- [Announcer] Disneyland is your land. - [Narrator] Disneyland. A place where dreams really do come true. Or should I say
nightmares, if you were one of the unfortunate attendees
at the grand opening of the Anaheim, California
park in July 1955. What could possibly turn
such a fun-filled event into a day so disastrous
it was dubbed Black Sunday? Well, you'll have to
stick around to find out, plus a whole host of
some of the most weird and wonderful facts on the web. Buckle up and prepare for another episode of "The Ultimate Fact Show." (cheerful music) What happens if you die in space? Ever thought about the dark
side of life among the stars? If you do happen to croak,
what happens to you? You'll be surprised to
know that NASA actually has no official protocol for
this grim circumstance. Astronauts usually spend only
six months at a time in space onboard the International Space Station, and they must undergo rigorous vetting, including intense medical examinations, before they get there. In his book "An Astronaut's
Guide to Life on Earth," astronaut Chris Hadfield
revealed all about a chilling training
exercise called a death sim. This is usually a roundtable discussion where one astronaut is
announced as having died and the others must hypothesize
about what to do about it. There are no body bags or
special lockers on board, so the simplest solution is to just pop the ship's airlock and jettison the body out into the vacuum of space, Spock-style. But a UN agreement says
you can't litter in space, and that includes dumping corpses. It's equally impractical to
keep a body aboard a spacecraft, and adding a mini-mausoleum
would likely cost millions. One of the most interesting solutions is the product of a collab
between the green burial company Promessa and NASA, dubbed the Body Back. This basically involves
an airtight sleeping bag that a human corpse is zipped into, then exposed to the freezing
temperatures of outer space. The frozen body is then hauled back inside and vibrated intensely
until it shatters into about 50 pounds of human dust that can be hung outside the aircraft
until it returns to Earth. What a way to go! The CIA once created a spy cat. Even the most feline
fanatic will admit that cats aren't the most co-operative
animals in the world, so you'll probably be surprised to learn that one was once entrusted with becoming a bonafide CIA operative. Operation Acoustic Kitty was
an espionage plan hatched back in the 1960s, which
would make portable spying devices out of domestic pets. To create the cyborg cat, a surgeon first implanted
a microphone in its ear, and a transmitter at
the base of its skull, then wove an antenna into the cat's fur. The plan was that operatives could train the cat to sit near foreign officials, transmitting their private conversations back to the CIA. For Acoustic Kitty's first official test, CIA staffers drove the animal to the park and tasked it with
capturing the conversation of two men chatting on a nearby bench. The stage was set, but Acoustic
Kitty was not playing ball. Instead of recording the conversation, the cat simply wandered
off into the street, where it was promptly squashed by a taxi. The CIA concluded that the program wasn't practical enough to continue, and the whole Acoustic Kitty
thing was shelved for good. You know, when the world's cat population found out about the fate
of poor old Acoustic Kitty, they started campaigning so
that their feline friends would never be turned into cyborgs again. Now you too can support
the kitty revolution, for the low, low cost of liking this video and tapping the subscribe button, as well as showing the
little bell icon some love to make sure you never miss
out on more amazing content. You know what to do. Why did Victorian mothers hide
in photos with their kids? The Victorian era is one of the most interesting periods in history, but it's also one of the creepiest. Case in point, these vintage photos of Victorian mothers hiding
with their young kids. But why the need for
such a spooky tradition? Actually, the whole thing is far more #relatable than you'd think. Babies are nigh-on
impossible to photograph. Any mother will tell you
that they wriggle, cry, drool, barf, poop and pee their way through staged photo shoots
like there's no tomorrow. And if it's hard now, it
was way harder back then. Nowadays we have camera phones
to catch every moment on, but if you were a Victorian mother, it was really a one-shot thing. Even though exposure
times had been drastically cut down to about 30 seconds
by the Victorian times, mothers still had to go to extreme lengths to get their babies to sit still. They couldn't simply plop their kid down on the chair and
expect it not to move while they waited for the shot to develop. The equal parts clever and creepy solution was to drape themselves in veils of fabric so that they could act as
