Talk for Bitnorth 2019.
01. The silkworm moth is super cute, and totally domesticated. It can’t live without human help. Once it turns into a moth all it does is have sex and die - it doesn’t eat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt-DkhVLqp8
02: A quartz watch works because the quartz crystal tuning fork vibrates 32,768 times a second https://youtu.be/_2By2ane2I4
03: You can’t plead insanity in Alaska, Kansas, Utah, Idaho or Montana: https://youtu.be/i-YPZ1_h7g
04: Weaver ants use their larvae as glue guns, pointing them at the leaf walls of their homes and squeezing them. This releases silk that glues the leaves together: https://youtu.be/G_dv_dNJf3U
05: Kale, cauliflower, cabbage, brussels sprouts, broccoli, and about dozen other things we eat all derive from the same plant, called Brassica oleracea, because millions of years ago this plant had an ancestor that tripled it’s genome, making genetic variation a lot greater in this family of plants https://youtu.be/JcVJDz1-8Lc
06: The Tantalus or Pythagoras cup is a roman bowl that works as a kind of siphon. When you fill it up to a certain point, it will start draining out the base of the bowl and you can’t stop it from draining completely. It’s one of the oldest known prank devices. https://youtu.be/JtYC974tWrI
07: Salt is one of the key ingredients in our diets and our chemistry. But black pepper originated in India and was mainly used to make rotten meat taste better. When the French got pepper, Louis the 14th made it a standard in our cuisine because he was a picky eater and didn’t like flavour. https://youtu.be/yzBIarGJjHk
08: Xenophyophores are single-celled ocean organisms that can grow as large as 20cm. https://youtu.be/szIcnSIlrDE
09: There are badass birds called Fire Hawks in Australia who intentionally start fires. https://youtu.be/5zcJs16aZ5s
10: In most places in the world, power is sent using 3 phase alternating current. Using an alternating current makes it easier to step up or down the voltage using a simple transformer, and 3 phase cycle is the lowest number of phases we can combine to get a pretty smooth supply of power. https://youtu.be/AHFZVn38dTM
11: Cougars are the biggest cats who purr and meow. https://youtu.be/BXhfZRE08ko
12: At Johnson Matthey Noble Metals, they refine such expensive metals, a special brush is used to collect dust from the shoes of visitors and workers, recovering dust with the equivalent worth of a big new car every year. https://youtu.be/Fg2WzCzKpYU
13: This guy is David Hahn. In 1994, when he was 17 he built a nuclear reactor in his Michigan backyard, exposing his neighbourhood to 1000x the regular dosage of background radiation and his community was declared a superfund site. https://youtu.be/SHZAaGidUbg
14: David Hahn was arrested in 2007 for stealing smoke detectors, and he died of alcohol poisoning at the age of 39. https://youtu.be/G0QMeTjcJDA
15: Due to the restaurant's reputation for staying open in extreme weather, the so-called “Waffle House Index” is informally used by FEMA to gauge storm severity.
16: Since 1600 in Japan, there’s been a baby crying festival where sumo wrestlers make babies cry to protect them from evil spirits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I8ROyD85S4
17: Parasitic wasps inject their eggs under oak tree cells in leaves and bark, The eggs release chemicals that tell the tree how to build a custom gall to protect the egg. https://youtu.be/lOgP5NzcTuA
18: This is called an anti-oliod and it rolls smoothly with a constant centre of mass. https://youtu.be/Kx3QtNmhN-o
19: Schlieren imaging, a technique used to detect tiny differences in air, can be accomplished using a spherical concave mirror, a bright LED flashlight, a razor blade or coloured filters, some tin foil, and a camera. https://youtu.be/K7pQsR8WFSo
20: The hardest catch you can achieve with the Kendema Japanese toy is to spear the ball on the point of the handle. The trick is to use angular momentum - if you spin the ball around it’s vertical axis, the hole will stay at the bottom and you can catch it on the point. https://youtu.be/TkGawXjsltc
21: You can get shrunken coins at http://capturedlightning.com/frames/interesting1.html. The way they are shrunk is with a really strong electromagnetic field around a coin using 8000v to produce a field of 50,000 amps (which is like 5 typical lighting bolts). This drives the magnetic field up and delivers 26 megawats to the coin, but most of the charge stays on the outside of the coin experts a force inwards, which shrinks the coin, at least until the coil explodes. https://youtu.be/d2TDXKfBaMQ
22: An easy way to tell if a corner is square is to measure 3 units from one of the square corners and 4 units from the other, and them confirm that the hypotenuse between those two points is 5 units. If it’s not, your corner isn’t square. https://youtu.be/NG_y1nr9Kxo
23: A man named Mattias Pilhede’s grandfather was single handedly responsible for getting monkeys banned as pets in Sweden. https://youtu.be/cKOtPR0DZdU
24: you can melt and recycle HDPE plastic (like the kind milk jugs are made of) using a sandwich press at 180-190c without causing fumes. https://youtu.be/W_XUJwINdLw
25: Scientists have found evidence of takeout restaurants in Pompeii. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BQ5JSbVWiw
26: You lose 1/3rd of your gut microbiome every time you poop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jijuG9tyoR0&t=468s
27: It rains diamonds on Saturn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niw_n34lcAI
28: The Burj Khalifa building in Dubai is so tall that the sun sets 3 minutes later on the top floor than it does on the ground floor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exeNXXH-Y3o
29: Mercury is the closest planet to Earth on average: https://youtu.be/GDgbVIqGADQ
