenistan’s Terrifying ‘Gates of Hell’ Firepit” — Smithsonian Magazine

WTF Fun Fact 12664 – Mushrooms Talk To One Another

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A study published in the Royal Society Open Science journal suggests that mushrooms are pretty chatty. In fact, the electrical signals fungi emit toward one another when they encounter food or danger bear a striking resemblance to human speech, at least in terms of the patterns they use.

Andrew Adamatzky of the Unconventional Computing Laboratory at the University of the West of England noticed that fungi electrical signals spiked in certain situations.

Now, you can’t hear mushrooms speak, of course. Many mushrooms grow as part of a network with tiny roots and filaments connecting them underground, called hyphae – and that’s where the signals are passed.

Adamatzky admits that his experiment is a far cry from finding a secret “mushroom language,” but making the comparison allows us to understand the possible purpose of these electrical signals. In the end, they may mean nothing, but the fact that we can distinguish patterns of electrical activity in certain situations would suggest something interesting is going on.

The article reminds us:

“This is indeed quite a primitive classification akin to interpreting binary words only by sums of their bits and not exact configurations of 1s and 0s. That said, we should not expect quick results: we are yet to decipher language of cats and dogs despite living with them for centuries, and research into electrical communication of fungi is in its pure infant stage.” 

– WTF Fun Facts

Source: “Mushrooms communicate with each other using up to 50 ‘words’, scientist claims” — The Guardian

WTF Fun Fact 12659 – The Dancing Plague

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The summer of 1518 was a weird one in part of the Holy Roman Empire. A plague of sorts broke out in July in the city of Strasbourg, and its main symptom was giving people the uncontrollable urge to dance.

It all began with a woman called Frau Troffea, who was seen stepping out into the street and twisting and twirling all alone to no music at all. Multiple sources say she danced for a week.

When others joined her, it wasn’t to keep the party going. They couldn’t help themselves. They danced until they literally couldn’t dance anymore – either because their feet were broken or bleeding or because they passed out or even died of a heart attack.

It’s said that by August, nearly 400 because afflicted with the mysterious and destructive desire to dance themselves to death. By September, officials had taken the remaining dancers to a mountain shrine…allegedly to pray away their affliction.

To say doctors handled it poorly is both an understatement and a bit unfair, considering the world had no germ theory of disease yet. Some blamed foot, others called it a “hysteria,” and some local physicians blamed it on “hot blood” that made bodies try to gyrate out the fever. They even had stages built, and professional dancers brought in to try to ease whatever was happening in people’s bodies and minds. Not surprisingly, it didn’t work.

In what probably seemed like a good idea at the time but feels a bit cringy to think about now, the town hired some backup musicians. That didn’t work either (and it probably made things worse).

A dance marathon sounds like fun and games until people start dying, and reports say they did by the dozens.

Similar dance plagues happened throughout the empire, but none were as extensive and well-documented as the 1518 incident.

The best explanation we have is that it was such a stressful time in Strasbourg that summer (disease and famine were rampant) that it triggered hysteria around the city that manifested as dancing because of St. Vitus, a Catholic saint people believed had the power to curse them with a dancing plague. –  WTF fun facts

Source: “What was the dancing plague of 1518?” — History.com

WTF Fun Fact 12658 – An Independence Day Coincidence

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The 4th of July may just be the most common day for U.S. presidents to die.

As America celebrated 50 years of independence on July 4, 1826, it also mourned the passing of two of the men responsible for it. 83-year-old Thomas Jefferson and 90-year-old John Adams died just hours apart on that day. And despite their advanced ages, it came as a shock to people, who found it very suspicious (apparently, we didn’t need the internet to start conspiracy theories).

People didn’t necessarily suspect foul play – they were not anywhere near one another at the time. In fact, some people found it to be the work of the divine. In a eulogy, Daniel Webster called it “proofs that our country and its benefactors are objects of His care.”

It is a bigger coincidence than one might normally feel comfortable with, however. It’s one thing to die on the same day and quite another for that day to be such a momentous occasion.

If there was another other going on, it may have simply been that both were very ill and on the verge of death but tried their best to hang on to see that 50th anniversary.

If you’re a fan of weird coincidences, you may also be interested to know that James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States, also died on July 4 (but in 1831). And Zachary Taylor is presumed to have caught cholera on July 4th immediately following the holiday festivities in1850 (though he did not die until July 9th). – WTF Fun Facts

Source: “Two Presidents Died on the Same July 4: Coincidence or Something More?” – History.com

WTF Fun Fact 12651 – The Military Researchers Who Turned a Cat Into a Phone

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Have you ever wanted to turn a cat into a telephone? We haven’t either. But in 1929, two Princeton University researchers gave it a go anyway. Apparently, they weren’t cat lovers.

