Blog
Short articles, facts and discoveries
- When George Washington died, Napoleon ordered 10 days of mourning in France
- By 400 BC, Persian engineers had mastered storing ice in the desert in summer.
- Technically cats domesticated humans rather than the other way around, as they saw the advantage of living with humans. Thus for millennia the DNA "domesticated" cats remained largely the same as when they were "wild", as no selective breeding was needed to make them tame.
- Roman Emperor Diocletian was the first to voluntarily retire in 305 AD to grow cabbages. When begged to return to power, he declined, saying “If you could see the vegetables I grow with my own hands, you wouldn’t talk to me about empire.” He lived out his days gardening by the Dalmatian coast.
- Genghis Khan would marry a daughter to the king of an allied nation, then send the new son-in-law to fight in Mongol wars while she took over the rule. Most sons-in-law died in combat, leaving his daughters in complete control of those nations.
- Did you know that bonobos and chimpanzees share nearly 99% of their DNA with humans? This makes them our closest living evolutionary relatives, splitting from a common ancestor around 6–8 million years ago. Despite the tiny 1% difference, it translates to millions of genetic variations.
- The Nazis burned Sigmund Freud's books. He said, "What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now, they are content with burning my books."
- Romans were known to create tombs for their dogs and gave them epitaphs to remember them by. One such inscription read, “I am in tears, while carrying you to your last resting place as much as I rejoiced when bringing you home with my own hands 15 years ago.”
- In 37 BC, the Roman polymath Marcus Terentius Varro warned his readers to avoid living near swamps because of "minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes" and cause disease. Microorganisms would not be observed until the 17th century.