- If like me, you binge
watched the first season of Stranger Things all in one sitting, then you'll surely know what this is. It's a baby Demogorgon, right? Of course there's a
perfectly logical explanation for the existence of this
seriously gross creature, but to find out, you're
going to have to stay around. So grab some popcorn,
your best trivia hat, and strap in for this episode
of The Ultimate Fact Show! (upbeat music) A snail woke up after four years of being glued to a museum card. Some animals have perfected the art of playing dead to protect
themselves from greedy predators. But what happens when
method acting goes too far? Well, then the case of one
very unfortunate snail, it could end up being scooped up and stuck to a museum card for the next four years. That's right, way back in 1846, authorities at the British
Museum glued what they thought was a deceased snail to a
piece of cardboard for display. The snail in question, formerly known as the
species Helix Desertorum, had been collected by Charles
Lamb Esquire who found it in the Egyptian desert in March of 1846 before donating it to the museum. Assuming this snail is
simply expired in transit, recipients glued it to
the cardboard show card. For four long years, no one knew that the British
Museum's catatonic snail had simply retreated into
it's shell in a deep sleep. Until one day when curators
noticed something strange while cleaning the exhibit. The snail's shell seemed
to have moved slightly and a suspicious trail of
iridescent slime followed it. They removed the specimen from the card and decided to bathe
it, and within minutes, the snail reacted to the
moisture and poked its head out to survey its new surroundings. You might imagine that
waking up in a British museum after four years of undisturbed
sleep would be quite a shock to the system, but the snail
didn't seem to care much. After being fed some cabbage, it fell asleep for another two years. What a legend! Why does a small spec of dirt
in your eye hurt so much? The world is full of things
that can cause us pain. But sometimes it's the smallest
things that hurt the most, like getting a tiny spec
of dirt in your eye. We've all been there. First the familiar discomfort
of a little intruder on the surface of your eyeball. Then the immediate regret
of rubbing that bad boy and experiencing a searing
pain, followed by redness. Before you know it, there's a bunch of tears
running down your cheeks. But how can something so
seemingly insignificant cause such a world of hurt? It's all to do with
the way your eye works. The transparent outer
layer of your eyeball that covers your iris and
pupil is called the cornea, and it has a lot of nerve endings. When you get a spec of dust in your eye and then try to tackle
the problem by rubbing it, all you're really doing is
dragging the dust against the delicate cornea, making
the pain even more unbearable. What's worse, you can
even end up embedding the foreign object inside the cornea. This could lead to a whole
host of vision related problems because the cornea accounts for about 2/3 of the eye's
total optical power. Instead, the best thing to do is try blinking enough to dislodge it. If that fails, you could also try and flush your eyes with cold water. But whatever you do, do not rub it. You've been warned. I don't like to toot my own horn, but I feel like I'm giving out some seriously life saving advise here. If you want to make sure
you stay in the loop with the most amazing content on the net, you should totally take a second to smash those like and subscribe buttons and make sure your notifications
are turned on, too. Your eyes will thank you the next time some pesky dirt gets in them. Where are all the baby pigeons? What is reality? Do we have free will? And are ghosts real? Might be some of life's
greatest questions. But there's one burning
quandary that too often gets omitted from the list. Where the heck are all the baby pigeons? It's no secret that
there's pigeons aplenty in the world's biggest city's, which means there must be baby pigeons. But ask yourself this. When was the last time
you actually saw one? Does this further confirm
the theory that pigeons are really just machines designed by the government to spy on us? Or perhaps they just
spontaneously reproduce in a cloud of feathers. Sadly, the reality is far less exciting, but at least it'll help
you sleep at night. Baby pigeons are known as squabs, and the reason why you never see them is because they're well hidden. Pigeons, also known as rock doves, build their nests in
places that mimic the caves and cliffs that their ancestors
used in the Mediterranean. In places like New York City, they build their nests in
protected places like windowsills, rooftops, under bridges, or in
artificial cliff like spots. Another reason why you're
unlikely to see a squab is that they only stay in the
nest for about 4 to 6 weeks, until they're effectively adult sized. It's probably a good thing
we don't see baby pigeons, because they're actually pretty revolting. They're sort of semi-transparent,
pink, and hairy. Perhaps that's why their
parents literally throw up their food to feed them. Why do we see monsters in the mirror? Have you ever stared at yourself for so long in a mirror that you start to see some terrifying demon staring back at you? To get to the bottom of
