Random facts
June 1, 2024 ☀️
Melinda French Gates is leaving the Gates Foundation to pursue her own charity. Melinda said she will now have an additional $12.5 billion to help women and families.
A record 30% of energy production worldwide is now coming from renewable sources.
Approximately 100,000 new tracks are now being uploaded to music streaming platforms every day.
A wild male orangutan in Indonesia was observed applying a medicinal paste to a scrape on his face. It’s the first documented example of an animal self-medicating a wound using a plant with healing properties.
CEO pay is rising twice as fast as everyone else’s. Proxy advisor ISS found that the median S&P 500 CEO makes $15.7 million now.
Researchers have developed a gel that breaks down alcohol in the gastrointestinal tract without harming the body. In the future, people who take the gel could reduce the harmful and intoxicating effects of alcohol. (Then why drink alcohol?)
The new “Optimize by Equinox” personalized health program will include personal training, nutrition plans, sleep coaching, and 100 lab tests from Function Health, all for $40,000 a year.
The legal definition of a vegetable versus a fruit — at least in the United States — was determined during a 19th century US Supreme Court case that concluded that the tomato is a vegetable.
The staffers at ChatGPT-maker OpenAI have a median salary of nearly $1 million.
Engineers developed a hair-thin fabric capable of suppressing sounds in large rooms The electrically active material acts as a “sound mirror,” and can reduce ambient noise by up to 75%.
Roughly 60% of American households have an air fryer.
The 12-string Hootenanny acoustic guitar, used by John Lennon in the recording of the Beatles’ 1965 Help! album and film, has sold for $2.9m (£2.3m).
The legislative body of the United Methodist Church voted to repeal a 40-year ban on the ordination of gay clergy.
The next Swiss Army Knife won’t have a knife. Victorinox, the company behind the tool, made the decision as blades fall out of favor in some parts of the world.
Skechers is the first company to buy Super Bowl ad space for next year. A 30-second Super Bowl spot can cost almost $7 million.
Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The sources of the fake science are “paper mills”—businesses or individuals that, for a price, will list a scientist as an author of a fabricated paper.
The biggest IPO on the books for 2024 so far was for Viking, a luxury cruise line company, which raised $1.5 billion dollars.
More people are using marijuana daily than drinking for the first time in the U.S.
Court documents from the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Google reveal that company parent Alphabet paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 to be its default search engine on the iPhone.
For decades, international happiness studies showed well-being was high during youth, declined in midlife, and increased again in old age. But recent studies indicate the kids are now the least happy.
Sixty percent of the World’s lakes (three million total) are located in Canada.
A single ragweed plant can produce 1 million pollen grains per day.
Alaska, Delaware, and West Virginia are the only three states in the U.S. that are not home to a single billionaire, according to Forbes.
Alaska is simultaneously the westernmost and easternmost state.
Madonna’s free Brazil concert at Rio’s Copacabana beach attracted more than 1.6 million fans.
Scientists found that whales employ a system of communication—a phonetic alphabet—which is modified depending on conversational context. They hope, with the help of AI, to eventually be able to communicate with the whales.
A cubic millimeter of brain tissue contains 57,000 cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and 150 million synapses, all amounting to 1,400 terabytes of data.
The words jail and prison are synonyms. But the words jailor and prisoner are antonyms.
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