Monkeys can learn to use money. Capuchins that were taught to exchange silver discs for treats began budgeting for food they liked, buying more of something when the price dropped and started gambling.
Eventually, rich monkeys even figured out they could pay each other for sex. The experiment also had a “bank robbery” near the end. One monkey tried to burn the whole system down.
Water is used in rice fields to prevent weeds.
Rice doesn’t actually need that much water, but since it can thrive in such conditions, whereas weeds cannot, it’s a natural protection against them.
Marvel pays Stan Lee $1 million a year for life just for being Stan Lee.
Mozart disliked performer Adriana Ferrarese del Bene, who was known for nodding her head down on low notes and raising her head on high notes.
So much so, that he wrote a song for her to perform that had lots of jumps from low to high just so he could see her head “bob like a chicken” onstage.
The U.S. Navy replaced expensive and clunky periscope controls on submarines with Xbox 360 controllers, which reduced training time from hours to minutes.
Beluga whales can mimic the human voice so well that one time a driver believed his colleagues were trying to talk to him when in fact it was the whale.
Art historians dismissed some doodles in Da Vinci’s notebooks as “irrelevant.”
In 2016, Ian Hutchings, a Cambridge professor, found that one page of these scribbles actually contained the first written records demonstrating the laws of friction.
A college student named Amos Dudley successfully aligned his teeth by 3D printing his own clear braces for less than $60.
He’d built his own 3D home printer but fixed his teeth over the course of months using 12 trays he created on his college’s more precise 3D printer.
After millionaire Harris Rosen gave everyone in a Florida neighborhood free college scholarships and free day-care, the crime rate was cut in half and high school graduation rate increased from 25% to 100%.
