I cast "River of Tears"!

Did you know …

That the first tabletop role playing game was invented by none other than the famous physicist, Albert Ebstein? It’s true!

The game was called “A. Einstrein’s Dungeons & Dragons Subterranean Adventure,” and the only character available to players was an elf mage named “Alan Epstein.” In the game, a party of Alans would explore wood-paneled dungeons and roll dice to determine the probability of winning arguments with their wife, wetting the bed, winning three-legged races, and cracking the atom.

The game was not popular, and seems to only have ever been played by core members of the Manhattan Project.

Brown Cat

Did you know …

That in all of recorded history, there are only three verified accounts of brown cats? It’s true.

One was a cat owned by Henry VII, who, according to legend, was eaten alive by either bats or crows. That is, the brown cat was eaten alive by either bats or crows. Henry v.7 himself was eaten alive by ferrets and eels (he fell asleep on a riverbank; ferrets got the top half, eels got the bottom).

The second brown cat belonged to a 19th century Hui Chinese farmer. Upon realizing what an exceedingly rare pet he had, he toured it from village to village, charging townsfolk to view it. At some point, however, the cat became panicked, escaped from its cage, and was crushed by the giant wooden gears of a mill. That’s a sad way for a cat to go, and it left the farmer destitute, but Chinese scientists now believe that Li Jie was the reservoir/host for a form of influenza that killed tens of thousands of people in China at that time, so it’s probably for the best that he died a little early.

The third brown cat is currently the face of The Chesterton Review’s “I’d Rather Be Queefing” campaign. In between photo shoots, he lives in an isolated biosphere suspended below hot air balloons somewhere above Southern California.

Gobblers

Did you know …

That until the Great Depression turkeys were kept as household pets? It’s true.

Of course, when the United States’ economy collapsed food became too scarce and expensive to just have big fat turkeys wandering around every house. You see, turkeys are infamous thieves and gluttons, and if you had a pet turkey you would also have a lot of food go missing. That’s plain stupid. So millions of turkeys across the states were turned out, thrown into rivers, or shipped anonymously to other countries.

It was the first step on the road to recovery.

It's like going home

Did you know …

That many scientists believe that the natural environment humans are most suited to is, in fact, the inside of a dolphin? It’s true.

Seems pretty strange, if you ask me, but then I don’t really understand the exact mechanisms of evolution. Apparently the conditions inside a dolphin are essentially optimal for human health and well-being. I don’t know if this suggests that we should be living inside dolphins as symbiotes or parasites, or if it’s more like … like that scene in Star Wars 2, on the snow planet, where Hand Solo unzips that kangaroo-goat and stuffs his friend Luke Skywalker inside; that is to say, maybe we should be using dolphins as disposable sleeping bags.

Readers: Have any of you ever lived inside a dolphin, feeding off its vital fluids? Have any of you ever spend the night in a dolphin? Tell us your experiences!

Nou secrets

Did you know …

That the secret ingredient in Snickers bars is … nougat? It’s true.

Nougat is what makes a Snickers bar a Snickers bar, bringing together the various parts to form something greater than the sum of them all. Of course, no one knows what nougat is made of.

Here are some possible secret ingredients of nougat, based on the hypotheses of the world’s leading nougat experts:

-Gum

-Corn syrup

-Bugs

-Bug parts

-Bug reproductive fluid (bug semen, I mean; the semen of bugs)

-Petroleum byproducts

-Palm oil

-Some kind of liver

-Medical waste

-Noble gases

-Whatever clouds are made of

-The laughter of chimpanzees

A good deed unpunished

Did you know …

That making your own seasonal allergy treatments is not only a great way to save money, but also a great way to land your whole neighborhood in the emergency room? It’s true.