Professor Ernest Glen Wever and his research assistant Charles William Bray performed the experiment that involved a live but unconscious (thankfully!) cat in order to see how the auditory nerve perceives sound.

That’s a fancy way of saying they sedated a cat, opened its skull, accessed its auditory nerve, and attached a telephone wire to it. The other end of the wire was connected to a telephone receiver.

While many of us may turn up our noses at the thought of animal research, it has saved and improved many human lives. Bray and Wever weren’t even interested in making a cat into a telephone for any practical purpose (not that we could even think of one anyway). Instead, they were interested in the research methods used to run the tests, which paved the way for more sophisticated research on human hearing and made contributions to devices called cochlear implants that convert sound vibrations into electrical signals in the brain for deaf people.

Despite not caring much about creating a cat phone, the experiment did work, and Bray was able to speak into the cat’s ears while Wever listened through the receiver 50 feet away in a soundproof room.

Princeton’s Mudd Manuscript Library wrote a blog describing it in more detail. They say:

“The common notion during this time was that the frequency of the response of a sensory nerve is correlated to the intensity of the stimulus. In the case of the auditory nerve, as a sound becomes louder, the frequency or pitch of the sound received by the ear should be higher. When Bray made a sound with a certain frequency, Wever heard the sound from the receiver at the same frequency. As Bray increased the pitch of the sound, the frequency of the sound Wever heard also increased. This experiment proved that the frequency of the response in the auditory nerve is correlated to the frequency of the sound.”

Wever and Bray received the first Howard Crosby Warren Medal of Society by the Society of Experimental Psychologists in 1936 for the experiment.

Later, both men entered military research. Bray became the Associate Research Director of the U.S. Air Force Human Resources Research and then served on the civilian psychological research team for the National Defense Research Council and the Navy. Wever became a consultant to the National Research Council on anti-submarine warfare.

And cats worldwide likely rejoiced that they found other things to do. –WTF fun facts

Source: “The Cat Telephone” — Mudd Manuscript Library Blog

WTF Fun Fact 12649 – A Considerate Thief

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A thief in Texas stole a lawnmower, but the strangest act caught on camera wasn’t the theft itself but rather the footage of him mowing the victim’s lawn before he took off with the equipment.

He mowed both the front and the back!

The Port Arthur Police Department said Marcus Hubbard stole the lawnmower on April 1, but the theft was no joke. Hubbard eventually did make off with the mower. But police arrived on the scene as he was making off with the stolen property and he abandoned it during his attempted escape.

They’re still looking for Hubbard at this point, so secure your mowers if you live in the area!

Check out the unexpected video below:

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Man steals lawnmower, cuts victim’s grass, police say” — WRIC News

WTF Fun Fact 12642 – The Cereal Made for Orange Juice

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May the 4 may be a day that lives in infamy. That’s the day fruit company Tropicana announced it will release a new cereal that you’re supposed to pour orange juice on top of instead of milk. It seems they do not realize that we could have done that all along and have just chosen not to for the most part.

Some people seem excited, while others are disgusted – so in that sense, it’s just like any other piece of random news.

According to the fruit company’s website for the cereal, you can buy your first box of Tropicana Crunch on May 4, 2022. The “Cereal Made for OJ.” (Not Simpson, we assume.)

We’re not sure how you “engineer a cereal” for citrus other than just suggesting it (which is really all it takes for most people), but the company seems oddly confident that the “unforgettable breakfast experience” is going to change breakfast forever.

And why May 4th, you ask? That’s National Orange Juice Day.

We’ll admit that the crunchy honey almond-flavored cereal doesn’t sound bad in itself, but we’ll just let you find out for yourselves how it tastes. – WTF fun facts

Source: “SNAP, CRACKLE… JUICE? NEW CEREAL MADE TO BE EATEN WITH ORANGE JUICE, NOT MILK” — Ripley’s Believe It Or Not

WTF Fun Fact 12641 – A Great Ball of Fire

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The world didn’t end on April 27, 2022, though we’re confident that a few people thought it might after seeing a giant fireball in the sky headed straight for earth at 8 am.

Around 60 people in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana saw what turned out to be a meteor, but hundreds of people heard the loud boom. That’s because it exploded 34 miles above a swampy area in Louisiana with the power of 3 tons of TNT. Frankly, we would have just gone back to bed after all that.

NASA confirmed the meteor and verified that pieces of it had been recovered on the ground in Mississippi. At first, they estimated its speed at 55,000mph but later amended it to a more modest 35,000mph.

The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency said the event caused no physical injuries or property damage. However, we’re pretty sure there was at least a little bit of existential damage done to anyone who thought they were about to meet the same end as the dinosaurs.

Because the law states that meteorites belong to whoever owns the property they land on, NASA will not disclose the locations of any of the fragments. (We’re pretty sure someone on Facebook will take care of that.)

