Amazing Facts About Anything Thread

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The bumblebee bat is the world’s smallest mammal

Weighing in at 0.05 to 0.07 ounces, with a head-to-body length of 1.14 to 1.29 inches and a wingspan of 5.1 to 5.7 inches, the bumblebee bat—also known as Kitti’s hog-nosed bat—is the smallest mammal in the world, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. To see this tiny bat for yourself, you’d have to visit one of a select few limestone caves on the Khwae Noi River in Kanchanaburi Province of southwest Thailand. Here are more of Earth’s tiniest creatures that play a big role in the environment.

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Sudan has more pyramids than any country in the world

Not only does Sudan have more pyramids than Egypt, but the numbers aren’t even close. While 138 pyramids have been discovered in Egypt, Sudan boasts around 255.

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Baseball umpires used to sit in rocking chairs

People have been playing baseball since the mid-19th century. In the early days, umpires would officiate the games while reclining in a rocking chair located 20 feet behind home plate. By 1878, the National League also declared that home teams must pay umpires $5 per game.

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Martin Luther King Jr., Anne Frank, And Barbara Walters Were Born In The Same Year

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France Was Still Using The Guillotine For Executions When 'Star Wars' Hit Theaters

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Pluto Was Made And Unmade A Planet Before It Completed One Orbit Of The Sun

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Laws In Longyearbyen, Norway, Include An Alcohol Quota, A Cat Ban, And No Burials

Longyearbyen, a town in Norway on the archipelago of Svalbard, is the northernmost settlement in the world with a population of more than 1,000 people. It was founded by an American, John Munro Longyear, in 1906 as a mining settlement, and has some unusual laws.

Because hundreds of polar bears live in the surrounding area, residents are required to carry and be able to use a high-powered rifle if they leave the settlement. However, guns are not allowed indoors.

To protect the Arctic bird population on the archipelago, another law bars anyone in Svalbard from having a cat as a pet.

The purchase of alcohol is heavily regulated. Anyone who resides in Svalbard has a monthly quota of alcohol they can purchase. All alcohol must be purchased on the archipelago; no tax-free alcohol can be imported from the mainland.

Also, no one can be buried in Longyearbyen. The settlement has a small graveyard, but no one has been interred there in approximately 70 years because the soil is permafrost, which means a corpse does not decompose after it is buried.

The law has given rise to the saying that it's illegal to die in Longyearbyen. While not technically true, anyone with a terminal illness would be sent to the mainland. It's also not a place for anyone to be born. As a tour guide explained:

"When a woman has three weeks left of her pregnancy, she must go back to the mainland to have her baby."

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A Sperm Bank Was Designed To Collect Sperm From Nobel Prize Winners

The Repository for Germinal Choice in Escondido, CA, founded in 1979 by multimillionaire Robert Graham, was a sperm bank meant to collect sperm from Nobel Prize winners. Graham reportedly thought the world was getting dumber, and wanted to reverse this trend by filling the population with children of smart prizewinners.

Graham advertised for potential mothers in a Mensa magazine; to “qualify,” the women needed to be married to men who were infertile, well-educated, and financially secure. He promoted his plan to the media as a way of saving humankind, but the public was so outraged that two of the three Nobel Prize winners Graham had recruited ended up withdrawing from the program. The third, scientist William Shockley, was a white supremacist who believed Black people were intellectually inferior to white people; his involvement in Graham's plan prompted a Saturday Night Live skit, “Dr. Shockley's House of Sperm.”

Graham was accused of, among other things, trying to create his own “master race.” So he pivoted, recruiting donors other than Nobel Prize winners. By the time Graham passed in 1997, 229 children had reportedly been born as a result of sperm donations from the clinic; none, however, were the offspring of a Nobel Prize winner.

The sperm bank closed in 1999. Two years later, Slate reporter David Plotz began investigating the clinic in the hopes of finding out who the donors were and what had happened to the sperm donations.

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France's Last Execution By Guillotine Occurred In 1977, The Same Year 'Star Wars' Was Released

During the French Revolution, executions happened routinely and in masse, sometimes by firing squad, hanging, or manual beheadings using an ax or sword. All methods lacked efficiency, and to physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, they were also cruel and inhumane. He petitioned the new revolutionary government to require that all executions be carried out using a machine, and after his application was accepted, he worked on building his deadly device.

While beheading machines existed prior to the French Revolution, this new device would be the most sophisticated execution apparatus of its day. Designed by French doctor Antoine Louis and built by German harpsichord maker Tobias Schmidt, the beheading device was dubbed a guillotine after the man who championed its usage, much to his horror and consternation.

The guillotine debuted its execution efficacy on April 25, 1792 and became a sensation. French folks of all ages came in droves to witness public executions, and its operators even became ghoulish celebrities. While it may seem like this frenzy over the guillotine remains in the far past, public executions remained in France until June 17, 1939, with the execution of convicted murderer Eugène Weidmann. After his demise, executions via guillotine continued, but were no longer public spectacles. On September 10, 1977, Hamida Djandoubi was the last to perish from the guillotine in France; in 1981, the machine was banned outright. Djandoubi was the also, as of 2021, the last person executed by any means in Western Europe.

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