FACTS

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Germany has more castles than there are McDonald's in the United States. Yep, you heard that right. Germany is estimated to have 25,000 castles, and there are around 13,000 McDonald's locations in America.

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Dogs are one of the three deadliest animals in the UK. The other two are bees and cows.

Mosquitoes are the world’s deadliest animal, killing up to a million people every year via the diseases they spread, such as malaria and dengue fever. In the UK, however, the 36 native mosquito species pose little in the way of threat, so they don’t feature in the three-way tie for the title of UK’s deadliest creature.

One of the three that does, is dogs. Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, recently added American XL bully dogs to the list of banned breeds after a rise in dog-related deaths. Numbers were around three per year, but in 2022, 10 people in England and Wales died from dog bite injuries, the tragic result of irresponsible ownership and a trend for breeding bigger, more muscular dogs.

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Sloths are slow in everything they do — including digestion. Because they digest foods so slowly, they basically have to breathe out their farts because they can't *actually* fart. If gas builds up in a sloth's intestines, it could get sick and potentially even burst. Rather than farting, the gases are reabsorbed into the bloodstream and are then respired out of the lungs.

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There are caves in Missouri that store 1.4 billion pounds of government-owned cheese. Located deep in the Ozark Mountains in limestone-converted mines, the caves are kept at a perfect 36ºF.

The stockpiles of government-owned cheese comprise country’s 1.4 billion pounds of surplus cheese.

In response to a national dairy shortage in the 1970s and 30% inflation on dairy products, the government intervened, resulting in prices falling drastically. So, in 1977, then-President Jimmy Carter decided to pour money into the dairy industry to motivate production and alleviate the crisis. The government set a new policy to subsidize dairy, providing two billion dollars to the industry over the next four years. While this plan was welcome to dairy farmers, it also primed them for overproduction.

Farmers who had been struggling were motivated to produce as much dairy as they could, knowing that whatever was not sold on the market could likely be purchased by the government, and it was. By the early 1980s, the government owned over 500 million pounds of cheese. The reason the dairy product was converted to cheese was because it has a longer shelf life than other dairy products as the government searched for solutions to the problem it had created.

“Government Cheese” was born, and the federal government distributed these cheese blocks through the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP). It was given away for free by pickup to people at food banks, community centers, and so on. “Government cheese” became a totem of American culture,

President Ronald Reagan holding a five pound block of “government cheese” in 1981

Flash forward to 2019, when the government again found itself storing cheese, this time to the tune of 1.4 billion pounds. Amid trade disputes and declining dairy consumption nationally, the American government has been subsidizing and stockpiling America’s surplus cheese. According to the USDA, American milk consumption has dropped from 275 pounds per capita in 1975 to 149 pounds per capita in 2017.

Though demand is declining, production is not. It has risen 13% since 2010. In 2016, the American dairy industry dumped a whopping 43 million gallons of milk into fields, animal feed, and anaerobic lagoons.

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Cornflakes were invented to suppress sexual impulses and desires.

The popular cereal was first made back in 1894 by John Harvey Kellogg.It was originally created as a healthy food for the patients of the sanitarium in which he worked, and its inception was functional: it was supposed to be healthy and deliberately bland.

It seems odd that someone should make deliberately tasteless food, but it was all part of an extreme diet – promoted by his church – aimed at suppressing passion. He was a Seventh-day Adventist, a branch of Christianity that advocated a strict vegetarian diet devoid of alcohol, caffeine, or meat. In addition, Kellogg was a fervent believer of abstinence and believed sex and masturbation were unhealthy and abnormal. In his book, Plain Facts for Old and Young: Embracing the Natural History and Hygiene of Organic Life he described what he saw as the negative effects of masturbation.

He cited mood swings, bad posture, acne, baldness, stiff joints, palpitations as well as a taste for spicy food to be the side affects of the ‘double abominable’ crime. To fight off any potential desire, he worked on ways people could curb sexual impulses including creating corn flakes, as well as a contraption that ran water through the bowel before following it with yogurt, delivered between the mouth and anus. Luckily, only the corn flakes caught on. His original recipe contained no sugar, so would have no doubt been less palatable than today’s version.

1913 ad

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There's a rare neurological disorder called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, which is a condition related to how you perceive your body, the world around you, or both.

Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (AIWS), also known as Todd's Syndrome or Dysmetropsia, is a neurological disorder that distorts perception. People with this syndrome may experience distortions in their visual perception of objects, such as appearing smaller (micropsia) or larger (macropsia), or appearing to be closer (pelopsia) or farther (teleopsia) than they are. Distortion may also occur for senses other than vision.

The cause of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is currently not known, but it has often been associated with migraines, head trauma, or viral encephalitis caused by Epstein–Barr Virus Infection. It is also theorized that AIWS can be caused by abnormal amounts of electrical activity, resulting in abnormal blood flow in the parts of the brain that process visual perception and texture.

Although there are cases of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome in both adolescents and adults, it is most commonly seen in children.