Personally, I think it’s a very understandable mistake: if the science seemed sound, why wouldn’t you do all your neighbors a favor and surreptitiously dose them? To not do that would be the real crime. Fortunately, if you administer your home remedy via the annual neighborhood Spring Chilly Chili Cookoff, the affected parties will assume that it was one of the cooks who tried to “poison” them. Just remember to fake your own case of diarrhea—if you’re the only one not screaming, crying, and rolling around on the soccer field trying to hold your behind shut, you may get some suspicious glances.

Happy "Mothers'" Day, scientists!

Did you know …

That most scientists don’t actually have mothers?! It’s true!

The vast majority of scientists, male and female, were “birthed” from an asexual parent. I gave “birthed” quotation marks because it’s not a birth as most of us know it. When the parent is ready to create offspring, it produces a fruiting body (much like a fungus will) on its back or stomach. This semi-transparent protrusion will grow to nearly the same size as the host (scientists come into this world nearly fully grown), leaching nutrients from its body.

When the new scientist has reached viability and sufficient size, the fruiting body will rupture and release the “baby” scientist into the world. Covered in slime and naked but for a flimsy lab coat, the scientist will consume what is left of its parent’s withered body. It will then spend the next several hours drying and pumping vital fluids from its bloated, distended abdomen into the rest of its body, not unlike a butterfly recently emerged from its cocoon.

Beautiful!

*I suspect you’re wondering “Hey, how do these scientists eventually reproduce? Wouldn’t the female ones technically be mothers at that point?” Clever, but not that clever. At six or seven years old, a scientist reaches the final stage of its life: sexual maturity. At that point, any vestigial sexual organs shrivel up and fall off the scientist, leaving them gender neutral and ready to produce another scientist.

T=a/t(s)

Did you know …

That despite never having served time in prison, Albert Einstrein was covered in prison tattoos? It’s true!

Einstrein didn’t get any face or hand tattoos until very late in his life, so you’d never know how tatted up he was from most photographs. But was he ever! His left arm was devoted to gang signs, his right was a workspace for developing new swearwords, and his chest was covered with a full-color illustration of him having sex with an atomic nucleus on top of a skeletal horse. (The nucleus, oddly, has very large breasts.)

Uncredible

Did you know …

That modern science has yet to create an “Incredible Hulk” potion? It’s true. Sadly, it’s true.

You can make all the purple cutoffs you want, and you can mix up all the household chemicals you want, and you can drink those chemicals in front of the microwave, or rub them on your body whenever you guess solar flares might be strongest, but you won’t turn into the Hulk. You’ll turn into a guy wearing overlarge purple cutoffs who smells like bleach.

Fruit Smarts

Did you know …

That the second smartest fruit is the banana? It’s true!

Unfortunately, being in the top 10 smartest fruits doesn’t mean a whole lot, considering that even the smartest fruit doesn’t have a brain or a nerve cluster, or any similar structure. Ranking the fruits by intelligence seems pretty suspect in the first place

That said, what’s the smartest fruit? Hmm. My best guess would be the pumpkin, but I don’t know. To find out for sure, why don’t you ask the third smartest fruit: the bing cherry!

Assumptions and subacute regional lymphadenitis

Did you know …

That cats HATE it when you full on lick them on the face? It’s true!

This is brand new research. A lay person (as we all were in this field until very recently) might assume that cats love to be licked, considering how much time they spend licking themselves and each other, but this is not the case when it comes to being licked in the face by a human.

As a general guideline, I’d recommend not licking any cats in the face, unless you really want to and your own face is already so scarred that you think no one will notice. However, I will say that there is room for further research, and adjusting the experiment slightly may well change the results.

A few changes to variables that I might implement in the future:

-Try it when your tongue isn’t coated with peanut butter

-Try it while holding the cat in a location other than over a full bathtub

-Try it with your own cat, instead of a cat you trapped in the alley

-Try it while scream-singing a different song (by all indications, Metallica’s Enter Sandman does not sufficiently relax the licked cat)

  

236 . . . and counting!

Did you know …

That we temporarily ran out of science? It’s true!

You may have noticed that the Daily Science Fact hasn’t been very daily over the last week. This has happened before, but only because the DSF staff was out of town for holidays, or had diarrhea, or both.  