these ghoulish apparitions, Dr. Caputo from the University of Urbino conducted a 2010 study
which asked participants to start into a mirror in
dim lighting for 10 minutes. At the end of the torture, sorry, I mean study, 66% of the participants reported
seeing huge deformations of their face, 28% saw an unknown person. And 48% saw fantastical
and monstrous beings. But why do we see imaginary
monsters in the mirror? It all comes down to something
called selective processing. Basically, your brain can only process so much information at once. While you're watching this video, you probably aren't noticing the feel of the clothes against your skin
or the pattern of your breath. Because your brain stops paying attention to certain stimuli, which it
doesn't deem as important. The same can be said
for your sense of sight. When faced with a bunch
of visual stimulation, your brain will simply tune
out the non-relevant parts. This phenomenon is called
the Troxler effect, which was discovered in 1804 by physician and philosopher Ignaz Troxler. If you stare into your own eyes
for too long in the mirror, it's possible that other
areas of the face might melt and blend into the mirror, giving you a terrifying appearance. What's worse, your brain
likes to fill in things it can't recognize with things
it can, no matter how scary. That means your mangled,
distorted face could easily morph into some monster you once saw in a movie that has been locked away in
the catacombs of your memories. Thanks a lot, brain. When you're done watching this video, why not dim the bathroom lights and give this little
psychological experiment a go? If you're brave enough, that is. When you do, tell me what you see, and let me know in the comments below. Now let's get back to the fact frenzy. Pythagoras hated beans
so much it killed him. Pythagoras was not only an
ancient Greek philosopher, but an avid bean hater. And I don't just mean they weren't his favorite dinnertime accoutrement. Pythagoras was a strident vegetarian, and he also abstained from eating beans because he believed that humans and beans supposedly spawned
from the same source. To prove his theory, he
conducted a simple experiment. He buried a handful of beans in the mud, then retrieved them a few
weeks later and declared how similar they looked to human fetuses. According to Pythagoras, to eat a bean would akin
to eating human flesh. The solution was simple,
he avoided for life, and even forbade his
followers from consuming them, or so much as touching them. There's even one account
of Pythagoras coming up on an ox who was eating beans
in a sunny pasture in the region of Tarentum
in the south of Italy. After informing the startled herdsman that the ox must be stopped, Pythagoras strode across the muddy field and spoke quietly into the ox's ear. According to the herdsmen, who were beside themselves with laughter, Pythagoras had convinced the
ox to never desire beans again. Sure enough, the ox persisted
with a bean-less diet and lived well beyond the
years of an ordinary ox. It all sounds pretty harmless, but Pythagoras' bean aversion actually led to his fatal downfall. As the story goes,
Pythagoras was being chased by a mob of angry townspeople
when he suddenly stopped, a vast bean field
stretched in front of him. Unwilling to trample the beans, his pursuers caught up with him and spilled his blood on the plants, ending his life for the
sake of a simple bean. There's a bird that vomits oil. There are some pretty
freaky defense tactics in the animal kingdom, but none are quite as
gross as Fulmar Chicks. (bird cawing) In case you didn't quite catch it, that adorable fluffy chick
is literally throwing up in self defense, but it gets worse. That isn't just any old
chuck-up, it's stomach oil. When they feel threatened,
these seabird chicks have learned to spew a stream of sticky, smelly, bright
orange digestive oil up to six feet away. And if you happen to be a
predatory bird, being sprayed by stomach oil isn't
just utterly repulsive, it's lethal, too. You see, these gloopy oil glues the predator's feathers
together so that it can't fly. Things go from bad to worse
when the attacking bird goes to the ocean to wash the oil off, and finds that it has lost it's
buoyancy and drowns instead. This is because the oil interferes with the locking mechanism of the feather barbs and
displaces the insulating air, which is usually trapped against the skin, leading to hypothermia, flightless-ness, and loss of flotation. The smell of the vomit also acts as a warning to the chick's parents, who will approach the nest cautiously in case the predator is still lurking. Apparently, even chicks
that haven't hatched yet can squirt the liquid out of
a hole in their egg shell. Now there's a party trick. Why can't penguins fly? Somewhere along the
bumpy path of evolution, it became clear that penguins
simply aren't destined for the skies. Like most birds, penguins
must travel a long way between their feeding and breeding grounds. But rather than flying, they swim. In fact, some of these arctic birds spend up to 75% of their lives in the water. They can swim at speeds of
15 to 25 miles per hour. But this has left biologists
scratching their heads over why they did not keep their ability to fly as their swimming and
diving abilities evolved. To try and solve the conundrum,
