12 Random Bits of Trivia the Clown in the Sewer Assured Us Would Float

Major League Eating, the organization behind the Fourth of July hot dog eating contest and all other major eating events, is hosting Goatham 2025: The Great Goat Graze-Off. Five goats employed by New York City to eat poison ivy in Riverside Park will compete. 

George Shea, the chair of the organization, has said the event will open up “the entire animal kingdom for our franchise,” but they’ve dabbled in animal competition before: a human-vs.-elephant bun eating competition. Shea recalls that “it was a horrific failure for humanity, we lost so badly.”

Scientists at the University of California, Irvine have found that a protein called reflectin is central to their ability to go from invisible to hyper-visible. They can selectively transmit or reflect light due to a specialized stacking of spiralized platelets made from reflectin.

An Australian man was asked by his boss to sell 200 cattle, but arranged to sell most of them at a steep discount to an accomplice, saving $100,000. He then stockpiled an additional $100,000 worth of premium bull semen, which is apparently a crime in Australia.

A man was arrested for stealing a bunch of fish from a pond, some of which were at least 20 years old.

Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, has $14 billion and over 100 biological children, and says he intends to split the money evenly among them all. He’s a father to six of them, and the rest were the result of donating sperm to a clinic for the last 15 years “to help a friend,” whatever that means.

Based on costs, safety and activities, one finance company put Ohio, New York and Minnesota at the top of the list, and Rhode Island, Connecticut and Delaware at the bottom.

Since the human genome was successfully mapped by a 13-year science project, a new team of scientists has set out to write up a blueprint for a human genome from scratch, calling their effort the Synthetic Human Genome Project. The lead researcher did that with an E. coli genome, and thinks the human version will take 10 years.

Among an uptick in kidnappings by masked cops, the gutting of life-saving services at home and around the world, and other things your dumbest coworker voted for, a record-low 58 percent of Americans say they’re either “extremely” or “very” proud to be an American.

A stretch of Canada’s Hudson Bay shoreline contains the only remaining rocks from the Hadean Eon, dating back 4.2 billion years.

A woman in New York City gives $40 “Garbage and Rat” walking tours, dropping rat facts like mating frequency (up to 20 times a day) and eating habits (dog turds often contain undigested dog food).

A Tennessee mother set the record by diving in every continent in 11 days, 19 hours, 23 minutes.