30: American flags on military uniforms and vehicles are shown "backwards" (the blue canton with the stars in on the right instead of the left) when on the right sleeve/side of a vehicle to emulate a flag being held on a pole while running forwards: https://youtu.be/iXAQFvro7GU
31: When it was first invented, the SOS morse-code distress call didn’t actually mean anything. it was just an easy-to-remember and easy-to-recognize pattern of arbitrary letters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNoOYeS0gs0
32: The maned wolf isn’t a fox or a wolf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSQ_ajl3cvE
33: Moby used to live and record in an old factory that was a prison hospital and a slaughterhouse, and it has 3 levels of basement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EFPQpVFdPs
34: Trains in Switzerland are forbidden from having exactly 256 axles because if they do, the train-detecting hardware will suffer an integer overflow and report 0 axles, which is interpreted as there not actually being a train at all https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34detVy-Hiw
35: Space smells like diesel fumes, gunpowder, and barbecue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp1Mgbu4H3o
36: Water can boil and freeze at the same time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Juz9pVVsmQQ
37: You can bend a laser beam with a water stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifbCsha7Syc
38: The chevrotain or lesser mouse deer looks like a tiny deer with fangs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKLoaU0f3jU
39: If you crack an egg deep enough underwater, it just stays together as though it’s still in a shell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJmoROaMduQ
40: In a room of just 23 people there’s a 50% chance that two people have the same birthday. https://youtu.be/Jn2s1BSMQyM
41: This is how your face develops in the womb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFY_KPFS3LA
42: If you shuffle a pack of cards properly, chances are that exact order has never been seen before in the whole history of the universe. https://youtu.be/uNS1QvDzCVw
43: Tigers have striped skin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjjkXdbpo18
44: Cicadas use prime numbers as an evolutionary strategy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjLiWy2nT7U
45: There is enough DNA in the average person’s body to stretch from the sun to Pluto and back — 17 times. https://youtu.be/0EUi3bJJnzc
46: Masturbating an elephant for sperm collection involves an enema and some pretty robust prostate stimulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q01T0AnVlSI (NSFW)
47: The first person to die while building the Hoover Dam was John Gregory Tierney, and the last was Patrick William Tierney, his son, exactly 14 years later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2wHCvPDt-E
48: Two neurotransmitters, GABA and glycine, work together to paralyze you as you fall asleep every night. Scientists theorize that people twitch themselves awake when they start dreaming before this process is complete. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hehY2FCWuDo
49: In the early 1900’s, a doctor named John Brinkley offered a cure for impotence that involved implanting goat testicles in his patients. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08HgcD5vIjI&t=131s
50: Both cats and dogs will eat their owners faces (and other parts), sometimes only hours after they die. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGr2KgWBy7U
51: The Flinstones was originally aimed at adults and sponsored by Winston cigarettes, and everybody smoked. It was also the first tv show to show a married couple sharing the same bed on TV. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNtk1dirZvI
52: You get a whole new skin every two to four weeks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqJWSyUbmkw
53: Snails with right-handed shells cannot mate with those with left-handed ones. But you can predict the presence of oil in a location by looking at their ratios. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEvsjMvztUs
54: The spokes on a rolling wheel are blurrier in the top half of the wheel than the bottom half because the point of rotation at the bottom of the wheel is motionless relative to the ground. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLV4NMsWxUc
55: You can make plasma by microwaving grapes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCrtk-pyP0I
56: Pet bobcats pee in the toilet or sink without training because they prefer to pee in running water in the wild.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOgZDUFvk4Y
57: The Japanese giant hornet’s venom is so powerful that it can actually dissolve human flesh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7VMcMJBjD4
58: Whether a fetus is right or left handed can be predicted by its position in the womb.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGLYcYCm2FM
59: The FDA says there are an average of 30 insect fragments and 1 rodent hair in every jar of peanut butter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyLmINv4Joo
60: The reason we can’t observe the behaviour of a particle without changing its behaviour is because at super tiny scales, there is no way to make an observation without smacking the particle around with some kind of energy. There’s no such thing as a passive measurement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6fAcigk3Ys
61: If you look at the table of the international phonetics alphabet, you can easily see the sounds that a human mouth can’t make by looking at the empty cells. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uZam0ubq-Y
62: Thanks to something called the no slip boundary condition, you can drop multiple colored drops of corn syrup in a tube of clear corn syrup around a rotating inner drum, spin it til it’s mixed, and then unmix it by spinning the inner drum in reverse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2_dJY_mIys