a study led by biologist at the University of Manitoba
in Winnipeg, Canada, conducted in 2013, examined species of seabirds that still have some ability to fly. These included the pelagic cormorant, which propels itself
underwater with webbed feet, and the which-billed murre, which flaps its wings underwater to swim. They tagged the birds with
recorders that measured the times of their dive as
well as depth and temperature, and used the results to
calculate how much energy the birds expended for diving and flying. The team compared their
results to some that had already been collected for birds, such as geese and penguins,
and found that both cormorants and murres must spend
exceedingly large amounts of energy to fly. The highest among all
known flying birds in fact. This demonstrated that these birds are basically sitting on an
evolutionary knife-point. Because their wings are
still built for flight, they can create enough drag underwater while their bodies are just light enough to help them take off
and cool down quicker than penguin's bulkier bodies. To improve their diving abilities, the birds would have to reduce
their wings and grow larger, which is exactly what happened
to penguins over time. Basically, a bird has to decide
what it wants to be good at, diving or flying. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Where do eels come from? Aristotle thought eels
spontaneously emerged from modern rain water. The ancient Egyptians
thought they were made by the sun warming the Nile. In the spring of 1876, a 19 year old man spent
many countless afternoons retrieving freshly caught
eels from the seaside city of Trieste and dissecting
them in the hopes of unraveling the
mystery of their origins. That man was Sigmund Freud, although he followed his
evolutionary questions in other directions before he
ever got to the bottom of it. Two years before Freud arrived in Trieste, the German biologist Max Shlutze declared on his deathbed that he leaving a world where all the important
questions had now been settled, except the eel question. In 1904, Danish searcher
Johannes Schmidt trawled the oceans for eel
larva and concluded that their breeding ground
was the Sargasso Sea. Over the past century,
a consensus has formed that American and European
eels journey thousands of kilometers across the ocean to spawn in the conductive conditions
of this wide sea. As the story goes, after
the eels reach maturity, they leave the shores of
Europe or North America for the Sargasso Sea,
and engage in panmixia, where individuals randomly
mate with each other. The resulting larva matures
into transparent glass eels and make their return
journey to spend their lives in river estuaries and
respective continents before the cycle continues. It seems like a sound explanation, but the truth that these
slippery sea creatures have not been observed
spawning in the Sargasso Sea, or anywhere on route, meaning their migration
is still a total mystery. The whole thing just screams
aliens, if you ask me. Roller coasters were invented to distract Americans from sin. There's nothing like the thrill
of riding a roller coaster, but it wasn't kicks that
motivated the invention of the very first roller coaster. It was immorality. In the 1800s, successful hosiery
businessman LaMarcus Thompson couldn't help but notice
that Americans were tempted by hedonistic places like saloons, dancing halls, and brothels. Thompson was not only a very rich man, but an intensely religious one, too. And he decided to take it upon himself to solve America's emerging
obsession with sinfulness. On a pleasure trip to the oddly named town of Mauch Chunk in Pennsylvania, he came across people riding
an old mining railway for fun. The railway once transported
coal to the nearby docks of the Lehigh Riveer and onto
the steel mills of Bethlehem. But it had been converted
to a vacation experience when the coal mines began to fade. Tourists paid $1 for an 80 minute ride on the disused railway, which included a thrilling 600+ foot drop, that was really more of a
slop by modern standards. Thompson drew up plans
for a smaller version of the switchback railway, and the first Thompson roller coaster was built in the spring of 1884 in the most immoral place he could think of. New York city's very own, Coney Island. His invention would tempt
people out of the brothels and taverns and into fresh air, as well as bringing
families back together. As we know, the roller coaster was a hit, and the rest is history. This creature looks
like a baby Demogorgon. Remember this adorable little critter? What you're seeing here isn't actually extraterrestrial spawn, it's just a newly hatched chick
eating from a feeding tube. What are those weird white
spots around it's mouth? Tiny teeth inside its
beak, and gross lumpy body. It's hard to imagine this
creature ever taking to the skies, but according to same
Eagle-eyed nature lovers, this is actually the
spawn of a Gouldian finch, which grows up to be totally beautiful. So what's up with the
chick's weird aliens mouths? Although we can't be certain why these tropophobia-inducing markings exist, the most likely theory refers
to something even creepier. Brood parasites. Simply put, a brood
parasite is any organism that relies on others
to raise their young. Bird parasite species lay