a support for the child without actually appearing in the shot. Because photographers'
fees were a hefty sum, and so many kids died young back then, this hidden mother image might be their only keepsake to
share with relatives. A lizard in Florida broke
the world poop record. In May 2020, Florida
Biologist Natalie Claunch discovered an unusual-looking
curly-tailed lizard near a pizza parlor in Cocoa Beach that made her stop dead in her tracks. At first, it seemed
the pear-shaped critter had a belly packed full of eggs, but that wasn't exactly the case. According to Claunch,
eggs feel like jellybeans, but this felt like a
semi-solid, putty-like mass. X-Ray scans revealed that the
lizard was actually packed completely full of something else, poop. As the lizard gulped down
insects and other small reptiles, it had also swallowed
particles of grease-soaked sand which stuck together to form a lump that was far too dense to be excreted. The more it ate, the bigger the mass grew. And by the time Claunch arrived, the lizard was so constipated that it had to be humanely euthanized. The female lizard weighed about one ounce, and the mass alone
weighed about 0.8 ounces, or about 78.5% of its total body weight. According to Claunch, this
represents the largest feces-to-body mass ratio ever
recorded in a living animal. Dissection also revealed that the lizard's internal organs were so squeezed that they had basically
vanished altogether. Next time you feel full
after Thanksgiving, spare a thought for
this poor little lizard. Why do bumblebees squirt? If I were to ask you what's
going on in this image, which was captured by amateur photographer Mark Parrott in 2015, what would you say? Looks a lot like that
fuzzy little guy is peeing as he zooms through the air, right? Wrong. Insects bodies are totally
different from our own in many different ways, and
you might be surprised to learn that they actually lack lungs per se. Instead, they have
something called spiracles, which are tiny holes that cover
the surface of their bodies through which air passes and diffuses straight into the tissues. Many insects have some
degree of muscular control over these spiracles, which means they can control when they open and close them to avoid unnecessary water loss. But for bumblebees, things
are slightly different. You see, bumblebees need their
entire body weight in nectar to fuel their flight. but nectar has a high water content, which means the insects need
to get rid of some of it. To maintain a good balance and
avoid flooding their bodies, they excrete the excess water through their spiracles in a jet through a process known as water voiding. It's like their own personal jet pack! Why does walking through
doorways make us forget? Picture this, you're
about to leave the house, when you realize you've forgotten your keys in your bedroom. You dash upstairs to grab them, but the minute you enter the room, you forget what you went
there for in the first place. It turns out it's not just
plain old forgetfulness. This phenomenon actually has
a name, the doorway effect. According to University of Notre Dame psychology professor Gabriel Radvansky, passing through doorways
serves as an event boundary in the mind which separates
episodes of activity. Basically, recalling
a decision or activity that was made in another room is difficult because it's essentially
been compartmentalized and filed away elsewhere in your brain. Radvansky conducted an
experiment to prove the theory, and published his findings in 2011 in the Quarterly Journal
of Experimental Psychology. Test subjects picked up shapes on a table, carried them to another room, and then swapped them
for a different object. After repeating this in an
environment with no doorway, Radvansky's team found
that people forgot things more frequently when doors were involved. This led him to conclude
that our brains use certain boundaries as markers of sorts, and doorways cause us to process one task and immediately class it as done. Wait, what were we talking about again? Just kidding. When was the last time something
like this happened to you? Why not tell me about your funniest story about forgetfulness down
in the comments below and I'll get back to
a few of my favorites. And to prove that you
remember watching this video, make sure to give it a
cheeky like on your way out! Now let's get back to it. Disneyland's opening was a
nightmare nicknamed Black Sunday. On July 18, 1955, nearly
half of the United States, an estimated 70 million people
in a country of 165 million gathered around their
black-and-white television sets to witness the grand
opening of the $17 million, 160 acre Disneyland theme
park in Anaheim, California, during a 90-minute broadcast
co-hosted by Ronald Reagan. Despite warnings from countless bankers and his own brother Roy, Mickey
