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Sixty Amazing-but-True Facts!


    • In the weightlessness of space a frozen pea will explode if it comes in contact with Pepsi.
    • The increased electricity used by modern appliance parts is causing a shift in the Earth's magnetic field. By the year 2327, the North Pole will be located in mid-Kansas, while the South Pole will be just off the coast of East Africa.
    • The idea for "tribbles" in "Star Trek" came from gerbils, since some gerbils are actually born pregnant.
    • Male rhesus monkeys often hang from tree branches by their amazing prehensile penises.
    • Johnny Plessey batted .331 for the Cleveland Spiders in 1891, even though he spent the entire season batting with a rolled-up, lacquered copy of the Toledo Post-Dispatch.
    • Smearing a small amount of dog feces on an insect bite will relieve the itching and swelling.
    • The Boeing 747 is capable of flying upside-down if it weren't for the fact that the wings would shear off when trying to roll it over.
    • The trucking company Elvis Presley worked at as a young man was owned by Frank Sinatra.
    • The only golf course on the island of Tonga has 15 holes, and there's no penalty if a monkey steals your golf ball.
    • Legislation passed during WWI making it illegal to say "gesundheit" to a sneezer was never repealed.
    • Manatees possess vocal chords which give them the ability to speak like humans, but don't do so because they have no ears with which to hear the sound.
    • SCUBA divers cannot pass gas at depths of 33 feet or below.
    • Catfish are the only animals that naturally have an ODD number of whiskers.
    • Replying more than 100 times to the same piece of spam e-mail will overwhelm the sender's system and interfere with their ability to send any more spam.
    • Polar bears can eat as many as 86 penguins in a single sitting.
    • The first McDonald's restaurant opened for business in 1952 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and featured the McHaggis sandwich.
    • The Air Force's F-117 fighter uses aerodynamics discovered during research into how bumblebees fly.
    • You *can* get blood from a stone, but only if contains at least 17 percent bauxite.
    • Silly Putty was "discovered" as the residue left behind after the first latex condoms were produced. It's not widely publicized for obvious reasons.
    • Approximately one-sixth of your life is spent on Wednesdays.
    • The skin needed for elbow transplants must be taken from the scrotum of a cadaver.
    • The sport of jai alai originated from a game played by Incan priests who held cats by their tails and swung at leather balls. The cats would instinctively grab at the ball with their claws, thus enabling players to catch them.
    • A cat's purr has the same romance-enhancing frequency as the voice of singer Barry White.
    • The typewriter was invented by Hungarian immigrant Qwert Yuiop, who left his "signature" on the keyboard.
    • The volume of water that the Giant Sequoia tree consumes in a 24-hour period contains enough suspended minerals to pave 17.3 feet of a 4-lane concrete freeway.
    • King Henry VIII slept with a gigantic axe.
    • Because printed materials are being replaced by CD-ROM, microfiche and the Internet, libraries that previously sank into their foundations under the weight of their books are now in danger of collapsing in extremely high winds.
    • In 1843, a Parisian street mime got stuck in his imaginary box and consequently died of starvation.
    • Touch-tone telephone keypads were originally planned to have buttons for Police and Fire Departments, but they were replaced with * and # when the project was cancelled in favor of developing the 911 system.
    • Human saliva has a boiling point three times that of regular water.
    • Calvin, of the "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strip, was patterned after President Calvin Coolidge, who had a pet tiger as a boy.
    • Watching an hour-long soap opera burns more calories than watching a three-hour baseball game.
    • Until 1978, Camel cigarettes contained minute particles of real camels.
    • You can actually sharpen the blades on a pencil sharpener by wrapping your pencils in aluminum foil before inserting them.
    • To human taste buds, Zima is virtually indistinguishable from zebra urine.
    • Seven out of every ten hockey-playing Canadians will lose a tooth during a game. For Canadians who don't play hockey, that figure drops to five out of ten.
    • A dog's naked behind leaves absolutely no bacteria when pressed against carpet.
    • A team of University of Virginia researchers released a study promoting the practice of picking one's nose, claiming that the health benefits of keeping nasal passages free from infectious blockages far outweigh the negative social connotations.
    • Among items left behind at Osama bin Laden's headquarters in Afghanistan were 27 issues of Mad Magazine. Al Qaeda members have admitted that bin Laden is reportedly an avid reader.
    • Urine from male cape water buffaloes is so flammable that some tribes use it for lantern fuel.
    • At the first World Cup championship in Uruguay, 1930, the soccer balls were actually monkey skulls wrapped in paper and leather.
    • Every Labrador retriever dreams about bananas.
    • If you put a bee in a film canister for two hours, it will go blind and leave behind its weight in honey.
    • Due to the angle at which the optic nerve enters the brain, staring at a blue surface during sex greatly increases the intensity of orgasms.
    • Never hold your nose and cover your mouth when sneezing, as it can blow out your eyeballs.
    • Centuries ago, purchasing real estate often required having one or more limbs amputated in order to prevent the purchaser from running away to avoid repayment of the loan. Hence an expensive purchase was said to cost "an arm and a leg."
    • When Mahatma Gandhi died, an autopsy revealed five gold Krugerrands in his small intestine.
    • Aardvarks are allergic to radishes, but only during summer months.
    • Coca-Cola was the favored drink of Pharaoh Ramses. An inscription found in his tomb, when translated, was found to be almost identical to the recipe used today.
    • If you part your hair on the right side, you were born to be carnivorous. If you part it on the left, your physical and psychological make-up is that of a vegetarian.
    • When immersed in liquid, a dead sparrow will make a sound like a crying baby.
    • In WWII the US military planned to airdrop over France propaganda in the form of Playboy magazine, with coded messages hidden in the models' turn-ons and turn-offs. The plan was scrapped because of a staple shortage due to rationing of metal.
    • Although difficult, it's possible to start a fire by rapidly rubbing together two Cool Ranch Doritos.
    • Napoleon's favorite type of wood was knotty chestnut.
    • The world's smartest pig, owned by a mathematics teacher in Madison, WI, memorized the multiplication tables up to 12.
    • Due to the natural "momentum" of the ocean, saltwater fish cannot swim backwards.
    • In ancient Greece, children of wealthy families were dipped in olive oil at birth to keep them hairless throughout their lives.
    • It is nearly three miles farther to fly from Amarillo, Texas to Louisville, Kentucky than it is to return from Louisville to Amarillo.
    • The "nine lives" attributed to cats is probably due to their having nine primary whiskers.
    • The original inspiration for Barbie dolls comes from dolls developed by German propagandists in the late 1930s to impress young girls with the ideal notions of Aryan features. The proportions for Barbie were actually based on those of Eva Braun.
    • The Venezuelan brown bat can detect and dodge individual raindrops in mid-flight, arriving safely back at his cave completely dry.

