Asklemmy

2” x 4” construction timber is 1.5” x 3.5” because of industrialisation (not shrinkflation)

Chinese scientists worked to create the "humanzee," a human-chimpanzee hybrid in the '60s. Female chimpanzees were impregnated with human sperm. The experiment was cut short by the Cultural Revolution - the scientists were sent to labor camps and a three-months pregnant chimpanzee died of neglect. The Soviets attempted a similar program in the '20s.

HD-DVD and Blu-ray weren't the only HD video disc formats competing for dominance in the '00s. HD VMD which was basically a DVD containing more layers unsuccessfully tried to compete with the two. The company who produced it dissolved in 2008 and only a few titles were ever released on the format.

There are more hydrogen atom in a single molecule of water than there are star in the entire solar system.

Joe

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This symbol, the ampersand, used to have equal status with letters of the alphabet and was stuck at the end after Z.

That's how it got its name. People would say "X,Y,Z, and, per se, And". (And "sort of" an and). Thus, "And per se And" became Ampersand.

You know how geese fly in a “v” shaped pattern in the sky? One side of the “v” is usually longer than the other. The reason for that is that there’s more geese on that side.

Bedsheet thread counts have been artificially inflated for years by the shifty linen companies counting individual fibers that the threads consist of as threads themselves. It’s become a meaningless number, since there is zero regulation. If you want a nice thick heavy cloth, GSM is the number you want, but most companies won’t share this (looking at you, The Company Store) because they obviously don’t want you to know how thin and flimsy their products really are before you buy them.

Diamonds aren't stable and will eventually, over billions of years, decompose from their cubic molecular structure to carbon's more stable form, graphite, which has a hexagonal molecular structure.

Oh, here's another good gemstone related one!

Amethyst and citrine are both quartz varieties, and if the color source happens to be from traces of iron in the crystal lattice, one can be turned into the other. Heating amethyst can make citrine, and irradiating citrine can turn it into amethyst. This is because the only actual difference between the two is the valiance level of a specific election in the iron atom giving the stone its color.

Several popular graphing calculators from Texas Instruments, including the TI-83 and TI-84, have a display resolution of 96*64, but only 95*63 pixels are used for graphing.

However, the earlier TI-81 did use all 96*64 pixels. The rationale for this change was to establish a central row and column for the axes and a central pixel for the origin. The cursor could only move pixel-by-pixel, and since the axes and origin would end up "between" pixels on the TI-81, they were inaccessible by the cursor.

The entomology book Life on a Little Known Planet taught me that bebugs mate via "traumatic insemination". The female has no opening, so the male pierces the exoskeleton and the wound later heals over -- all of which allows entomologoists to count the number of times a female has mated by the number of scars on their abdomen.

Most male cats, when investigating something with a paw, will use the left paw.

Darwin drank tortoise piss and, according to his documentation, didn’t hate it.

Diabetics piss has so much sugar in it that you can make high end whiskey with it.

Living at high altitude for long periods of time can cause a disease that is otherwise most associated with cocaine and meth.

Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension has some weird causes, but it seems that high altitude and having to work for enough oxygen can cause the body to revolt.

I just touched my nose. Until I posted this, I was the only person who knew this fact.

the roslagsbanan commuter rail is the only actively used 2 ft 11 ^3^⁄~32~ in railway in the world.

...honestly, with a wikipedia article that extensive it hardly qualifies as "obscure".

Opossums have 13 nipples

The Leatherman Skeletool is currently available in several varieties, including the long-running standard model with an unfinished stainless steel body, a chunk of aluminum in the handle, and a 420HC semi-serrated blade, and the Skeletool CX variant with...whatever the black coating is made of, a carbon fiber chunk in the handle, and a 154CM plain blade.

When the model was first introduced, the base model had a plain blade, and the CX had a semi-serrated blade. This was swapped, as they realized first time knife buyers were more likely to see the semi-serration as a value-add, while more serious knife guys would prefer a plain blade. So you might find a very old Skeletool with a plain 420HC blade, or an old CX with a semi-serrated 154CM blade.

There are no extant recordings of George Orwell's voice

Fish mate inside of a sea cucumber's anus.

The smallest extant flightless bird in the world is the Inaccessible Rail.

The tiniest park in the USA is located on a city street corner in Portland, Oregon. Mill Ends Park

Edit: I fell down a rabbit hole. Corrected myself having posted it originally as “world’s smallest park” which is how I knew it - apparently it carried that distinction until Feb this year when a tiny space on a Japanese street (which was created in 1988) formally applied for, and was awarded the Guinness book of records title of World’s Smallest Park.

Also this one just popped into my head - the Guinness Book of Records was originally conceived as a means of settling arguments by compiling factual “records”. The original argument related to a shooting trip in England in which the Managing Director of Guinness Breweries partook, where a missed shot led to a disagreement about the fastest game bird. The realisation that arguments such as this would be commonplace, and that no resource existed to settle such matters - the niche for capturing these types of facts was identified and the book was born.

Fun fact, you can, in fact, make sourdough with the yeast from a yeast infection, and bake with it.