Mouse creator Walt Disney had borrowed against his life insurance and sold vacation property
to push the park to open only one year after
construction first began. The program appeared to run smoothy. But like many Disney productions, the live broadcast was just a fantasy. Away from the cameras,
it soon became apparent that many of the attractions, including the Rocket to the
Moon, Peter Pan and Dumbo rides weren't ready to operate on opening day. The Mark Twain Riverboat
also flooded with water, and began listing from side to side. Elsewhere, so many weeds had sprouted along the banks of the Canal
Boats of the World ride that workers placed signs
with exotic species names in Latin in a bid to
resemble an arboretum. As temperatures soared to 100 degrees, fresh asphalt on Main Street, USA ensnared women's high heels, while working drinking fountains were
few and far between, thanks to a local plumbers strike. While the park opening was invite only and anticipated a crowd of 15,000 people, 28,154 passed through its gates thanks to counterfeit tickets, overwhelming the park's
food and refreshment stalls. Outside stretched an
epic seven mile backup to Disneyland on the Santa Ana Freeway. For years to come, Disney workers branded the day Black Sunday. but within 7 weeks, park
attendance had already surpassed one million visitors. All's well that ends well, right? Stephen Hawking once threw
a party for time travelers. Do you believe in time travel? Stephen Hawking did, and he was one of the
smartest guys on Earth. In fact, back in 2009,
Hawking set out to try and prove that time
travelers walk among us by inviting them to a party. This wasn't any old party, though, it was an elaborate champagne party decked out with Krug
poured into fancy flutes, accompanied by hors d'oeuvres aplenty. But here's the catch, he
didn't release the invitations until after the party
had actually taken place. His theory? If people turned up, then
it would be concrete proof that time travel is real. The invite read, you are
cordially invited to a reception for time travelers hosted by
Professor Stephen Hawking, along with the date of June 28th, 2009, and the disclaimer no RSVP required. The thing is, no matter how long Hawking sat around waiting, no one showed. Which meant that, unfortunately,
time travel is not real. Probably. Somewhere, some time traveler is watching this now and
thinking, to be fair, no one said there was going to be Krug. What happens to coins in fountains? We seldom pass a fountain
without stopping to toss in some loose change
in exchange for a wish from the powers that be, but
where does it actually go? All those pennies can't
just sit there forever, or they'd pile up and
clog the fountain's works. Depending on where a
fountain is and who owns it, there are actually a number of places the collected coins could end up. In New York City, loose change
collected from fountains in public parks usually goes
towards the fountains' upkeep. But parks staff aren't always the first to get their hands on them. An article published
by the Atlantic in 2016 found that most of the
city's fountains are stripped of their coins by
entrepreneurial New Yorkers. Fountain-thieving is also a
particularly large problem in Kansas, which proudly calls
itself The City of Fountains. Here, coins are picked out
by the homeless population almost as soon as they're thrown in. Rome's iconic Trevi fountain, where visitors have tossed
coins for hundreds of years, is cleaned every night, reportedly netting as much as $4000 a day in loose change. The money is then donated to a nearby grocery store for the
disadvantaged, and officials are notoriously tough on anyone
caught pinching from it. Minnesota's Mall of America
also collects about $24,000 a year from its fountains and ponds, and non-profits can submit applications for a cut of the change. Basically, your unfulfilled wish goes toward a good cause most of the time. Baby carrots were invented in 1986. Baby carrots are a staple
of kids' lunchboxes and easy snacks for serial dieters, but what if I told you
these miniature veggies have been lying to you all along? Baby carrots have only
been around since 1986, when they were first
invented, yes, invented, by farmer Mike Yurosek. The truth is, baby carrots are just chopped up regular carrots. You see, the word baby
implies these carrots have been pulled from the ground before they have reached full size, but Yurosek actually whittled
them down to about two inches from larger farmed carrots,
and they've more or less remained that way ever since. But why butcher perfectly good carrots? Well, here's the catch,
Yurosek's carrots were deemed too ugly to be sold as they were. Back in the 1980s,
supermarkets expected carrots to be a particular size, shape, and color. Anything that didn't make the cut had to be sold for juice, processing, animal feed, or just thrown away. Yurosek decided to try