NASA also reminded people: “We are not meteorite people, as our main focus is protecting spacecraft and astronauts from meteoroids.” So they won’t be identifying or authenticating any other rocks people claim are meteorites. They also confirmed that Mississippi is particularly meteorite-prone, with incidents occurring in 1854, 1910, 1922, and 2012. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Pieces of ‘fireball’ that exploded while zooming over 3 Southern states are being found on ground, NASA says” — CBS News

WTF Fun Fact 12639 – Prosecuting Space Crime

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Pretty soon, it may be illegal for Canadian astronauts to go on crime sprees in space.

Now, we’re pretty sure that’s not why Canadians become astronauts in the first place, but apparently, you can never be too careful.

So, what’s this all about? Well, Canada just proposed an amendment to the country’s Criminal Code in their no-doubt riveting 443-page Budget Implementation Act in the House of Commons. It basically states that any crime committed in space by Canadians will be considered to have been committed on Canadian territory and punished accordingly. In other words, if you commit moon murder as a Canadian, you better not come back.

Interestingly, Canada has been preparing for space crime for a while now. Their Criminal Code already lays out prohibitions on crimes Canadian astronauts may commit during space flight to the International Space Station. accounts for astronauts who may commit crimes during space flights to the International Space Station.

Canada is part of the Lunar Gateway Project, a NASA-backed orbiting space platform. Part of that plan includes a trip to the moon, and apparently, the government wants to make sure Canadians maintain their reputation for being polite even among extraterrestrials.

The proposed code change reads:

“A Canadian crew member who, during a space flight, commits an act or omission outside Canada that if committed in Canada would constitute an indictable offense is deemed to have committed that act or omission in Canada.”

There are two interesting questions at play here – 1) who controls space justice, and 2) what gives a country the right to say space in their territory for prosecutorial purposes?

If you think space crime is absurd, there have already been accusations that have raised questions (however, no crime actually occurred). In 2019, astronaut Anne McClain was accused by her estranged spouse, Summer Worden, of improperly accessing bank records from the International Space Station. But McClain was later cleared after her spouse admitted to lying.

Still, it made people wonder how we might prosecute crimes in space, where no one technically owns territory (yet) and no one has jurisdiction.

Now, we already have some guidelines for international space law, believe it or not. According to CBC News:

“‘There are five international treaties governing activities in space but the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, ratified by Canada and more than 100 other countries, is the most relevant when it comes to dealing with alleged crimes in space, wrote Danielle Ireland-Piper, an associate professor of constitutional and international law at Australia’s Bond University. ‘As for the question of who prosecutes space crimes, the short answer is that a spacefaring criminal would generally be subject to the law of the country of which they are a citizen, or the country aboard whose registered spacecraft the crime was committed.'”

But things might be different if the astronaut-on-astronaut crime occurs between two different nations. In that case, there might be some disagreement about which country is able to prosecute the space offender. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Crimes on the moon could soon be added to Canada’s Criminal Code” — CBC News

WTF Fun Fact 12638 – Drinking Gold To Stay Young

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Humans have always been obsessed with living forever. And, as you may have guessed, we’ve continued to fail.

The practice of drinking cold goes all the way back to ancient China and Egypt but came back into high fashion in the 16th-century in France. Members of the court of King Henry II tried different tonics with gold to reduce wrinkles and stave off death, but, of course, it killed many of them.

De Poitiers was very influential, and despite her choice of cocktail ingredients, she did live to be 66. According to Atlas Obscura: “Brantôme, the French historian, once wrote about meeting de Poitiers six months before she passed away at the age of 66. Though he admitted to not knowing much about the ‘potable gold and other drugs’ she took daily, which contributed to her ‘fine appearance,’ he quickly added: ‘I believe that if this lady had lived another hundred years she would not have aged … in her face, so well-composed it was.'”

Gold drinking was perhaps even more popular in the medieval period after an alchemist devised a method for dissolving solid gold into a liquid. The drinkable gold was called aurum potabile (or aurum potable), and it was advertised as a medicinal drink that could cure everything from epilepsy to manic episodes.

One of the oddest recipes comes from Pope John XXI, who, in In 1578, wrote a recipe for an elixir of youth that included “taking gold, silver, iron, copper, iron, steel, and lead filings, then placing that mixture ‘in the urine of a virgin child on the first day,’ then white wine, fennel juice, egg whites, in a nursing woman’s milk, in red wine, then again in egg whites, in that order, for the following six days,” according to Atlas Obscura.

Bottoms up! – WTF fun facts

Source: “Drinking Gold Was a Grisly Anti-Aging Trend of 16th-Century France” — Atlas Obscura

WTF Fun Fact 12636 – A Medical Device That’ll Make You Squirm

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Sure, it sounds gross. It is gross. But so is a lot of the creative stuff doctors do to keep us alive.

