30 WTF Facts That Will Make You More Interesting On Zoom Calls

1. “Rainbow Valley” on Mount Everest isn’t named for the colors of rocks or snow, but for the multitude of colorful jackets of mountaineers that died there.

2. The first person who was sentenced to the electric chair died in an extreme manner. Someone forgot to wet an essential part of the machine and the prisoner ended up with bubbling skin, melting eyes, and foaming mouth among other things. The amount of electricity was so strong that he began to convulse violently where he weakened the straps. He twitched so erratically that his index finger dug through the palm of his hand.

The entire room smelled of burning flesh. Many people who came to see had fainted during the execution. The most fucked up part was he could be heard wheezing after they shut the electricity off.

3. There are tiny mites that live at the base of your eyelashes. Demodex folliculorum or Demodex brevis if you care to look up what lives there.

4. After raping his blindfolded victims, the Golden State Killer would be extremely quiet and pretend he had left the room. When the poor victims would start to move towards the phone or try to untie themselves he would scare the fucking shit out of them.

He would also break into victims’ houses multiple times before attacking to rearrange furniture or dresser drawers, leave rope for when he would eventually tie them up, and go to extreme lengths to creep someone out before attacking.

5. Dead people can get goosebumps.

6. Serial killer Dennis Rader, also known as BTK, never raped his victims because he felt that it was wrong to ‘cheat on his wife’.

7. Around 2,500 left-handed people die every year trying to use right-handed tools.

8. Most cruise ships have their own morgue. Along with swimming pools, golf courses, and jaw-dropping theaters, most cruise ships are also equipped with a morgue. If any passenger dies while aboard, the ship’s crew has to be able to tend to the body and store it until they arrive in port. An estimated 200 people die on cruise ships every year. Just think about that next time you sign up to sail away to paradise.

9. Robert Liston is famous for performing the only operation with a 300 percent mortality rate. This is in the era of theater surgery. During one operation in particular, while trying to be swift with his blade, he managed to cut off his assistant’s fingers; which they later died from infection. Additionally, a spectator got his clothes clipped by the blade and died of a heart attack. Oh, and the patient died too.

10. In Japan when people commit suicide they take off their shoes before jumping to tell the police it wasn’t a murder.

11. The original chainsaw was on a pocket watch like chain and pulled back and forth to cut through bone. It was invented to cut through a woman’s pubic bone in order to give more room for the baby to pass.

12. The inside of a banana peel, when rubbed against a mosquito bite, can help numb the itching sensation.

13. Flatworms stab each other with their penises and the loser of the battle becomes pregnant and the mother of the offspring.

14. If Barbie existed in real life, she would be about 7 foot 4. Her neck would be eleven inches long.

15. A man name Hisashi Ouchi experienced extreme amounts of radiation during a nuclear meltdown in Japan. In the end, he had literally no DNA left in his body but doctors kept him alive for 83 days which required many blood transfusions and bandages to keep him just barely functional among other things. It’s a pretty interesting story even with how unethical it is.

16. Female kangaroos have 3 vaginas each.

17. A moray eel has two sets of jaws, much like the Xenomorphs in the Alien movie. The first jaw is located in the mouth, which serves as a vice to hold captured prey. The second jaw is located in the throat. Called a pharyngeal jaw, this structure is shot forwards at breakneck speeds from the gullet into the mouth to swallow prey. As the eel holds the prey in its first set of jaws, the pharyngeal jaw is quickly shot from the throat, grabs down on the prey, (oh yeah… it has teeth too…) and drags it down into the stomach. It’s a terrifying thought.

18. Hair and nails keep appearing to keep growing for a short time after death. That’s because skin retracts after death, making them appear longer.

19. In 1972, French scientists wanted to know how ants responded to radiation, and if any mutations would occur. They placed small pieces of Caesium 137 around an ant-hill, only to discover half a year later that the ants had relocated the Caesium to the inside of their nest and used it for central heating.

No mutations or behavioral effects were observed in the ants after 11 months, though flora in the area did die or lost its foliage.

20. Roughly 7,000 people die every year because of their doctor’s bad handwriting.

21. Cleopatra lived closer to the time mobile phones were invented then she did to the time the pyramids were built.

22. Sharks puke out their whole stomachs when they’re stressed out.

23. The collars on men’s dress shirts used to be detachable, to save on laundry costs as the collar was the part that needed the most cleaning.

24. A lot of foods, most notably ice cream, have seaweed in them. A specific seaweed, referred to as rock weed where I live, gets harvested and sold to be used as a gelling agent in a lot of foods.

25. Founding father Gouverneur Morris died by trying to perform self-surgery with a whalebone (he tried to use it as a catheter). He stuck it in his pee-pee hole and died from internal injury and infection.

26. The anus is the first body part to develop in the womb. Guess we’re all assholes by nature.

27. Every year there are between 80 to 100 million more people alive on the planet than the previous year.

28. Women usually have more testosterone than estrogen. It’s just that in men the ratio is even more imbalanced.

29. Adélie penguins are one of the only animals that prostitute themselves. The females have sex with males in exchange for pebbles.

30. The only thing I learned from my first year Psych course: “Babies cry with an accent.”