and get his gnarly carrots to market by peeling off the skin and cutting them into smaller pieces. He bagged them up, sold
them on as baby carrots and within no time the
invention was a hit! Although some carrots are
pulled during immaturity, most of the baby carrots
you encounter today aren't actually babies at all,
just adults playing dress-up. Why do hoverflies mimic bees? Here's a difficult one:
which of these is the bee? If you encountered them wild,
you'd probably steer clear, but only one is capable of stinging you. The other is a type of harmless hoverfly, which has learned to mimic bees and wasps through their coloring, body
shape and even their behaviors. Both bees and wasps use bright
yellow and black coloring to send out a clear message to predators, don't eat me, I taste like doo-doo. This is known as aposematism,
and various insects and other animals, like poisonous frogs, converge on the same model of signaling, called Mullerian Mimicry. This basically means they're
all sending out an honest signal that they're of no
real interest to predators. Hoverflies, on the other hand, piggyback off of the protection this offers by disguising themselves as their distasteful counterparts. This is known as Batesian Mimicry This clever strategy means that
predators who encounter them will automatically associate
the patterning and appearance of the hoverfly with bad taste,
choosing not to eat them. There are actually plenty of differences between hoverflies and bees and wasps. For example, hoverflies
or dipterans have one set of wings while hymenopterans,
bees, wasps, and basically every other flying insect
have two pairs of wings. But most predators aren't that clued-up and are pressed for time. instead, they see stripes and move on. Pretty clever, huh? There's a cockroach that
pretends to be a ladybird. Hoverflies aren't the only professional copycats of the insect world. If you were to come across this beauty while out on a stroll,
you'd probably think it was an innocent ladybird,
but you'd be horribly wrong. This shiny red cutie
is in fact a cockroach, one of the most hated pests in the world. You probably think that
all cockroaches are big, brown brutes, but you can
actually find a vast and colorful array of these creepy-crawlies in nature, and the The Prosplecta genus cockroach has got to be one of the prettiest. Although some cockroaches, like those of the genus
Perisphaerus, rely on camouflage tricks like rolling themselves into a ball to mimic harmless pill bugs. the Prosplecta genus has taken its dress-up one step further. Much like those pesky
hoverflies, this cockroach, which can be found in the Philippines, uses Batesian mimicry to copy the distinct red-and-black spotted patterning
of the ladybird beetle. Ladybirds, like bees and wasps,
use aposematic coloration to tell predators that they're bad news because they produce
alkaloids, toxic chemicals that make them taste gross to predators. Basically, this clever
cockroach is masquerading as someone else to make
sure it gets left alone. I bet he's fun at parties! Monkeys don't eat bananas. If I asked you to draw a cartoon monkey, I'm sure you'd stick a banana in its hand. But the likelihood of a wild monkey actually gobbling up the yellow fruit like they do in popular
culture is actually very slim. Perhaps Curious George is to blame for the circulation of this vicious lie, but it's time you heard the truth. According to primate
expert Katherine Milton, the entire wild monkey-banana connection is in fact a total fabrication. Wild monkeys will never encounter bananas unless they're around human habitation where bananas have been planted
because the edible banana is a cultivated,
domesticated plant and fruit. In the wild, primates are far
more likely to eat leaves, flowers, nuts, and insects
than the kind of bananas we can buy from the grocery store. Bananas aren't even good for monkeys. In fact, in 2014, Paignton Zoo in England banned their monkeys from
eating bananas altogether because they're so sugary that
they're bad for their teeth and can lead to conditions like diabetes. Still, that isn't to say
monkeys don't enjoy bananas. A study from 1936 offered
monkeys fruits, vegetables, nuts, and bread to see what they would choose to eat more of and found that bananas ranked right behind grapes
as the monkey's favorite. You always want what you can't have! This beetle has boxing-glove antennae. Allow me to introduce
you to the Anthony Joshua of the insect world. Just kidding, those flexed
arms and brutish boxing-gloves aren't actually arms at all. In fact, you're probably
looking at this bug all wrong. This is a macro photography
image was captured by 56-year-old Javier
Ruperez from Almachar, Spain, and shows the red palm
