22 Facts I Learned This Week That I Will Be Thinking About For All Of Eternity

🚨 Warning: This article contains mentions of murder, suicide, and other sensitive topics. 🚨

1.Imagine being this good at your job! River Monsters, an Animal Planet series starring Jeremy Wade, ended because Wade had caught every large freshwater fish species known to man, so there was essentially no more content left to film. The show, which followed Wade as he attempted to catch fish from legends and folklore, ran for nine seasons.

2.William Shakespeare was worried that when he died, his bones would be stolen from his grave, which was common among high-profile people at the time of his death. To prevent this, the Bard placed a curse on his own grave, with his tombstone reading, "Good friend for Jesus sake forbear, to dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, and cursed be he that moves my bones." He also ponied up some extra cash to ensure that his final resting place would be inside a church, instead of outside in a graveyard.

3.It's completely silent up in space. Because sound waves need something to travel through, the lack of atmosphere in space means there's nothing for sound to pass through. There is sound on Earth because sound waves can pass through our atmosphere.

4.Mack Ray Edwards was a construction worker who used to kill children and then bury their bodies under portions of the California highway he was working on. He began confessing to his crimes in 1970, when he entered a Los Angeles police station, placed a loaded handgun on the counter and revealed he was responsible for the robbery and kidnapping of three teenage girls.

From there, Edwards admitted to the brutal murders of six more missing California children, many of whom were suspected of being runaways by authorities. To make matters worse, Edwards told authorities that while he buried their bodies under the portions of the highway he was working on, the areas had already been paved over and completed, and thus were very difficult to dig up. Edwards was sentenced to death, but died by suicide before his execution date. In 2008, a dig to recover the remains of 15-year-old Roger Madison was unsuccessful, in part because of how expensive it would be to continue digging under portions of the busy freeway.

5.While US law requires the president to be paid a salary, you might be surprised that it's only been increased five times since 1789! Back in the day, George Washington took home $25,000. The pay was increased to $50,000 in 1873 during Ulysses S. Grant's second term. In 1909, it was increased to $75,000, during Taft's administration. By the time Harry Truman was re-elected in 1943, the president was earning $100,000. It was bumped up to $200,000 in 1969 while Richard Nixon was Commander in Chief, and has been resting at $400,000 since George W. Bush took office in 2001.

6.Singer Buddy Holly predicted his own 1959 death. Holly claimed that he and his wife Maria were simultaneously woken up by a nightmare involving a plane crash near a farm. Weeks later, Holly went on tour with his band. While they normally traveled via bus, it was a cold winter, and the unheated bus notoriously broke down often, so Holly decided to charter a plane to get to their next stop. He and his band were killed when the plane crashed in a cornfield in Iowa shortly after takeoff.

7.When Napoleon Bonaparte died while exiled on the remote isle of St. Helena, it was revealed that during his autopsy, his heart, stomach, and penis were all removed. While it's unclear why the coroner castrated the ruler, some believed it was out of spite for not being included in his will. Others think that a priest ordered it out of revenge after Napoleon repeatedly called him impotent. Napoleon's member has traveled far and wide since the castration: it was originally sold to a London bookseller, then to a new owner in Philadelphia, before landing in a New York museum. It has been in the possession of a private collector since the 1970s.

8.Dingoes, a breed native to Australia, are actually an ancient breed of domestic dog. DNA testing proved that there aren't enough differences between the dingo and the average domestic dog to make them separate species. Scientists believe that this lack of differentiation is caused in part by human interference in dog breeding.

9.On the night of Iraq's Kuwait invasion, there was a huge increase in pizza deliveries to the Pentagon, tipping people off to the fact that a military operation was happening. After this, the term "PizzInt," or "Pizza Intelligence," was coined, referring to people in Washington, D.C. learning something big was happening because of the increase in pizza deliveries.

While the Pentagon has a food court inside to prevent any ill-timed tipoffs, the government still takes extra precautions from time to time. During the 2011 raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, instead of placing a huge order from one restaurant, the White House supposedly ordered only two or three pizzas from a large selection of local pizzerias to avoid the media from finding out about the operation before it was officially released.

MGM / Via giphy.com

10.If you live in Singapore, you are automatically registered as an organ donor on your 21st birthday. Opting out means that if you ever need an organ transplant, you will be placed at the very bottom of the transplant list.

11.Private Kevin Elliott and his friend Barry Delaney jokingly made a pact that if Elliot was killed in battle, Delaney would wear a lime green dress to his funeral. Three years later, Elliot was killed during a Taliban ambush in Afghanistan. Staying true to his word, Barry showed up to the proceedings wearing a lime green dress that he bought for £4.99 at Primark.

