Strange but True Facts
"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities, Truth isn't" Mark Twain
All the fantasies of movies and novels just can't compare to the oddities that researchers around the world have come across through the years. I have found a few oddballs and put them together for your amusement.
Earth broadcasts a symphony of sound - crackles, pops, whistles, and sizzles - via radio waves that result from lightning strikes. No lightning in your area? No problem. Even storms on the other side of the planet can send these very low frequency (VLF) radio waves bouncing between the surface of the planet and the ionosphere - boing boing boing= all the way to your house. /typical radio receivers won't detect them, but special VLF receivers will.
-------------------Fulgurites
When lightning strikes a place where the soil is sandy, its heat causes the silica in the sand to form craggy glass tubes that "fossilize" the lightning. Fossilized lightning bolts are called "fulgurites."
A fulgurite estimated to be about fifteen thousand years old was found in the Sahara. Because a rainstorm almost always accompanies lightning, geochronologists (scientists who specialize in determining the age of rocks) believe this fulgurite is evidence that the Sahara was not always the hot, dry environment we know today.
------------------------------------------------------------Archaeologists working at Paisley Cave in Oregon in 2002 found human poop that they have determined to be 14,300 years old - the oldest traces of human life ever found in North America.
*Polite archaeologists call fossilized poop "coprolites."
-------------------------Madagascar, the island nation off the east coast of Africa, is a favorite spot for paleontologists in search of dinosaur bones. Among their fins have been the remains of a mini 2.5 foot crocodile that lived on land, a cannibalistic dinosaur, and a creature that researchers call Masiakasaurus knopfleri. This last dinosaur was named for the lead singer/guitarist of the band Dire Straits because the crew realized that every time Dire Straits music was played at the dig site they found another dinosaur bone.
--------------------------A handful of gingko trees survived the atomic bomb assault on the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War II. They are still alive today.
--------------------------------Because pure white bread was considered to be of higher quality than brown bread, medieval bakers would whiten their flour by any means necessary - mixing it with alum, chalk, clay, or even ground bones. Ewwww
--------------------------Tidbit, a female blacktop star, are up in an aquarium in Virginia and had no contact with male blacktip sharks for the eight years of her life. So imagine how surprised her handlers were when she turned up pregnant. Tidbit's pregnancy confirmed what ichthyologists (fish biologists) had long suspected: Sharks have the ability to reproduce by virgin birth. Female sharks can become pregnant without the assistance of males, and those offspring have the same DNA as their moms without any contributions from another shark. Ichthyologists believe that this type of reproduction could become even more common as shark populations are overfished and females have a tougher time finding mates.
-------------------------------The sound we all hate. Fingernails scraping a chalkboard. Just the mention of it probably makes you cringe, but you've probably never stopped to wonder why. Now you'll know: This action produces sound frequencies similar to those of a chimpanzee's warning call, So the sense of distress we feel when the fingernails scrape could be a sign that our fundamental primate danger sensors have been triggered.
------------------------------A 2009 study at the University of Wisconsin set out to determine how tamarin monkeys respond to various types of musical sounds. Classical? Jazz? Polka? Most human music left the monkeys cold, or even made them anxious, with one exception: They seemed to like the heavy metal sound of the band Metallica.
-------------------------------Marc Chavannes and Alfred Fielding created Bubble Wrap after experimenting unsuccessfully with an idea for plastic, textured wallpaper.
-----------------------People with synesthesia interpret sensory information in unusual ways. They might see letters and numbers in distinct colors, even if the printed type they're reading is black. They might taste sounds or hear colors - perceiving two separate sensory triggers where most people would perceive only one.