weevil, a beetle that usually grows up to four centimeters. The red palm weevil is characterized by a prolongation of the
head in the form of a beak, and the funky hairdo on his
head is actually special bristles which male beetles
use to detect females. Its antenna are appendages below its beak, which it uses for feeling,, smelling, and tasting the environment around it. Red palm weevils are
native to tropical Asia but have spread to Europe,
and holes dug in palm trees by their larvae can kill the plants, making these little critters a local pest. These insects may look pretty
unassuming from far away, but when shot this close
up using a macro lens, they look like they're ready to square up. I wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of one if I were a puny ant! A horse almost became a senator in Rome. You'd be surprised to
hear what kinds of people have ended up in positions
of power through the ages. Take Gaius Caesar
Germanicus, otherwise known as the notorious emperor
Caligula, for example. He only ruled Rome from 37 AD to 41 AD, but boy did he make an impression. In fact, Caligula has gone down in history as the mad emperor, and for good reason. He did a lot of crazy stuff
during his short rule, but one of the things he's best remembered for is his close relationship
with a certain horse. Incitatus was Caligula's prize racehorse, and he was treated accordingly. The steed was invited to
dinner, fed oats infused with gold flakes, and
given a marble stall, an ivory manger, and a jeweled collar. Oh, and if you happened to
live near to Incitatus' stable, your whole neighborhood had
to stay silent the day before each race so that the horse
could concentrate properly. The most famous story about
Incitatus is that Caligula decided he would make him a
consul in the Roman senate. Thankfully, some might say,
Caligula was assassinated before this could actually happen. The writers to recount these events, Seutonius and Cassius Dio, lived decades after the
emperors 4-year-reign, so the exactness of the
tale is up for debate. But given Caligula's undisputed insanity, there are few doubts that
this actually did happen. This fish can spit fire. Forget dragons, what if I told you there was a fire-breathing fish out there? You probably wouldn't believe me, but check it out for yourself! Spoiler alert, that isn't actually fire. But these fishy fireworks
are close enough. The fish in question is the cardinalfish, which lives and feeds on or
near the bottom of the ocean, and can be found in the
Banggai Archipelago, an island group in Indonesia. When the cardinalfish
sucks up tiny ostracods for its dinner, the bioluminescent sea-creatures emit a burst of light. And when those bad boys light
up, creating a light show inside the fish's mouth,
it's really bad news. You see, the last thing you want to do when you're a little
fish in a big, bad ocean full of predators is attract
attention to yourself. That's like sticking a
glowstick in your mouth and saying hey, come eat me! So, when the ostracods light
up, the cardinalfish panics and vomits them back up again. This uber-cool defense
mechanism is the result of a light-inducing chemical reaction mixture inside the ostracod, which is set off whenever they're jostled. The cardinalfish would love to steer clear of the tasty morsel, but
there's no telling which type of ostracods will react this way. It's like the ultimate
game of snack roulette! Why do seagulls steal food? Seagulls are notorious for their boldness. They have no problem swooping
down to steal your fries or gobble your ice cream. But new research has now explained why they're such notorious thieves. According to researchers
at Exeter University, gulls actually prefer food
that's been handled by humans first because they see it as
a sign of food availability. Like how cats and dogs react when they see their owners
put their meals out. In the study, herring gulls were presented with two identical food items, one of which they'd seen a person holding. Unsurprisingly, they pecked
far more at the handled food. The same team also discovered
in 2019 that the only way to deter seagulls from dive
bombing you at the beach is to stare at them. Researchers in Cornwall, UK put
a bag of fries on the ground and tested how long it took herring gulls to approach while they made
eye contact with the birds. Only 26% of the gulls still went for the food despite the eye contact, and it took them an extra
21 seconds to approach when a human was staring at them. Seems like you can forget
about keeping your eye on the prize, watch the birds instead! How's that noggin of yours feeling after taking on all this new information? If you're still hungry for
more amazing facts like these, why not check out one
of the previous episodes from this series, I'll put
them on screen for you now! Happy binging, and as always
thanks for watching guys!