As it turns out, the resurgence of therapies that use maggots and leeches has saved thousands of lives. Doctors can use them because they are FDA-approved as medical devices, despite being living creatures.

Now, no one heads to the local community garden or dumpster to get medicinal leeches and maggots. They are created in labs within very specific parameters.

So, let’s start with maggots. How can they possibly be medicinal?

The maggots used in medicine are the larvae of bottle-green blowflies. Because maggots only eat dead skin and not living skin, they’re actually perfect for cleaning infected wounds. Instead of having some first-year resident scrubbing out your open wound, maggots are even more gentle by comparison. In fact, since they’re eating dead tissue that’s already numb, you don’t feel the chomping at all. And they do a darn thorough job!

Leeches, on the other hand, are known as blood drinkers. Both of these creatures have been used in medicine for thousands of years, but are just making a comeback. However, leeches weren’t always applied in helpful ways in the past. Now, they’re used to clean up pooled blood in the body.

According to Discover Magazine: “When blood starts pooling instead of circulating, the area swells, and the lack of fresh, oxygenated blood causes skin tissues to die. Leeches can prevent that from happening.”

In the 1980s, as more wounds became resistant to antibiotics, a few doctors wanted to try maggots again and got some men at the VA hospital to agree. After the trials worked, the doctor in charge realized that in order to share the maggots with colleagues, he had to file paperwork with the FDA, and they turned out to be hard to regulate. But it was possible and in 2003, the FDA approved maggots as a medical device. Six months later, leeches were approved as well.

Obviously, not all hospitals are keen to use them (and patients aren’t generally big fans of the idea either). – WTF fun facts

Source: “Leeches and Maggots Are FDA-Approved and Still Used in Modern Medicine” — Discover Magazine

WTF Fun Fact 12634 – Gnomesville, Australia

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The story goes that it all started with one gnome. People were impressed when more showed up. After hundreds more were added, it became a bit of a tourist attraction. At 3000 gnomes, it became a destination. Now, by some estimates, there are 5 – 10,000.

They are collected in tiny villages, and on logs. All seemingly having a great time next to their cute gnome-y signs and other garden paraphernalia.

Gnomesville is in Australia, and the nearest big city is Perth. Its address is a lot number, so you have to follow the signs.

As one visitor put it:

“At Gnomesville you will see a massive community of garden gnomes. Current counts are apparently over 10,000 but I am sure that no one really knows. All that I do know is that when you arrive (and you will know you are arriving by the appearance of a few Gnomes on the side of the road) that you are overwhelmed by the numbers of gnomes all around you.

Gnomesville Western Australia is not a place to rush around. I mean you could walk around in 15 minutes and say “oh cool that’s a LOT of gnomes”. The joy is in stopping and looking at the gnomes. Literally every gnome tells a story. They are doing all sorts of things (sometimes a little bit rude) and its very interesting.

A pretty creek runs through Gnomesville and the gnomes have set up homes up there, underneath some beautiful trees.

Also interesting are the stories of the people that left the gnomes. You can see that people have visited from all around the world. There are some sad stories and some celebrations. I feel like Gnomesville Perth provides insight to travelers – and locals from around the world about what it means to be alive.”

The good news is that there’s no entry fee! – WTF fun facts

Source: “Gnomesville is Real! A Quirky Spot in Ferguson Valley, Australia” — Albom Adventures

WTF Fun Fact 12628 – Mr. Goxx, the Crypto Trading Hamster

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Not only did a hamster named Mr. Goxx have more success at trading crypto than most people, but he also had 18,000 Twitter followers at the time of his death in November of 2021.

Owned by two friends in Germany, Mr. Goxx used his cage to make “predictions” about cryptocurrency.

The BBC explained:

“The business-minded rodent has a trading office attached to his regular cage. Every day, when he enters the office, a livestream starts on Twitch, andhis Twitter accountlets followers know: Mr Goxx has started a trading session.

By running in his “intention wheel”, he selects which cryptocurrency he’d like to trade, as the wheel spins through the different options. His office floor has two tunnels nearby: one for buy, one for sell.

Every time he runs through a tunnel, the electronics wired to his office complete a trade according to Mr Goxx’s desires.”

His handlers would stream him live on Twitch, where thousands would watch him make his moves.

Considering he only began his career on June 12, 2021, he was pretty successful. Though with the current crypto downturn, we’re not sure how his former portfolio is looking these days.

But he taught us what his owners set out to teach, which is that a hamster making random choices still makes better choices than most cryptocurrency investors. –WTF fun facts

Source: “Mr Goxx, the cryptocurrency-trading hamster, dies” — BBC News