12.Ben and Jerry's founders, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, originally wanted to start a bagel company. When they went to buy the equipment, they realized it was out of their price range, so they pivoted to ice cream. While I can't imagine a world without Ben and Jerry's ice cream, I'm not gonna lie, their original pitch sounded pretty great: they wanted to hand deliver bagels, cream cheese, lox, and the New York Times to customers on Sunday mornings.

13.If you're scared of getting bitten by a shark, then I suggest you also steer clear of New York City. The number of people who are bitten by another person in New York is ten times the number of people who get bitten by a shark each year.

14.Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker. Because of her job, she had access to the Warsaw Ghetto, where hundreds of thousands of Jewish people were imprisoned. Horrified by what was happening, Sendler ended up rescuing over 2,500 children from the prison. Some of the children were smuggled out in caskets and potato sacks, while others were taken out in ambulances or through secret tunnels. In order to protect the children, she gave each of them a new identity, but recorded all of their old information in a secret code and kept it hidden in a buried jar, so that she could reunite the children with their families when it was safe.

In October 1943, the Nazis caught onto this plan and arrested Sendler. She was sent to prison, where Nazis tortured her in order to get her to give up the names of the people who helped her with the rescue efforts. She refused and was sentenced to death, but was able to escape unharmed. Sendler assumed a new identity and continued her work. Once the war was over, she remained true to her word and helped reunite families.

15.If you live in Wyoming, you better get used to taking the stairs! In the entire state, there are only two escalators, both located in banks.

Dior / Via giphy.com

16.In 1933, Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt snuck out of a White House event, commandeered a plane, and went on a joyride to nearby Baltimore. Eleanor also supposedly briefly took command of the plane’s controls to test out her pilot skills after taking flying lessons. The pair were still wearing their gowns from the dinner while up in the air.

17.Although coral attach themselves to the ocean floor as if they had roots, they are actually animals and not plants. Coral do not make their own food, which is a characteristic of plants. Instead, they use their tiny tentacle-like arms to sweep food from the ocean floor into their mouths.

18.The making of Shrek was quite chaotic. While Mike Myers' Scottish voicing of Shrek makes the movie memorable, nailing that portrayal wasn't without some trial and error. The late Chris Farley was originally tapped to play the ogre. He recorded somewhere between 85–90% of the dialogue before he died in 1997. Myers was given the role, and began recording the dialogue in a Canadian accent. Partway through filming, he decided he wanted to switch to the Scottish accent, and had to rerecord all of the lines he previously recorded.

DreamWorks / Via giphy.com

On the animation side, DreamWorks employees treated having to work on the project as a punishment. When higher-ups thought employees weren't giving the production of The Prince Of Egypt their all, they were sent to work on Shrek, which wasn't given as much support as The Prince of Egypt. Turns out, Shrek would go on to become one of DreamWorks' most enduring movies. It ended up saving the company from financial ruin, and turned into a lucrative franchise.

19.In 1987, the state of Nevada developed an entirely uninhibited county called Bullfrog County with exorbitantly high property taxes. Why? The state wanted to prevent the federal government from constructing a planned nuclear waste site in the area. The concept was scrapped the next year when it started to cause the state legal problems. In 2002, a proposal to build a waste facility within Yucca Mountain, located about 80 miles away from Las Vegas, was approved, but by 2011, the Obama administration pulled all federal funding from the project, which was highly contested by the public.

20.We do not deserve dogs! Smoky was a Yorkshire Terrier who served in World War II. The pup only weighed four pounds, but participated in 12 combat missions, 150 air raids, and a typhoon in Okinawa. By the end of Smoky's military career, she had been awarded 8 Battle Stars. She is now credited as being the first therapy dog, and was likely the catalyst for a renewed interest in adopting Yorkies as pets.

21.When Pac-Man was invented in Japan in 1980, it was actually called Puck Man. The name was changed to Pac-Man when people started voicing concerns that the "P" in "Puck" would be changed to an "F" by aspiring graffiti artists.

Pac-Man / Via giphy.com

22.As a teen in the 1940s, Judith Love Cohen loved math and dreamed of becoming an engineer. While her teachers tried to convince her to go to finishing school, she earned a spot at the University of Southern California, where she majored in engineering. Her talents earned her a job as a NASA contractor, where she was often the only woman in the room. Cohen went on to help develop the Abort Guidance system, the mechanism that saved the Apollo 13 astronauts after an oxygen tank exploded.

Cohen continued to work while heavily pregnant. On the day she went into labor, she had been working on a complex problem. Not wanting to abandon her work, she took a printout of the problem to complete while in the hospital. Not only did she end up finishing the problem, she also gave birth that day. The child? None other than Jack Black. A twist that I am truly obsessed with!