Asklemmy

The Latin meaning of the color ultramarine is "over the sea" Also, they once made a pigment called mummy, which was literally made out of finely grinded mummy.

2” x 4” construction timber is 1.5” x 3.5” because of industrialisation (not shrinkflation)

Chinese scientists worked to create the "humanzee," a human-chimpanzee hybrid in the '60s. Female chimpanzees were impregnated with human sperm. The experiment was cut short by the Cultural Revolution - the scientists were sent to labor camps and a three-months pregnant chimpanzee died of neglect. The Soviets attempted a similar program in the '20s.

A lot of people know of the April Fools 418 I’m a Teapot error code, but did you know there’s a full Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol from the same RFC for running a coffee pot server? It even includes an HTCPCP method named “WHEN” to let the pot know it has poured enough cream.

The dot above the letter i is called a tittle.

There are more hydrogen atom in a single molecule of water than there are star in the entire solar system.

HD-DVD and Blu-ray weren't the only HD video disc formats competing for dominance in the '00s. HD VMD which was basically a DVD containing more layers unsuccessfully tried to compete with the two. The company who produced it dissolved in 2008 and only a few titles were ever released on the format.

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This symbol, the ampersand, used to have equal status with letters of the alphabet and was stuck at the end after Z.

That's how it got its name. People would say "X,Y,Z, and, per se, And". (And "sort of" an and). Thus, "And per se And" became Ampersand.

Joe

You know how geese fly in a “v” shaped pattern in the sky? One side of the “v” is usually longer than the other. The reason for that is that there’s more geese on that side.

Bedsheet thread counts have been artificially inflated for years by the shifty linen companies counting individual fibers that the threads consist of as threads themselves. It’s become a meaningless number, since there is zero regulation. If you want a nice thick heavy cloth, GSM is the number you want, but most companies won’t share this (looking at you, The Company Store) because they obviously don’t want you to know how thin and flimsy their products really are before you buy them.

Diamonds aren't stable and will eventually, over billions of years, decompose from their cubic molecular structure to carbon's more stable form, graphite, which has a hexagonal molecular structure.

Oh, here's another good gemstone related one!

Amethyst and citrine are both quartz varieties, and if the color source happens to be from traces of iron in the crystal lattice, one can be turned into the other. Heating amethyst can make citrine, and irradiating citrine can turn it into amethyst. This is because the only actual difference between the two is the valiance level of a specific election in the iron atom giving the stone its color.

Several popular graphing calculators from Texas Instruments, including the TI-83 and TI-84, have a display resolution of 96*64, but only 95*63 pixels are used for graphing.

However, the earlier TI-81 did use all 96*64 pixels. The rationale for this change was to establish a central row and column for the axes and a central pixel for the origin. The cursor could only move pixel-by-pixel, and since the axes and origin would end up "between" pixels on the TI-81, they were inaccessible by the cursor.

The entomology book Life on a Little Known Planet taught me that bebugs mate via "traumatic insemination". The female has no opening, so the male pierces the exoskeleton and the wound later heals over -- all of which allows entomologoists to count the number of times a female has mated by the number of scars on their abdomen.

Most male cats, when investigating something with a paw, will use the left paw.

Diabetics piss has so much sugar in it that you can make high end whiskey with it.

Darwin drank tortoise piss and, according to his documentation, didn’t hate it.

I just touched my nose. Until I posted this, I was the only person who knew this fact.

Living at high altitude for long periods of time can cause a disease that is otherwise most associated with cocaine and meth.

Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension has some weird causes, but it seems that high altitude and having to work for enough oxygen can cause the body to revolt.

the roslagsbanan commuter rail is the only actively used 2 ft 11 ^3^⁄~32~ in railway in the world.

...honestly, with a wikipedia article that extensive it hardly qualifies as "obscure".

Opossums have 13 nipples