10 People with Unbelievable Talents

Published on 10/23/2008 under Science
TAGS: Talented People, gifted and talented, talents, move objects with mind, psycho kinesis, Flatulist, Flatulism, Pop eyes, Mr Methane, Tu Jin-Sheng, Miroslaw Magola, Manjit Singh, Michel Lotito,

Tu Jin-Sheng: Pulls a Truck with his Penis

As Kung Fu magazine puts it: "When a man can tow a truck with his genitals, that’s all anyone ever really remembers about him." Tu Jin-Sheng, a 50-year-old man from Taiwan, is a martial arts grandmaster of Iron Crotch, a branch of Qigong said to have 60,000 followers worldwide. On 2005, he attached his penis to a truck for a demonstration, and pulled it several yards across a car park in Fremont.

About 20 people, most of whom study Qigong, the ancient Chinese art of movement and breathing to increase energy, gathered for the truck pull. Its practitioners are known to lift hundreds of pounds with their genitals to increase energy and sexual performance.

The truck demonstration was made for a British crew filming the documentary "Penis Envy" shown below, it's a must-see!



Miroslaw Magola: Moves objects with his Mind

"Remember, there is no spoon". Just like that kid from "The Matrix" movie, Miroslaw Magola --The "Magnetic Man"-- defies laws of gravity with an extraordinary ability — applying the power of psycho kinesis he can raise anything from metal pans to marble statues, transport them through the air to affix to his body, then creates a force to keep them there — simply using mind control.

An avid enthusiast of the phenomenon of psychic energy, Miroslaw has developed his skill to manipulate lifeless objects in mid-air to obey his will, even forcing them spin around or shake. His mental powers are so keen that he can jump around while an object is stuck to his head without losing his mental grasp of the item. Miroslaw explains how he employs psycho kinetics to perform these uncanny feats, “It works because I load myself with energy (I connect myself to it) and at the same time I wish for the object to raise.”



Miroslaw has undergone numerous tests for his perplexing skill which remains unexplained by conventional science to date. Although Miroslaw Magola is gifted with some of the strangest abilities in the world which are generally regarded as paranormal, his book is filled with protests against exactly this form of categorization. He deals with and discusses things ‘beyond our world,’ yet describes himself as a radical rationalist and insists on his normality.

NOTE: Although writer James Randi has discredited Magola, the "magnetic man" has responded as well





Manjit Singh: Pulls a Jet with his Ears

57 year-old Manjit Singh, called the "Ironman", holds more than 30 world records including pulling a double decker bus with his hair, lifting 85 kg with his ears, and of course, pulling a Jet also with his ears! On April 2007, Ironman pulled the aircraft -weighting approximately 7.4 tonnes- 12ft along the apron at East Midlands Airport, UK.

