Fun Facts That Are

Nancy Valla, Dignity Health's Chief Nursing Officer, reported expired anesthesia machines, outdated defibrillators, and unsterilized surgical instruments at her hospital. Her reward: being replaced while on medical leave. A California jury awarded her $27.5 million.

The Lincoln Memorial has a secret: a 43,800 sq ft cave beneath it - nearly twice the floor space of the memorial above. Rainwater seeping through the marble has grown real stalactites, and 1914 construction workers left cartoon graffiti on the columns, now preserved behind plexiglass. It opens as a public museum for the first time on June 25.

The Gateway Arch was built as two separate legs measured to meet precisely at the top. On October 28, 1965, the morning sun expanded the south leg. The last piece would not fit. Workers ran fire hoses to the top and soaked the steel until it shrank. Hydraulic jacks applied 450 tons of force, and the final section slid in.

Buford, a Pyrenees-Anatolian ranch dog, found 2-year-old Boden Allen alone in the Arizona desert and walked him 7 miles home through mountain-lion country. State police spotted two mountain lions on his trail. Boden told his rescuers: "I followed the dog back." Buford became an honorary search and rescue member.

Muhammad Ali got a call: Joe was on a 9th-floor fire escape in Los Angeles. He would not come down. Police, a psychologist, and a chaplain had all tried and failed. Ali drove over, leaned out a window, and said: "You're my brother. I love you and I couldn't lie to you." Twenty minutes later he had his arm around Joe and walked him inside. Ali drove him to the hospital himself.

Julia Roberts became the first actress ever paid $20 million for a single film - a tier that until then belonged only to men like Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks. She broke it with Erin Brockovich, then won the Oscar for Best Actress. The men had to make room.

Jhonatan Gonzalez was hiking the Narrows at Zion National Park with his family - kids as young as 1 - when the calm river suddenly turned waist-deep and raging, choked with logs and debris. He and his brothers planted themselves in the current and formed a human chain. Strangers on the bank grabbed on. Dozens of hikers, including toddlers, passed hand-to-hand to safety. Everyone made it out.

In 1901, sponge divers exploring a 2,000-year-old shipwreck off Greece hauled up a corroded lump of bronze. Decades of scanning revealed what it was: a mechanical computer of around 30 interlocking gears that tracked the Sun, Moon and planets and predicted eclipses. Nothing this complex appears again for more than a thousand years.

Socotra broke away from Africa millions of years ago; about a third of its plants exist nowhere else, including the umbrella-shaped dragon blood tree that bleeds red sap.

Cleopatra lived closer in time to the 1969 Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid (around 2560 BC). The pyramids were already about 2,500 years old in her lifetime.

In open-label placebo trials, patients told plainly they were taking sugar pills still reported real symptom relief for conditions like IBS, back pain and migraine.

Octopuses have three hearts and blue, copper-based blood. About two-thirds of their neurons sit in their eight arms, which can taste, touch and act semi-independently, and they can edit their own RNA.