Fun Facts That Are

A London skyscraper accidentally became a giant curved mirror. Its glass facade focused sunlight into a beam so intense it melted a parked Jaguar, scorched a shop, and let a reporter fry an egg on the pavement. The architect had built the same flaw in Las Vegas years earlier.

Marlon Brando played Superman's father for 12 days and under 20 minutes on screen. He took $3.7 million upfront plus 11.75% of the gross - a cut the producer later estimated at roughly $19 million total. Christopher Reeve, who played Superman in every scene, earned $250,000. Brando never learned a single line. He read them off cue cards - including words written on the baby's diaper.

Two whales got stranded on a sandbar at Mahia Beach in New Zealand. A mother and her calf kept beaching themselves for over an hour. Rescuers were close to giving up. Then a wild dolphin named Moko showed up. The whales seemed to answer his calls. They followed Moko through a narrow channel and swam free.

Every winter there's a migration bigger than the Serengeti's - and almost nobody has heard of it. Hundreds of millions of sardines surge up South Africa's east coast in a shoal over 7km long. Dolphins herd them into bait balls near the surface. Sharks rush in from below. Cape gannets plunge at up to 86km/h and a Bryde's whale swallows the whole ball in one pass. Scientists still debate why the sardines bother.

Rogaine was not invented to grow hair. Upjohn developed minoxidil in the 1950s to treat ulcers - it failed. They pivoted to a blood pressure drug, approved as Loniten in 1979. During those trials, 60-80% of patients grew unexpected hair. A 1980 letter in the New England Journal of Medicine exposed the side effect. Upjohn launched Rogaine in 1988 - the first drug the FDA ever approved to regrow hair.

Terry Crews worked as a courtroom sketch artist in Flint before the NFL. He won a scholarship to study at the Interlochen Arts Academy. He then entered Western Michigan on an art scholarship, before switching to football. When teams cut him from NFL rosters, he painted portraits of teammates - charging $5,000 each. The muscle-bound action star is a trained, photorealistic portrait artist.

Hedy Lamarr - Hollywood's "most beautiful woman" - co-invented frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology during WWII to guide Allied torpedoes. The Navy dismissed it. Her patent expired in 1959. She never received a dollar. That technology became the foundation for WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth.

Smokey Bear was a poster before he was a real bear. In 1950, firefighters in New Mexico found a three-month-old black bear cub clinging to a burned tree, his paws scorched from a wildfire. They nursed him back to health, named him Smokey, and sent him to the National Zoo in Washington DC. He lived there for 26 years. He got so much fan mail he was given his own ZIP code: 20252. He is buried in Capitan, New Mexico.

The Nazca Lines in Peru are one of the world's great ancient mysteries. Researchers spent nearly a century mapping 430 carved figures in the desert. Yamagata University asked IBM to build an AI trained on aerial imagery. In just six months, AI found 303 new figures - nearly doubling what a century of fieldwork found.

The mantis shrimp has 16 types of color receptors compared to humans' 3, but despite this they're actually terrible at distinguishing between similar shades. Scientists believe they use colors more like a barcode scanner than a camera.

Scarlett was a stray cat living in an abandoned Brooklyn garage when it caught fire in March 1996. She ran into the flames five times to carry each of her five kittens to safety, one by one. Her eyes were blistered shut by the end. Unable to see, she touched each kitten with her nose to count them before she collapsed. She survived, was adopted, and the clinic received over 7,000 letters from people wanting to give her a home.

In August 1923, a 2-year-old Scotch Collie named Bobbie was separated from his family during a road trip through Wolcott, Indiana - 2,551 miles from home. Six months later, on February 15, 1924, he turned up at his family's door in Silverton, Oregon: gaunt, paws bloody, claws worn to nothing. He had crossed the Continental Divide alone, in winter. He came home.