Theodore Roosevelt was the first U.S. president to ride in an automobile.
Rap music star Vanilla Ice's real name is Robert Van Winkle.
Victor Hugo's Les Miserables contains one of the longest sentences in the French language — 823 words without a period...
The star Zeta Thaun, a supernova, was so bright when it exploded in 1054 that it could be seen during the day. Its remains are now known as the Crab Nebula.
More than 25 percent of the world's forests are in Siberia.
The monkey wrench is named after its inventor, a London blacksmith named Charles Moncke.
Lighting a fire inside an igloo actually strengthens and insulates it.
It takes a full week to make jelly beans.
Observing the buzzard in flight was responsible for one of the Wright Brothers most important breakthroughs - warping the tips of their wings.
No patent can ever be taken out on a gambling machine in the United States.
Until 1893, lynching was legal in the United States. The first anti-lynching law was passed in Georgia, but it only made the violation punishable by four years in prison.
Fireflies like to light up together. Two fireflies found near each other will eventually start lighting up at the same time.
Electrical hearing aids were invented in 1901 by Miller R. Hutchinson.
Adult cockroaches can crawl through a space as thick as two stacked quarters.
The huddle formation used by football teams originated at Gallaudet University, a liberal arts college for deaf people in Washington, D.C., to prevent other schools from reading their sign language.
Descartes came up with the theory of coordinate geometry by looking at a fly walk across a tiled ceiling.
What do Warren Beatty, Uma Thurman, Sidney Poitier, Burt Reynolds, and Michael Caine have in common, besides being in the film business? Long before fame came their way, they worked as dishwashers.
The human body consists of about 60 trillion cells, and each cell has about 10,000 times as many molecules as the Milky Way has stars.
In English pubs, ale is ordered by pints and quarts. In old England, when customers became unruly, the bartender would yell at them to mind their own "pints and quarts" and settle down. From that, we got the abbreviated phrase "mind your P's and Q's."
English playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is indirectly responsible for the presence of starlings in North America. The species did not exist there until, in the 1890s, a wealthy New Yorker named Eugene Scheifflin released 100 birds in the city's Central Park as part of a project to bring to the United States all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare's works.
Out of the 11 original patents made by Nikola Tesla, for the generation of hydroelectric energy, 9 are still in use, (unchanged) today. Suck it, Edison.