Neil Young’s father is in the Hockey Hall of Fame.
mmm
Chico Marx invented a fastener often used in aerospace applications.
Glowworms are real, but they’re not actually worms - they’re flying insects.
I always assumed the name of Angel Falls in Venezuela was religiously inspired. It’s actually named for an American pilot named Jimmie. Jimmie Angel. I understand that this is a sore point for some Venezuelans.
There are no skeletal muscles in our fingers. There are arrector pili muscles.
Not Annie’s claim, but I found this:
You’re thinking of Zeppo, and he wasn’t the inventor. He owned the company that was the first to begin producing them.
He received an award from the Hockey Hall of Fame. He’s “in” the Manitoba Hockey Hall of Fame.
For more…assuming you have a lot of spare time… check out:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TodayIlearned/
for example:
Cites included.
What do the following people have in common? (No, it’s not the bomb)
- Leo Szilard (Founded the Manhattan Project)
- Edward Teller (Known as Father of the Hydrogen Bomb for his work on nuclear physics)
- Eugene Wigner (Nobel prize winning nuclear physicist)
- John von Neuman (Legendary mathematician - set theory, self-replication analysis used to discover DNA, explosive lensing math used for nuclear explosion)
- Nicholas Kurti (Physicist on Manhattan Project)
- Theodore von Karman (Founded Jet Propulsion Lab)
- Michael Polanyi (Chemist and polymath – 2 of his pupils and his son won Nobel Prizes in chemistry)
- Andrew Grove (Founded Intel corporation, Time magazine’s Man of the Year in 97)
- John Kemeny (Invented BASIC computer language)
- Dennis Gabor (1971 Nobel Prize - Physics)
- …and a half dozen other geniuses, including George Soros – I got tired of typing.
They all went to 3 high schools in Budapest that were within 3 miles of one another. All in the period 1890 to 1920.
I find this utterly astounding.
link
mmm
No, anatomically modern humans have been around for much longer than that. However, this is not to say that our Neanderthal brethren could not have painted them.
OTOH,
And speaking of things I just learned today, I had not heard of Homo sapiens idaltu.
It’s not uncommon for incorrect facts to be included in death notices.
Here is a list of members:
Scott Young is not on it. Journalists are not on it.
As has been pointed out, this is false.
To expand on “this is false,” the word “rap” has been a term for “talking” since long before there was rap music, and originally had no connotation at all of being associated with music or poetry; it just meant talking. It was from that origin that the word came to mean “poetic spoken word performance in music.” Sicne it started out just meaning to talk (as early as the 1930s) it would make no sense at all for it to be an acronym involving music (a meaning it did not take on until the 1970s.)
For fun linguistic facts; linguists don’t know where the following words came from:
Bird
Dog
Kick
I know it seems weird such common words don’t have a known origin, but it is true. Etymploically speaking they all suddenly appear in English or Old English out of nowhere, with no likely cognate in any other language. “Dog” is especially odd, because until teh 16th century, English speaking people called that animal a hund, or hound. And then suddenly they started calling them dogs, and no one knows why.
The word likely comes from he Old English “docga,” which may have meant “strong” - but no one knows where THAT word came from, and no one knows why in the 1500s people replaced a perfectly good word with a totally different one.
“Bird” is equally weird. In Old English, animals with feathers and wings were called “fugol,” which is the origin of the word “fowl.” Bird may be from “Bridd,” which meant a young bird specifically, but again, no one has any idea where “Bridd” comes from either. It is related to no other word in any other language.
They probably took it from Mbabaram 
RickyJay, interesting. It seems that with “kick” experts can at least make an educated guess, that it’s from the same Indo European root (meaning “to sprout” or “jut out”) that gave us “chit” and “scion.”
Wow, that is cool. Thanks for posting.
Another derivation that’s weird if it’s correct (and it’s still not completely certain) is that the word “bad” apparently comes from the word “bæddel”, which means something like “homosexual” or “effeminate” or “hermaphrodite”. It thus is similar to the way “gay” is used in certain dialects (and, yeah, I’m aware how offensive that it is). It’s also similar to the way that “lame” is used, and people seldom remark on the fact that the slang use of that word is also offensive.
Cool! Your link led me to a half hour spent catching up on hominid fossil advances since the 80s. Then, the possible common ancestor to humans and most of all apes — 11 to 7 million years ago, give or take — was Ramapithecus. I see now that’s been renamed Sivapithecus, and is considered ancestral only to orangutans.
Instead, the current best candidate for a common ancestor to apes and humans (but not orangutans) is Ouranopithecus, first found in Greek Macedonia, and later in Turkey. Who knew!