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Flyting was the original rap battle.
Way before flip top and rap battles, there was “flyting”: the artful exchange of witty, insulting lines. Flyting was popular in the 5th to 16th century England and Scotland.
In 2003, Pepsi hosted a game show in which contestants could win $1 billion if they guessed the same six-digit number as a chimpanzee named Kendall. It’s hard to choose the most ridiculous part of that sentence, but for me it’s probably that the chimp was named Kendall. Jake Rossen is good at writing weird stories about Pepsi and weird stories about primates, so you can imagine that he’d really be in his bag for a story about both.
The Russians showed up 12 days late to the 1908 Olympics.
It was no sweat, though: back then, the Olympics lasted for 6 months. The Russians showed up late to the 1908 London Olympics because they were using the Julian calendar, which is 2 weeks behind the Gregorian calendar already used by the rest of the world.
In Japan, letting a sumo wrestler make your baby cry is considered good luck.
One of the coolest fun facts about Japan: they have a ritual where sumo wrestlers make babies cry. Sounds like a dream for me, but a nightmare for parents. However, the ritual is said to bring good luck. The Naki Sumo is a 400-year-old Japanese ritual where babies engage in a baby-cry sumo: two sumo wrestlers face each other carrying a baby each. The sumo wrestlers will try to make the babies cry, and the child that cries first or the loudest wins.
Black cats are good luck in Britain and Japan.
Black cats may have been universally seen as bad luck, but that isn’t the case for Great Britain and Japan. In fact, new brides are given black cats to bless their marriage in the English Midlands. In Japan, black cats are a symbol of good luck for single women.
Fact: Nikola Tesla hated pearls
The electrical engineer paved the way for current system generators and motors; the way electricity gets transmitted and converted to mechanical power is thanks to his inventions. But despite his patience with scientific experimentation, he apparently had no tolerance for pearls. When his secretary wore pearl jewelry one day, he made her go home.
Fact: Thomas Edison is the reason you love cat videos
After inventing the kinetograph in 1892, Edison was able to record and watch moving images for the first time. He filmed short clips in his studio, some of which feature famous people like Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill. But the real stars of these early videos are the Boxing Cats—adorable cats that he recorded in a boxing ring circa 1894. If you like cat videos, you’ll also appreciate these cat memes.
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Ötzi, the beloved frozen mummy unearthed from an Alpine glacier in 1991, should probably be the Mental Floss mascot by now. We’ve covered the many characteristics of the Copper-Age hunter, from his multiple tattoos to his animal-skin clothing to his intestinal parasites. This year, geneticists sequenced Ötzi’s genome using the latest technology and found that he was likely prone to male-pattern baldness, among other traits. Ellen Gutoskey ably reported this important news and came up with my favorite headline of the entire year.
Fact: Brad Pitt suffered an ironic injury on a film set
In Troy, based on Homer’s Illiad, Pitt plays the brave (and buff) Greek hero Achilles. Legend has it that Achilles could not be defeated unless hit in his heel. (It’s where we get the term “Achilles’ heel,” meaning a vulnerable point.) While filming an epic battle scene, Pitt ironically hurt his Achilles tendon—an injury that set back the film’s production by two months.
Fact: Pregnancy tests date back to 1350 B.C.E.
According to a document written on ancient papyrus, Egyptian women urinated on wheat and barley seeds to determine if they were pregnant or not, reports the Office of History in the National Institutes of Health. If wheat grew, it predicted a female baby. If barley grew, it predicted a male baby. The woman was not pregnant if nothing grew. Experimenting with this seed theory in 1963 proved it was accurate 70 percent of the time.
Fact: Martin Luther King Jr. got a C in public speaking
The world remembers Dr. King as a leader of the Civil Rights Movement, and people often quote his “I Have a Dream” speech, which he delivered in 1963. Yet more than a decade before that legendary speech, while attending Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, he earned a C in public speaking during his first and second term. Check out these other ironic “failures” of hugely successful people.
Old books are full of strange wonders—including delightful doodles of lions that look nothing like lions at all. Writer Jane Alexander explores the reason these beasts look so quirky in this story from February, which features a medley of images of the bizarre beasts.
Thanks to the success of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, forgotten Mattel dolls like Allan and Midge are now movie stars. But true fans of the toy brand know that Barbie’s social network spans far beyond what was shown on the silver screen. In this handy guide, Ellen Gutoskey gives the supporting players in Barbie’s life the scholarly attention they deserve. Tutti and Todd may not have appeared in the 2023 film, but there’s still hope for the rumored Ken spin-off.
If you’ve been watching the silly, swashbuckling Max comedy Our Flag Means Death, the name Stede Bonnet is certainly familiar to you. But what you may not realize is that Bonnet, a.k.a. “The Gentleman Pirate,” is indeed based on a very real person. Who, yep, left his family behind to pursue his dreams of becoming the next Blackbeard. Kristin Hunt gives some fun historical context to the character for fans of the series.
