You Can't Make This Stuff Up!

[Lee Stewart]

The peak of Mt. Everest is marine limestone that contains fossilized skeletons of marine creatures from what used to be the Tethys Sea. Approximately 470 million years ago, it was sea floor! Mt. Everest and the Himalayas were formed 70 million years ago when the Eurasian plate and Indo-Australian plate collided, pushing the plate boundaries up into the mountain range you can see today

[Lee Stewart]

Most people think dogs see in black and white, but they actually see in shades of yellow and green. The color spectrum we see is thanks to the rods and cones in our eyes, which are responsible for interpreting color by wavelength. Humans (and primates) see three wavelengths of color (red, blue, and yellow) but dogs only have cones that see two (yellow and blue). Basically, to a dog, anything that is a shade of red will just be interpreted as a shade of green.

[Lee Stewart]

If you analyze the nursery lyrics, you’ll notice there is not a single mention of an egg. Historians have surmised that Humpty Dumpty was actually a cannon used during the English Civil War of 1642–1649, which the Royalists sat atop a wall surrounding the city of Colchester to ward off an attack from the Parliamentarians. In 1648, when the Parliamentarians sieged the city, the wall that Humpty was on was blown apart, and Humpty fell. Because of its size, none of the king’s horses and none of the king’s men were able to recover the cannon.

[Lee Stewart]

As reported by the Telegraph, scientists at the University of China who were researching the material of the Great Wall were surprised to learn that there was a special ingredient added to the standard mixture of lime and water: sticky rice! Not only did this make the Great Wall mortar the world’s first composite mortar, it also was the reason why the Ming Dynasty’s structures were able to withstand everything from earthquakes to the sands of time.

[Lee Stewart]

If you never understood where the name came from, now it can finally make sense: the bars, when created in 1930, were sold in packs of three, each with a different nougat flavor: vanilla, chocolate, strawberry. During the sugar rations in World War II, three-packs became too expensive to produce (and consume), so the company cut the retail down to one flavor.

[Lee Stewart]

The ManhattAnt (the official scientific name not yet determined) is found only within a 14-block strip of New York City, and nowhere else on the planet. It’s similar to a regular cornfield ant, but can’t be matched to any other known ant species. Scientists believe that it evolved thanks to isolation within the concrete jungle—and potentially from an unhealthy diet, as it lives in such close proximity to Upper West Siders, who, with all the pizza and hot dogs, don’t exactly have the healthiest diets.

[Lee Stewart]

[Lee Stewart]

[Lee Stewart]

[Lee Stewart]