Fairy wren nestlings learn “passwords,” or unique single notes, from their mothers while still in their eggs; after birth they must use the passwords when calling for food, or the mothers will abandon the nest. In a 2012 study, scientists in Australia experimented with switching eggs and mothers, and found that passwords were not genetically inherited; the chicks assumed the passwords of their adopted mothers.
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Wikipedia editing guidelines ask that page authors avoid including mission statements in entries. “These usually focus on platitudes rather than specifics,” the site warns. “In short, they rarely tell us anything useful.”
Before their journey westward in America in 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were advised by Thomas Jefferson to “observe the animals” and especially “the remains and accounts of any which may be deemed rare or extinct.” One of the animal fossils that the expedition sent back is believed to have been of a dinosaur, dating from the Cretaceous Period.
Thirteenth-century professor Thaddeus of Bologna once claimed anyone who ate eggplant for nine days would go insane. A student decided to test the theory and after nine days returned to report he was not mad. Thaddeus asked him to turn around; on observing the student’s behind he announced, “All this about the eggplant has been proved.” It is said the student subsequently wrote a learned treatise on the subject.
A fourteenth-century-bc peace treaty recorded on a cuneiform tablet contains an invocation to Mithra, the Indo-Iranian god of the sun as well as of oaths and mutual obligation. In the Roman Empire, Mithras was honored as the god of loyalty to the emperor, while in Indian Vedic texts, he represents friendship and benevolence and, along with the god Varuna, is entrusted with the maintenance of the gods’ essence.
DNA tests determined in 2017 that Egyptian noblemen Khnum-Nakht and Nakht-Ankh, two brothers whose four-thousand-year-old mummies were excavated in 1907, had the same mother but different fathers.
“We are nothing but what we derive from the air we breathe, the climate we inhabit,” wrote J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782). “Those who live near the sea, feed more on fish than on flesh, and often encounter that boisterous element. This renders them more bold and compromising.”
A UK fashion student announced plans to harvest the DNA of late couturier Alexander McQueen—extracted from hair used in his 1992 collection “Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims”—to develop epidermal material for a line of leather jackets and bags. The lab-grown skin will feature McQueen’s freckles, moles, and tattoos, and be susceptible to sunburn.
Asked whether it was night or day that first emerged when the universe came into existence, sixth-century-bc Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus replied, “Night, earlier by a day.”
In 2008 a Bronx-based Red Sox fan worked one day of construction at the new Yankee Stadium—having said up to then he wouldn’t go there “for all the hot dogs in the world”—so he could bury a Red Sox jersey in the cement, hoping to “jinx that stadium.” His defiant act was reported to Yankee officials, who spent $50,000 digging up the jersey and threatened legal action. “It was worth it,” the fan said.
To promote malingering and desertion among German soldiers during World War II, the British Political Warfare Executive and Special Operations Executive produced innocuously titled German-language booklets, among them Exercise Protocol for War Marines, into which they inserted information on how to feign illness and escape service. The British then circulated such propaganda using various special-ops agents and balloon drops across Europe.
A lawsuit was filed in spring of 2019 in which owners of Ark Encounter, a creationist theme park in Williamstown, Kentucky, claimed breach of contract against insurers who denied liability in a landslide—caused by heavy rains—that undermined a park roadway. The defendants say the water damage that disrupted the 510-foot replica ark was a matter of “design deficiencies or faulty workmanship,” and thus not covered.
Having surrendered at the Appomattox Court House earlier that year, Gen. Robert E. Lee in 1865 became the president of Washington College—now Washington & Lee University—where he suggested, “The study of the mother tongue in any country is an important element of polite education, and is moreover valuable for its practical utility and necessary relation to other branches of learning.” He established in 1869 a chair in English language and literature, the first of its kind in the United States.
In 1890 Russian botanist Dmitri Ivanovsky was commissioned to study a disease destroying tobacco plants in Crimea. Filtering the sap from affected plants, Ivanovsky discovered in 1892 the presence of a small parasitic microorganism invisible under great magnification—a virus—which he thought was a minuscule bacterium. In 1898 Dutch microbiologist Martinus W. Beijerinck became the first person to recognize viruses as reproducing entities distinct from other organisms.
At a hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia, in 1952, a Dr. Hatcher tried to convince a Dr. Cranford to watch him perform a transorbital lobotomy. “Nothing to it,” Hatcher said. “I take a sort of medical ice pick, hold it like this, bop it through the bones just above the eyeball, push it up into the brain, swiggle it around, cut the brain fibers like this, and that’s it.” Cranford responded, “I was going to breakfast, but I’ve changed my mind.” Hatcher laughed. “You can change your mind,” he said, “but not like I can change it.”