Most times when I search through Getty Images, I find stuff that’s so weird that I can’t help but post it to the Mental Floss Slack for discussion. (I mean, check out this happy baby holding Krampus’s tongue! And these menacing owls! And this picture of a person in a bar dressed like a cat holding on to a camel!) But sometimes, when you least expect it, you find something really interesting—like this letter Einstein wrote in response to a person asking about UFOs. It was really fun to dig into what was happening with UFOs in the U.S. at that time, examine Einstein’s response, and cover how the media wrote about it.
Anyone who has been to a karaoke night with me knows that I love to close with Celine Dion’s epic power ballad “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now”—and when I found out this year that writer Jim Steinman had described the song as “an erotic motorcycle,” I knew I had to assign a story about it. Kenneth Partridge expertly covered all the fasciating twists and turns in the history of the song, from its origins in Peter Pan and Wuthering Heights (really) to how it caused a falling out between Steinman and Meatloaf. The word saga gets thrown around a lot, but if the story of this song doesn’t qualify, I don’t know what does.
Fact: Bees can make colored honey
In France, there’s a biogas plant that manages waste from a Mars chocolate factory, where M&Ms are made. Beekeepers nearby noticed that their bees were making “unnatural shades of green and blue” honey. A spokesperson from the British Beekeepers’ Association theorized that the bees eating the sugary M&M waste caused the colored honey. Speaking of colors, find out what is the world’s ugliest color next.
Ben & Jerry learned how to make ice cream from a $5 course at Penn State.
The titular Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were childhood friends. Although Greenfield finished college, he was unable to pursue med school. Cohen, on the other hand, dropped out of school. In 1977, Cohen and Greenfield completed a course on ice cream making from Pennsylvania State University’s creamery. One of the fun facts no one knows about this famous product: Have you ever wondered why Ben & Jerry’s is so chunky? Ben Cohen actually a condition where he can’t smell or taste anything. Instead, he relied on food textures texture to provide variety in his diet. This led to the company’s trademark chunks in their ice cream.
Fact: Bananas glow blue under black lights
To the everyday eye under normal conditions, ripe bananas appear yellow due to organic pigments called carotenoids. When bananas ripen, chlorophyll begins to break down. This pigment is the element that makes bananas glow, or fluoresce, under UV lights and appear blue. While this is definitely among the most interesting facts about bananas, we have another one that will make you want to eat a banana every day.
The the official plural form of a Prius is Prii.
After an online poll in 2011, Toyota announced the official plural form of the Prius: it’s Prii. Add that to the fun facts you never even thought of, but know now. We hope you find peace.
Fact: Wimbledon tennis balls are kept at 68 degrees Fahrenheit
The temperature of a tennis ball affects how it bounces. At warmer temperatures, the gas molecules inside the ball expand, making the ball bounce higher. Lower temperatures cause the molecules to shrink and the ball to bounce lower. To make sure the best tennis balls are used, Wimbledon goes through more than 50,000 tennis balls each year.
Fact: Adult cats are lactose intolerant
Like some humans, adult cats don’t have enough of the lactase enzyme to digest lactose from milk, causing them to vomit, have diarrhea, or get gassy. Cats only have enough of that enzyme when they’re born and during the early years of their lives.
Freelance science writer Joseph Howlett had me at mammoth poop—but there was also an intriguing scientific question behind the phrase. Joseph describes a heated debate among scientists over the uses of environmental DNA—a method of sampling DNA from the environment, rather than actual bones or tissue, to gain clues about ancient fauna. In this case, the presence of DNA from fossilized feces in Siberian permafrost suggested that woolly mammoths may have lived as recently as 4000 years ago, according to a study published in Nature. But other scientists weren’t convinced.
Dogs can understand up to 250 words and gestures.
The average dog is as smart as a two-year-old child.
Fact: Albert Einstein’s eyeballs are in New York City
They were given to Henry Abrams and preserved in a safety deposit box. Abrams was Einstein’s eye doctor. He received the eyeballs from Thomas Harvey, the man who performed the autopsy on Einstein and illegally took the scientist’s brain for himself.
Goats have rectangular pupils.
Have you ever looked at a goat and thought, “Man, why do you look so weird?” Goats have been used for different religious imagery and have been associated with satanic or demonic themes. (Hello, Insidious demon.) One of the fun facts about goats is that their weird, rectangular pupils actually give them a wider range of vision to look out for predators.
Wasting food is illegal for supermarkets in France.
France is the first country in the world that legislated a Food Waste Law that bans supermarkets from wasting unsold food. It mandates that supermarkets must compost their leftover produce, or donate the goods to charity.
I’m obsessed with platypuses, and probably with Penelope most of all. The monotreme was brought to the Bronx Zoo in 1947 with a male and another female in hopes that they’d breed. But as Ellen Gutoskey explains in this feature, Penelope couldn’t stand the overtures of her would-be mate and hated their enclosure. She would eventually fool zookeepers into thinking she was pregnant (garnering herself double portions—clever girl) and eventually made a break for it. Iconic.
Among the many fascinating facts I learned while editing this piece by Michele Debczak about Sound Effects No. 13 – Death & Horror—a sound effects album by the BBC’s record label released in 1977—is that they manhandled cabbages to create some of the effects. Sound Effects No. 13 ended up catching the attention of of people who sought to have it banned, but unfortunately for them, their campaign only helped turn it into a hit.