63: There is a Mars Helicopter, the first powered flying device being sent to another planet, in a lab in Pasadena. Flying it on Mars will be like flying a helicopter at 100,000 feet on Earth. 40,000 feet is the record for a helicopter flight on Earth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhsZUZmJvaM
64: China’s artificial sun reaches 100 million degrees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRa798QVEFQ
65: Sodium flames can appear black in the light of a sodium lamp. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn2OyQh6o7U
66: Canadians apologize so much that BC passed a law called the Apology Act that says saying ‘Sorry’ does not imply an admission of fault in a court of law. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-z5YrLa6KE
67: There were probably active volcanos on the moon as recently as the cretaceous period. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53TGz30Z1sM
68: The only letter missing from the periodic table is J. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz4Dd1I_fX0
69: When a grizzly and a polar bear breed, they make either a Puzzle Bear or a Growlar Bear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyX7HH0omIU
70: Calling shotgun when riding in a car comes from the term ‘shotgun messenger’ which was used to refer to the guard who sat next to the stagecoach driver. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ny3v5YF9lgY
71: Nintendo trademarked the phrase ‘It’s on like Donkey Kong’ in 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrYlMWIXrf0
72: Leonardo Di Caprio improvised the phrase ‘I’m king of the world’ in Titanic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmMvgisxymE
73: Pastafarian heaven is full of beer volcanos and stripper factories: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqPw_kZRtj4
74: Coffins and caskets are different because of their shapes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUaqKZnClGQ
75: Sunflowers can help clean radioactivity from soil. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2pQ9guh27s
76: Colorado has an active volcano, and we don’t know why it exists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ax2RBPmPveg
77: You can improve the range of the signal from your car remote by pointing it at your head: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYeXuM_xL1M
78: African elephants are evolving without tusks and the leading theory is that this is a selection bias that protects them from poachers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8EVQdIUWBE
79: In 1923, a jockey named Frank Hayes died on his horse during a race, but his horse won, making him the first jockey to win a race after dying. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYJwFTU6xII
80: The world’s largest piano was built by a 15 year old in New Zealand. It took him 2 years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x57kcRdojrY
81: Spiked dog collars were invented by the Greeks to protect dogs from having their throats bitten by wolves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkmwSZ4K7d0
82: The founder of Jake Daniels died from kicking a safe, breaking his toe, and getting a lethal infection that progressed over a period of 5 years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W8AbnqqBpw
83: The planet Pluto was named by an 11 year old girl. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BESfWDMO-v0
84: Spongebob and Karen are married in real life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al6w3CPPUWQ&t=7s
85: In 2009, Steven Hawkins threw a party for time travellers, and didn’t tell anyone until after. That way, only time travellers would be able to attend. No one showed up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elah3i_WiFI
86: Bulls don’t care about the color red. They’re color blind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZwS0U17hF0
87: Some types of herring fish communicate by farting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcwCYIfm6eA
88: Ben and Jerry’s has a graveyard for their dead flavours. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClkM4nSr2Bc
89: Scientists have discovered sharks living in an active underwater volcano, but scientists can’t dive to investigate them because they would get burned. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0e3t18rrjOA
90: The Ethiopian calendar is 7.5 years behind the Gregorian calendar because it has 13 months. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDG71FqBIm0
91: China is building panda shaped solar farms to interest young people in renewable energy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7sy85kHKDk
92: Underwater rugby is a real sport. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sjxkk8VJBd0
93: In 1324 two Italian city states fought a war over a bucket that resulted in 2000 deaths. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cln0J87vulU
94:It is illegal to die in Longyearbyen Norway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kETYvHON_I
95: Emilia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt once ducked out of a White House dinner to commandeer an airplane and go for a ride, and there’s a kid’s book about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Pq8WiupeYg
96: During prohibition, bootleggers wore cow shows to avoid being caught. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6sg7EBqJZk
97: Some cats are allergic to people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IcrssvIt10
98: Melbourne trees were given email addresses so citizens could report problems. People sent the trees love letters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnZ_c5LEbKw
99: The large synoptic survey telescope will collect more data in the first year than every other telescope combined has ever collected. And then it will keep doing that for ten years. https://youtu.be/33UMkPe93Ko
100: This is how you synthesize plutonium 238 for your spacecraft. https://youtu.be/-sh5XZo5wRE