Speaking after the record attempt, he said: "I don't feel too bad, I have a little bit of pain around the ears but I'm ok." The attempt raised money for his charity Manjit Fitness, which aims to get children living in his native Mahilpur, India involved in sport.


Ru Anting: Writes with his Tears

56 year-old Ru Anting, Luoyang in China, has a very special talent: he can write calligraphy with water he shoots from his eyes. After sucking up some water with his nose, he then sprays it through his tear ducts, ending up on the paper.

Ru discovered his unusual talent as a child while swimming in the river. "Sometimes I would swallow water while swimming, and once I accidentally discovered the water I swallowed could be shot out through my eyes. My friends were all shocked to see it," he said.

But it wasn't until the 1990s, when Ru lost his job in a local fertilizer factory after more than 20 years, that he began to develop his unusual talent. After three years of intensive training, he found he could shoot water accurately up to 10ft from his eyes at will.


Michel Lotito: Eats Everything

French entertainer Michel Lotito is known as Monsieur Mangetout (Mister Eat-it-all). As a famous consumer of undigestables, Lotito's performances are the consumption of metal, glass, rubber and so on in items such as bicycles, televisions, a Cessna 150, and smaller items which are disassembled, cut-up and swallowed. The aircraft took roughly two years to be 'eaten' from 1978 to 1980. He began eating unusual material while a child and has been performing publicly since 1966.

Lotito does not often suffer from ill-effects due to his diet, even after the consumption of materials usually considered poisonous. When performing he consumes around a kilogram of material daily, preceding it with mineral oil and drinking considerable quantities of water during the 'meal'. He apparently possesses a stomach and intestine with walls of twice the expected thickness, and his digestive acids are, allegedly, unusually powerful, allowing him to digest a certain portion of his metallic meals.


Thai Ngoc: Needs no Sleep

Sixty-four-year-old Thai Ngoc, a vietnamese farmer, is known around the world for a unique talent: he needs no sleep. After getting a fever in 1973, we hasn't been able to sleep and has counted infinite numbers of sheep during more than 11,700 consecutive sleepless nights. "I don't know whether the insomnia has impacted my health or not. But I'm still healthy and can farm normally like others," Ngoc said. Proving his health, the elderly resident of Que Trung commune, Que Son district said he can carry two 50kg bags of fertilizer down 4km of road to return home every day.

Ngoc currently lives on his 5ha farm at the foot of a mountain busy with farming and taking care of pigs and chickens all day. His six children live at their house in Que Trung. Ngoc often does extra farm work or guards his farm at night to prevent theft, saying he used three months of sleepless nights to dig two large ponds to raise fish.


Zhang Quan: Claps as Loud as a Helicopter

70 year-old Zhang Quan is hoping to get into the record books - by clapping his hands. His claps measured 107 decibels, just three decibels lower than whirling helicopter blades. The bad news? local environmental protection officials say Zhang is so loud, he could face arrest for noise pollution if he claps too often.


Wei Mingtang: Blows up Balloons with his Ears

Wei Mingtang, 55, is a factory worker from Guilin city, in Guangxi province, China. About 30 years ago he discovered his ears leaked air, so he came up with the idea of using his ears and a pipe for his -now famous- act: inflate balloons with his ears!

On a recent city Spring Festival Party, Wei also blew out 20 candles in a line within 20 seconds using a hose leading out from his ears.


Claudio Pinto: Pops both of his Eyes

48-year-old brazilian man Claudio Pinto hopes for a place in the record books for an amazing talent: he can pop both eyes 95% out of their sockets. Pinto has undergone various tests and doctors say they have never seen or heard of a person who can pop the eyes as much as him.

The man from Belo Horizonte, said: "It is a pretty easy way to make money. I can pop my eyes out four centimetres each, it is a gift from God, I feel blessed."


Paul Oldfield: World's Only Flatulist

Mr Methane, alias former train driver Paul Oldfield, claims to be the only performing professional flatulist in the world, or more precisely, a "professional farter". His 'talent' came to light when he accompanied his sister in yoga practice. There, he discovered - to his surprise and delight - that he was able to take in air through the rear, retain it, and then expel it as and when he chose. At first, it was nothing more than a party trick to entertain fellow railwaymen, but eventually Mr Methane found that by careful control, he could pick out a simple tune.



He gradually expanded his repertoire, which now ranges from Strauss's Blue Danube waltz through to Kylie Minogue's I Should Be So Lucky. Then, on 1991, he left his job at British Rail and devoted himself to his new entertainment career. On stage, he wears a bright green-and-purple skin-tight costume with cape and mask, looking like a superhero, and travels around the world with his act.
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