1. Former NBA Champion and Chicago Bulls player Horace Grant continued to wear sports-goggles after receiving Lasik surgery to help kids who were teased over wearing glasses.

1. A judge named Keith Cutler summoned to be a juror on a case he was presiding over. When he applied to be excused from jury service he was initially declined and was told to write to the resident judge, to which he replied: "I am the resident judge."

1. The Queen owns all unmarked swans in open water and she is the “officially appointed ‘Swan Keeper’ of England.”

01. Fart jokes have existed since at least 1900 BCE. A Sumerian quip about a woman farting in her husband’s lap is the world’s oldest recorded joke.

1. In 2022, we will be able to see a red supernova with a naked eye.

1. Electricity was introduced to Ethiopia in 1896 after Emperor Menelik II ordered two newly invented electric chairs as a form of humane capital punishment and realized they were useless in his country without electricity.

1. When King Kamehameha of Hawaii died in 1819, his body was taken and buried in secret in accordance with Hawaiian tradition to preserve his mana. To this day, his body has not been found and people only speculate on its location.

1. Wild salmon flesh is red because of pigments in the krill they eat. It is the same pigment that turns lobsters and flamingos red/pink. If this is not supplemented in farmed salmon, their flesh will be the normal gray of other fish. This is why farmed salmon says, "color added."

1. The three gorges dam in China holds back so much water that it slows the rotation of the earth slightly.

1. Smell hallucinations are called phantosmia and can be caused by infections, neurological damage, or epilepsy.

1. The US Army does not keep any record of "confirmed kills". Servicemen routinely report successful hits to their superiors and personally keep track.

1. The urine of ginger boys was prized in medieval Europe for making stained glass.

1. In Switzerland, if you fail in your practical driving test three times, you have to visit a psychologist to explain why.

1. A McDonald's Caesar Salad has more calories, fat, and salt than a Double Big Mac burger.

1. Queen Elizabeth II is a trained mechanic. She learned her skills in World War 2 (1945) as part of the Auxiliary Territorial Service.

1. A woman changed clothes while on a tour of Iceland in 2012 and people thought she went missing because they didn't recognize her. The woman then joined a search party looking for herself.

1. A group of women referred to as the "Brassiere Brigade" stole thousands of dollars from Southern Bell Telephone Company in the 1950s. The women worked as pay phone coin collectors and stole the money by smuggling it in their bras before it had been counted.

1. There was an explosion in 1626 in China which killed 20,000 people. The cause of the explosion has not been conclusively determined.

Fact Republic is where curiosity meets clarity. Discover random, history, and uncommon facts about everyday life. Uncover the unbelievable and unknown

1. The design for "Little Boy", the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, was never field tested before being used because the scientists were so confident in the design and there was only enough U-235 for one bomb.

1. A Polish poet named Stanisław Jerzy Lec in 1943 tried to escape from a Nazi work camp in Tarnopol (now Ukraine), for which he was sentenced to death. While digging his own grave, he killed a guard with a shovel and successfully escaped disguised as a Wehrmacht soldier.

1. The mystery novelist Agatha Christie posthumously saved a girl's life by having written in one of her stories about a rare poison. That same poison was killing this girl in real life, and the doctors had no clue, but a nurse happened to be reading that story at the time.

01. No one ever claimed in court that Twinkies made them commit a crime. In the murder trial of Dan White, the defense attorneys successfully argued diminished capacity as a result of severe depression. While eating Twinkies was given as evidence of depression, it was never claimed to be the cause of the murders...

1. A cow can be tricked into nursing a calf not her own, by skinning her dead baby and putting the skin on another calf. This practice is called “grafting.”

1. The United States experiences approximately 75% of all tornadoes in the world.

1. A man named Yacouba Sawadogo in Africa single-handedly stopped the desertification of his region by reviving ancient farming and irrigation techniques despite being ridiculed by his community.

1. In 2015, a dinosaur with a bat-like wing membrane was discovered, becoming the closest thing to a dragon/wyvern currently discovered.

1. There are squirrel monkeys living in the wild in Florida.

1. Scientology isn't legally considered a religion in all countries. Switzerland identifies it as a commercial enterprise, France and Chile as a cult, and Norway as a non-profit.

1. The first use of "Google" as a verb in pop culture (TV) happened on Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 2002.

1. In a study on the appeal of chocolate, it took researchers 1 year to find 11 men who don't like chocolate.

1. Scientology isn't legally considered a religion in all countries. Switzerland identifies it as a commercial enterprise, France and Chile as a cult, and Norway as a non-profit.

1. Benito Mussolini tried to stabilize the Leaning Tower of Pisa by filling the base with concrete, only to have it sag further.

1. A man was able to steal $10 million from a bank because its employees kept an important bank code on a post-it on the wall.

1. There used to be 4 billion American chestnut trees, but they all disappeared because of a fungus that kills them as saplings.

1. The German word for "turkey" literally translates to "threatening chicken." Porcupines are "spike pigs," raccoons are "wash bears," and platypuses are "beak animals."

1. In Rio Olympics of the top 30 fastest 100m sprints, 9 of them were clean and not associated with doping. All 9 sprints were by Usain Bolt.