30 Random Facts About The World That Might Change Your Perspective On Certain Things, By Factourism (New Pics)

There is a polar bear jail in Canada⁠⁠The town of Churchill in northern Manitoba, visited by a thousand polar bears in the summer, has a special facility for the most troublesome or dangerous of these special visitors: nothing else than a jail, comprising about fifty cells where the bears are locked up to one month and without food. After that, they are flown far away from the town with a helicopter. The theory is that this would be memorable enough for the bear that they won’t want to approach the town ever again, even though they cannot find food anywhere else any more since the ice in the region has melted and their usual food, seals, are now not that common.

Queen Elizabeth was a mechanic during WWII⁠⁠During the second world war, Elizabeth II, then princess, now queen of the United Kingdom, was working full-time as a mechanic and driver to help the war efforts. She was 18 in 1944 when she decided, against her father’s (King George V) initial opinion, that she would join the Auxiliary Territorial Service, a women’s branch of the British army. A photo from that time has her fixing a car engine while her mother Queen Elizabeth I is visiting.

Tennis players produce up to 3 litres of sweat an hour. ⁠⁠A tennis player can create more sweat than their body is able to replace during a 5 hours match, especially when the weather conditions are very hot. Players have to be selective about what balls to put effort into, in order to reduce their own heat and not outdo what their body can take.⁠

When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created Apple in 1976, the first of the two Steves came up with the name Apple for two reasons: he had a nice experience working in an apple orchard a few years earlier, and the name would get them before Atari in the phone book, the company where Jobs was working previously.

We hold 0.2 mg of gold inside us. ⁠⁠An average person weighing 70 kilograms hosts 43 kg of oxygen, 16 kg of carbon, 7 kg of hydrogen… and 0.2 mg of gold.

From the 1200s, the Tower of London started to host a menagerie of exotic animals, the ancestor of what would eventually move and become the London Zoo in the 1830s. The place was finally opened to the general public under Elizabeth I. The entrance was half-pence, but was free if you brought a cat or a dog.

A sheep, a duck and a rooster were the first passengers on a hot air balloon⁠⁠1783. The Montgolfier brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne, have been doing experiments with hot air balloons for about a year, when they got invited to make their first demonstration with passengers in Versailles, attended by the king Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. The passengers are three farm animals, chosen for their characteristics: a sheep that is not that different from a human, a bird that can fly and a bird that can’t. The balloon flew eight minutes and went 500 metres high, before landing peacefully. The animals were almost fine: the duck was not disrupted, the sheep was eating its hay like nothing happened, but had sat on the rooster, breaking its beak. They became honoured residents of the royal menagerie. A month later, the brothers flew a new balloon, this time with people in it.

Studies have shown that life is on average shorter for left-handers. One that looked at 1,000 Californians found out that the left-handed portion died on average 9 years younger. They discovered that left-handers are also five times more likely to die in an accident.⁠

Cacao plants are cultivated in a very narrow strip on the globe: they grow only around the equator, in places that have relatively stable temperature and humidity during the year. But in the next few decades, the climate of these regions is expected to become warmer and dryer, leaving the cacao nowhere to be grown. Giant chocolate companies like Mars are working with scientists to find solutions, like making GMO cacao plants able to withstand these conditions, but we are certainly reaching the end of chocolate as we know it.

The most frequently used password is 123456⁠⁠{Weekend Repost}⁠“123456” has been for several consecutive years the most widely used password, according to a list collecting all those which were hacked and leaked. The top 10 also includes the very imaginative “123456789”, “12345678”, “1234567”, and “12345”. As for the second most used password, it is “password”.