Fun Facts That Are

Hubble launched in 1990 with a $1.5 billion price tag - and a mirror ground to the wrong shape. The error was just 2 microns off, about 1/50th the width of a human hair, but enough to leave the telescope nearly blind. NASA became a late-night punchline. In December 1993, astronauts spent 35 hours across five spacewalks installing corrective optics in orbit. The images that came back were perfect.

Gustave Eiffel built a secret apartment at the top of his tower - 906 feet above Paris - with a piano, sitting room, and three small desks for science. Paris's wealthy offered him fortunes to rent it for a single night. He refused every offer. On September 10, 1889, Thomas Edison climbed up and gifted him a phonograph. The apartment still exists, with wax figures of Eiffel, Edison, and his daughter Claire inside.

Tahlequah is a wild orca off Seattle. In 2018, her newborn calf died. She refused to let the body sink. She carried it on her head for 17 days and nearly 1,000 miles. Scientists called it a Tour of Grief. Seven years later, she lost another calf. She carried that one for at least 11 days too. She loved deeply enough to grieve like this twice.

A jellyfish no wider than a fingernail cannot die of old age. When Turritopsis dohrnii gets old, starving, or injured, its adult cells transform and it shrinks back into a polyp - the larval stage it grew from years earlier. Then it grows up all over again, and can repeat the loop indefinitely. That makes it biologically immortal. Scientists only noticed in the 1990s, when aging adults kept reverting in their tanks instead of dying.

Lee Berger found 1,550 fossils of an unknown human species in South Africa's Rising Star cave. The only way in was an 18-cm gap. He couldn't fit. He posted on Facebook for scientists slim enough to squeeze through. Six women answered. They crawled in and pulled out Homo naledi - a lost branch of humanity. Eight years later, Berger lost 25 kg and finally made it in himself.

The wombat is the only animal on Earth that poops in cubes - 80 to 100 neat, flat-sided blocks every night. For years nobody knew how; everyone assumed a square exit. There isn't one. Engineer Patricia Yang mapped a wombat's intestines and found two stretchy groove regions where the gut wall flexes unevenly, moulding the waste into cubes. The wombat then stacks them to mark territory - and cubes don't roll away.

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.

Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni is the world's largest mirror. Once a year, seasonal rain covers 10,582 square kilometres of salt so flat the horizon vanishes. You appear to walk on the sky. The surface varies less than a metre in elevation across the entire expanse. Space agencies calibrate their altimeters here - five times better than open ocean.

Jerry Selbee, a retired convenience-store owner from Evart, Michigan, spotted a flaw in a state lottery in three minutes: on roll-down weeks, buying tickets in bulk produced a positive expected return. He and his wife Marge formed a syndicate, drove 900 miles to Massachusetts for every roll-down, and played for nine years. Their group grossed $26 million. All legal.

Tom Cruise spotted a burning yacht off Capri, Italy while vacationing with Nicole Kidman in 1996. He ordered his yacht's skiff out and his crew pulled five people to safety - including a seven-year-old girl - minutes before the boat sank. The world's biggest action star had just performed a real rescue.

Sergeant Reckless was a Mongolian mare bought for $250 by US Marines in 1952. During one day of battle in 1953, she made 51 solo trips hauling ammunition to the front lines, covering over 35 miles under fire. She was formally promoted to Staff Sergeant by the Commandant of the Marine Corps - with a 1,700-Marine parade in her honor.

Developers offered 84-year-old Edith Macefield one million dollars for the tiny Seattle house she bought for $3,750 in 1952. She said no. They built a five-story mall around it. During construction, the site superintendent started bringing her groceries and driving her to appointments. They became friends. When she died, she left the house to him.