More people died making V2 rockets than were killed by them. Germany was facing a large issue with rocket fuel shortages during the project because people kept drinking it. The fuel was made from 70% ethyl alcohol and 30% water, distilled from potatoes. It was the most economically viable fuel at the time, since they were already very low on other fuels. To stop workers from drinking it, they denatured the alcohol (essentially poisoning it) but people kept drinking it anyways and getting extremely ill. This simply caused people to start leaving the V2 program and costing Germany massive losses in production. This also means that any alcohol over 70% is stronger than actual WW2 rocket fuel.
Syphilis
Before the medicinal cure for syphilis was found, people who had the disease were infected with malaria in order to cure them. The extremely high fever caused by malaria killed the syphilis bacteria and the patients were then cured of their malaria using quinine.
Bill Gates
Starting now, if you earned one US dollar every second, it would take 2921 years to have more money than Bill Gates.
Aircraft
There were more planes destroyed during World War 2 than there are intact planes in the world today.
Headless Chicken
On the 10th of September 1945 a farmer was beheading chickens to sell at the local market when he realised that one was not dying like the others. It was still running around and trying to peck at the ground. He caught it and put it in a box overnight, but the next morning it was still alive. And so Mike the Headless chicken became famous. He was fed with liquid food squirted directly into his oesophagus and had to have mucus cleared out using a syringe. He lived for 18 months and finally died when he started choking on mucus and his owners couldn't find the syringe in time.
Spider's Web
The silk from a black widow spider's web has 10 times the tensile strength of steel.
Orange
The colour orange was actually named after the fruit. Before then the colour was described as red. Which is why people with orange hair are called red-heads.
Attractive
If 99% of the Earth's population found you unattractive, that means that 76 million people would still think you are good looking.
Dinosaurs
Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809 and the first dinosaur fossil was officially discovered in 1819. So that means that Abraham Lincoln was born before the existence of dinosaurs became known to the general population.
The Sun
If sound could travel through space, the roar of the sun would be unbearable on Earth, even though it is 93 million miles away.
GPS
Global Positioning Satellites have to compensate for time dilation, because time runs at a different rate in orbit.
Printer Cartridges
A toner cartridge is more expensive by weight than a B2 Stealth Bomber which costs $2 billion US dollars.
Tigers
There are more tigers in private collections in Texas than there are anywhere else in the world, wild or otherwise.
David
The statue of David by Michelangelo was made from a block of very low grade marble that no-one wanted to use for sculptures but was too expensive to discard.
Children
The record of most children born to a single woman is 69. Valentina Vassilyev, a peasant woman from Shuya in Russia, gave birth to 16 pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets during her lifetime.
Gravity
The gravity of a black hole is so great that it literally bends light around the black hole. This means that if you could somehow stand close enough to a black hole and look straight ahead, you would actually see the back of your own head.
Temperature Changes
The city of Spearfish in South Dakota holds the world record for the fastest recorded temperature change. On January 22, 1943, at about 7:30 a.m. MST, the temperature in Spearfish was −20°C. The Chinook wind (a local wind that blows through the mountains) picked up speed rapidly, and two minutes later (7:32 a.m.) the temperature was +7 °C above zero. The 27 °C rise in two minutes set a world record that still stands today. By 9:00 a.m., the temperature had risen to 12 °C. Suddenly, the wind died down and the temperature tumbled back to −20 °C. The 32.2 °C drop took only 27 minutes.
Photos
Every two minutes we take more photographs than all of humanity took during the 1800s.
Ejaculation
The average speed of semen being ejaculated out of the male body during orgasm is 45km/h. This can be increased with Kegel exercises.
Sparrows
One day Mao Zedong, otherwise known as Chairman Mao, saw a sparrow eating grain. Thinking that the sparrows were hurting China's grain supply, he and the Communist Party launched the Four Pests Campaign. The Chinese military and population killed every sparrow they could find. Embassies didn't allow the Chinese to kill sparrows on their property, so the Chinese banged pots and pans outside the embassies 24/7 until the sparrows died of exhaustion. Unfortunately for the Chinese, sparrows mainly eat insects, not grain. The locust population exploded and 43 million people starved to death.
Nose
Your nose is always in your line of sight, your brain just ignores it.
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