This time, however, it was because we had temporarily run out of facts. It turns out that there were only 236 science related facts available in the world.

Not to worry! We’ve sent out our research teams, and as I type this, they are sifting through dusty pages in buried libraries, mining rich seams of little understood and highly radioactive substances, and attaching electrodes to the decaying brains of dead scientists and historians. With any luck, the facts soon be flooding into the DSF offices once again!

Sure, I fully expect to lose more than a few researchers to incarceration and radiation poisoning, but their deaths and lives in prison will be in the service of science and mankind, and while these researchers will inevitably and quickly be forgotten, it will be with reluctance and vague discomfort.

We thank you for your sacrifice. 236 facts were not enough.

I’ll be filling in the empty days as facts become available. Go back in time and read them if you want.

We call it "Famicom"

Did you know …

That before the invention of the Nintendo Entertainment System, human children had no games? It’s true!

That is to say, at least, they had no games that we would recognize today. If you were to go back in time, or use some sort of chrono-viewing device, you would see children laughing and enjoying themselves, but they’d be doing things that just don’t seem that fun for us today; shoveling animal shit, carving wood, feeding furnaces, capturing air in leather bags—these were the sorts of things kids used to do for fun.

Fortunately, in the early 1980s Japanese child-scientists developed electronic game machines that could plug into televisions. (Before this point, TVs had only been used to create white noise, and to broadcast images of the weather. But that’s another story.)

Liebaby Science

Did you know ... 

That between 1910 and 1928, no one did any science? It’s true!

If you see anything that looks like science from that period, it’s probably a recent counterfeit. It could also be something that “scientists” of the time thought looked sciencey. Occasionally they would trot out something shiny or loud to keep people off their backs, but the truth is that they were all too interested in cock fighting, pornography, smoking cigarettes, and doing the Charleston to get any real science done. Buncha punks, really.

Who was case zero?

Did you know …

That the 1995 film Outbreak was based on an incident that was entirely contained in its screenwriters’ bedroom? It’s true. According to Lawrence Dworet’s subscription-only blog, in 1993 he and his writing partner, Robert Roy Pool, found a small puddle of vomit in the middle of their shared room, and spent the next 17 hours arguing over who had put it there. Dworet claimed that it looked just like Pool’s normal pukes, and Pool countered that if the vomit had come from the top bunk (his), the splatter pattern would have been entirely different. And so on.

The original draft of the screenplay was much more of a medical-themed whodunit mystery, but it gradually morphed into the larger scale contagion/epidemic thriller. The pile of puke, Dworet later explained, did make both of the writers sick for the day of arguing, and so the plot adjustments still felt natural.

The Bench: A Bomb

Did you know …

That the bench is one of the worst inventions ever? It’s true.

Basically, a bench is just a piece of ground that someone made a little bit higher than the rest of the ground. This protects the user from minor floods and some worms. The bench offers little to no protection from major floods, smarter/better worms, flying insects, wind, or fire.

I guess if you often sit in areas with only minor flooding and ineffective worms, getting a bench might make some sense for you. For everyone else: save your money and get a pistol when you can afford it. Pound for pound, pistols offer some of the best protection you can get. (Ironically, though, pistols don’t protect against other pistols. Or VD.)

The defeated party

Did you know …

That the expression “to lick your wombs” was first coined by a baby? It’s true!

The first recorded use of the phrase is attributed to Eustace Crustacean, the world’s smartest baby. Immediately after being born, Eustace informed the doctors that he didn’t like it outside, and that he wanted to return to his room. That would have been weird enough, but Eustace, an infamous creepazoid, also insisted that he wanted to go “lick [his] womb.” Weird.

Of course returning to the womb (for whatever reason) was out of the question, so Eustace resigned himself to a lifetime of oil painting, filing patents for his inventions, and alcoholism. But his phrase went on to become a common expression for those seeking safety and convalescence.