CAMPUS NAIJA WEIRD FACTS;By Cecilia Tabansi

1. The longest time between two twins being

born is 87 days.



2. The world's deepest postbox is in Susami

Bay in Japan. It's 10 metres underwater.



3. In 2007, an American man named Corey

Taylor tried to fake his own death in order to

get out of his cell phone contract without

paying a fee. It didn't work.



4. The oldest condoms ever found date back

to the 1640s (they were found in a cesspit at

Dudley Castle), and were made from animal

and fish intestines.



5. In 1923, jockey Frank Hayes won a race at

Belmont Park in New York despite being

dead — he suffered a heart attack mid-race,

but his body stayed in the saddle until his

horse crossed the line for a 20–1 outsider

victory.



6. Everyone has a unique tongue print, just

like fingerprints.



7. Most Muppets are left-handed. (Because

most Muppeteers are right-handed, so they

operate the head with their favoured hand.)



8. Female kangaroos have three vaginas.

Ian Walton / Getty Images



9. It costs the U.S. Mint almost twice as much

to mint each penny and nickel as the coins

are actually worth. Taxpayers lost over $100

million in 2013 just through the coins being

made.



10. Light doesn't necessarily travel at the

speed of light. The slowest we've ever

recorded light moving at is 38 mph.



11. Casu marzu is a Sardinian cheese that

contains live maggots. The maggots can jump

up to five inches out of cheese while you're

eating it, so it's a good idea to shield it with

your hand to stop them jumping into your

eyes.



12. The loneliest creature on Earth is a whale

who has been calling out for a mate for over

two decades — but whose high-pitched voice

is so different to other whales that they

never respond.



13. The spikes on the end of a stegosaurus'

tail are known among paleontologists as the

"thagomizer" — a term coined by cartoonist

Gary Larson in a 1982 Far Side drawing.



14. During World War II, the crew of the

British submarine HMS Trident kept a fully

grown reindeer called Pollyanna aboard their

vessel for six weeks (it was a gift from the

Russians).



15. The northern leopard frog swallows its

prey using its eyes — it uses them to help

push food down its throat by retracting them

into its head.



16. The first man to urinate on the moon

was Buzz Aldrin, shortly after stepping onto

the lunar surface.

NASA/Newsmakers



17. Some fruit flies are genetically resistant

to getting drunk — but only if they have an

inactive version of a gene scientists have

named "happyhour".



18. Experiments show that male rhesus

macaque monkeys will pay to look at

pictures of female rhesus macaques'

bottoms.



19. In 1567, the man said to have the

longest beard in the world died after he

tripped over his beard running away from a

fire .



20. The Dance Fever of 1518 was a month-

long plague of inexplicable dancing in

Strasbourg, in which hundreds of people

danced for about a month for no apparent

reason. Several of them danced themselves

to death.



21. Vladimir Nabokov nearly invented the

smiley.



22. In 1993, San Francisco held a

referendum over whether a police officer

called Bob Geary was allowed to patrol while

carrying a ventriloquist's dummy called

Brendan O'Smarty. He was.



23. Sigurd the Mighty, a ninth-century Norse

earl of Orkney, was killed by an enemy he

had beheaded several hours earlier. He'd

tied the man's head to his horse's saddle, but

while riding home one of its protruding

teeth grazed his leg. He died from the

infection.



24. The Dutch village of Giethoorn has no

roads; its buildings are connected entirely by

canals and footbridges.



25. A family of people with blue skin lived in

Kentucky for many generations. The Fulgates

of Troublesome Creek are thought to have

gained their blue skin through combination

of inbreeding and a rare genetic condition

known as methemoglobinemia.



26. Powerful earthquakes can permanently

shorten the length of Earth's day, by moving

the spin of the Earth's axis. The 2011 Japan

earthquake knocked 1.8 microseconds off

our days. The 2004 Sumatra quake cost us

around 6.8 microseconds.



27. The first American film to show a toilet

being flushed on screen was Alfred

Hitchcock's Psycho.



28. Melting glaciers and icebergs make a

distinctive fizzing noise known as "bergy

seltzer".



29. There is a glacier called "Blood Falls" in

Antarctica that regularly pours out red liquid,

making it look like the ice is bleeding. (It's

actually oxidised salty water.)



30. In 2008 scientists discovered a new

species of bacteria that lives in hairspray.



31. The top of the Eiffel Tower leans away

from the sun, as the metal facing the sun

heats up and expands. It can move as much

as 7 inches.



32. Lt. Col. "Mad" Jack Churchill was only

British soldier in WWII known to have killed

an enemy soldier with a longbow. "Mad Jack"

insisted on going into battle armed with both

a medieval bow and a claymore sword.



33. A U.S. park ranger named Roy C. Sullivan

held the record for being struck by lightning

the most times, having been struck — and

surviving — seven times between 1942 and

1977. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot in

1983.



34. The longest musical performance in

history is currently taking place in the church

of St. Burchardi in Halberstadt, Germany.

The performance of John Cage's "Organ²/

ASLSP (As Slow As Possible)" started on Sept.

5, 2001, and is set to finish in 2640. The last

time the note changed was October 2013;

the next change isn't due until 2020.



35. There's an opera house on the U.S.–

Canada border where the stage is in one

country and half the audience is in another.



36. The tiny parasite Toxoplasma gondii can

only breed sexually when in the guts of a cat.

To this end, when it infects rats, it changes

their behaviour to make them less scared of

cats.





37. The katzenklavier ("cat piano") was a

musical instrument made out of cats.

Designed by 17th-century German scholar

Athanasius Kircher, it consisted of a row of

caged cats with different voice pitches, who

could be "played" by a keyboardist driving

nails into their tails.



38. There is a single mega-colony of ants that

spans three continents, covering much of

Europe, the west coast of the U.S., and the

west coast of Japan.



39. The largest snowflake ever recorded

reportedly measured 15 inches across.



40. An epidemic of laughing that lasted

almost a year broke out in Tanganyika (now

Tanzania) in 1962. Several thousand people

were affected, across several villages. It

forced a school to close. It wasn't fun, though

— other symptoms included crying, fainting,

rashes, and pain.



41. The Romans used to clean and whiten

their teeth with urine. Apparently it works.

Please don't do it, though.



42. There are around 60,000 miles of blood

vessels in the human body. If you took them

all out and laid them end to end, they'd

stretch around the world more than twice.

But, seriously, don't do that either.



Compiled by Cecilia Tabansi