12 Ancient Bits of Trivia Jealously Guarded by Mysterious Temple Guards on the Other Side of a Treacherous Moat and the Steps of Knowledge

The film cost $210 million to make, or $337 million adjusted for inflation. The ship itself cost $7.5 million, which would be about $237 million today. And so, the movie cost almost 1.5 times more than the ship.

In 2021, an Australian man with ALS was able to tweet with the help of a brain-computer interface.

Colombian drug smuggling narco-submarines can be built and deployed from the jungle, making them absurdly hard to intercept. When the U.S. Coast Guard finally nabbed one in 2006, they named it Bigfoot, because they’d suspected these vessels were myths.

She auditioned, and got really close, but was offered a writing position instead. Her boss at The Office, former SNL writer Greg Daniels, stuck to his guns — because she hadn’t landed the cast spot, he wouldn’t let her out of her contract.

The FBI and the CIA heavily recruit from the Mormon community — they’re often multilingual due to their missionary trips, and they don’t fuck around with drugs and alcohol.

A big whig at Nokia was once clocked going 25 kilometers per hour over the speed limit. Because fines are based on the offender’s income, he had to pay about $100,000. That’s thought to be the most expensive speeding ticket in history.

The Forbes Pigment Collection at Harvard Art Museum has a preserved array of bizarre, disgusting pigments. The collection includes tyrian purple, which requires a type of sea snail secretion, and kermes, which is produced by grinding blisters created by a specific type of insect.

Smoking on airplanes became illegal in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But a cigarette butt tossed in the garbage could be so dangerous, ashtrays are on the “minimum equipment list” — the checklist of parts that must be in working order for a plane to be allowed to take off.

In stark contrast to shows like Finding Bigfoot, who will make infinite seasons out of zero discoveries, Jeremy Wade decided to end his show after nine seasons because he’d caught every creepy little beast he set out to: “Ten years ago, I had a list in my head, which seemed impossibly ambitious at the time, but everything has now been ticked off.”

In 2005, an agriculture expert was able to make 2,000-year-old seeds germinate, officially bringing back the Judean date palm. It had been officially extinct for 1,800 years.

In 1977, SNL ran an “Anyone Can Host” contest, asking people to explain why they should be selected, in 25 words or less. Eighty-year-old Miskel Spillman won by writing in: “I’m 80 years old. I need one more cheap thrill, since my doctor told me I only have another 25 years left.” Until Betty White hosted at 88, Spillman was the oldest host in SNL history.

A pelt collected in 1989 in South America was originally classified as an ocelot. In 2001, a researcher noticed that it definitely wasn’t one of those, but couldn’t put their finger on what it was exactly. Authorities spent the next 20 years trying to figure it out, and in 2023, they just kind of threw in the towel and decided it belonged to a never-before-classified animal. Welcome to the world, leopardus narinensis, we hope you’re still alive somewhere.