eggs that resemble the host and distribute them among a
number of different nests. As a result, the two species
often end up co-evolving as the parasite tries
to perfect its mimicry to try to blend in as
seamlessly as possible. Estrildid finches, which
belong to the same family as the Gouldian finch,
suffer from brood parasites that bear almost identical mouth markings to the finch chicks. However, Gouldian finches aren't known to suffer from these parasites. This suggest that the finches
develop the markings first, and the parasites then
evolved to mimic them. In this case, it seems
that the markings may have served another purpose, like helping the bird's parents locate their chick's mouths for feeding. Either way, you have to
applaud the commitment of the parasites for making
themselves look repulsive just to get a bit of grub. When you swat a fly,
it isn't blood you see. Swatting a fly is one of
life's many small victories. Cleaning up the nasty
red smear left behind is not quite as fun. But get this, that isn't actually blood. Flies do have blood,
but it's not like ours. You see, human blood has
red blood cells in it, which are responsible for
taking oxygen and carrying it throughout our bodies. The reason they're red is
because they contain hemoglobin, which is a special protein
that binds the oxygen. Insect blood, or haemolymph,
on the other hand, contains various nutrients,
hormones, and other things, but has no hemoglobin. So instead of being red,
insect blood is mostly clear. However, it may sometimes
have some very light pigments in it thanks to the plants they've eaten, which might give their blood
a yellow or greenish hue. So where does the red smear come from? That crimson smear you se
when you squash a house fly is actually a result of the
red pigment in their eyes. Somehow the idea of wiping
up bright red eye juice is even less appealing than blood. A beetle can escape from a frog's butt after being eaten alive. Life as a puny insect is full of dangers, and being eaten alive by a larger predator is a pretty gnarly way to go. But one species of water
beetle has a unique way of escaping this almost certain death, through the back door. When Shinji Sugiura from Kobe University in Japan presented the frog
Pelophylax nigromacilatus with the aquatic beetle
Regimbartia attenuata during a series of experiments in September 2019, the frog quickly swallowed
the beetle whole as expected, but then things took an unexpected turn. In 93% of about a dozen experiments, the beetles miraculously
reappeared after slipping out of the frog's anus, alive and well. Sugiura speculates that the beetles have evolved this
defense against the frogs in their marshy habitat. Though muscles typically hold the frogs anal vent tightly shut, those muscles loosen
up when the frog poops, meaning the beetles could
be somehow stimulating the frog's defecation reflex to temporarily open this emergency exit. Once swallowed, the beetle
travels the dark, perilous, and airless path through
the esophagus, stomach, small intestines, and large intestine. From end to end, this journey
took a minimum of six minutes. But in most cases, the
beetles emerge between 1 to 6 hours after being eaten. The unconventional passage wasn't without its own drawbacks, though. According to Sugiura,
the triumphant beetles were frequently entangled
in fecal pellets, but they recovered fairly quickly. Ants can gut an almond. Ants are some of the
most resilient workers in the animal kingdom. These tiny bug can achieve
some incredible feats, like lifting objects up to five
times their own body weight. In case you needed reminding why you shouldn't underestimate them, checkout this colony of
ants that gutted an almond to make their own almond flour. Ants are fearsome natural scavengers, and have an incredibly diverse diet. Like humans, they are also
sophisticated and social animals who've devised a whole host
of ingenuous ways to locate, harvest, store, and distribute their food throughout the colony. When worker ants come across
something to their liking, they return to the nest,
leaving a chemical trail of pheromones for other
worker ants to pick up. Then they get to work breaking down the object using their sharp pincers before carrying pieces back to the nest. Because ants are so opportunistic, stray food in your home,
like this discarded almond, could easily become an invitation. Nuts aren't a usually
staple of an ants diet, but these enterprising insects certainly have no problem gutting the almond to see what they could
get out of it anyway. There may be a few reasons
why they have piled up the floury insides around the nut shell. Ants crave fats and oils, which they could get by chewing the almond and discarding the unwanted parts. Some ants are also
intelligent enough to know now to bring anything back to
the nest that will grow mold. While other species, like temnothorax, which often setup home inside acorns, might create such piles in hopes of using the contents for nesting. Either way, this is one
seriously incredible feat of team work. Which of these incredible
facts blew your mind the most? If your brain is hungry for
more random trivia, worry not. There are plenty more
episodes in this series, and you can go ahead and check them out. Until next time, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)
