Page 4 - Best of the Week

Baked potatoes in foil can be deadly!

If you bake a potato in aluminum foil and you leave it at room temperature, you can create an environment ripe for a bacterium called Clostridium botulinum, which causes the deadly disease known as botulism.

The reason for this is that C. Botulinum can easily contaminate potatoes and other crop that comes in contact with the soil. Usually, cooking kills the spores, but a foil-wrapped potato holds in moisture, and sometimes prevents the temperature from being high enough to kill all of them.

(Source)

A family found a $4.85m lottery ticket in their cookie jar!

Ricardo Cerezo had been buying lottery tickets compulsively. After a month, his wife was annoyed and asked him to go get them checked for prizes, or she was going to throw them away.

He took the tickets which had been put in a cookie jar and went to a 7-Eleven to check them. Most weren't winners. However, the last one said 'file a claim,' which meant it was worth $600 or more. That's when he went online and realized that he had won $4.85 million and didn't even know about it.

The family was facing foreclosure on their home, but now thanks to this fortunate windfall, they'll be able to keep their home. Hopefully they put the money to good use.

(Source)

Bill Gates just became the richest man in the world. Again!

Although he had lost the title to Mexican magnate Carlos Slim for over six years, a recent surge in Microsoft's stock price has let Bill Gates reclaim the title of the world's richest man.

Gates' fortune now stands at $72.7 billion, while Slim's is $72.1 billion. Slim's fortunes also fell because Mexico passed a bill that will tighten the reins of his enormous telecom company, America Movil.

Next in line? Warren Buffet at $59.7 billion, then Spaniar Amancio Ortega at $57 and finally, IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad at $55.6 billion. What's remarkable is that both Gates and Buffet have already given so much of their money away, and yet they're still at the top of the list!

(Source)

Norway knighted a penguin.

Nils Olav, a king penguin, was adopted in 1972 to be the mascot of the Norwegian Guard. He is named after Majols Nils Egelien and former King of Norway King Olav.

Since then, he has only moved up in ranks. In 1982, he became a Corporal. In 1987, he reached the rank of Sergeant. In 1993, he became a Regimental Sergeant Major, and in 2001, he became an Honourable Regimental Sergeant Major.

Nils is often visited by Norway's armed forces and has received much regard and respect because of his outstanding service and good conduct. In 2005, Edinburgh Zoo was presented with a bronze statue of the penguin due to the esteem Nils has generated.

2008, however, was the pinnacle of Olav’s career. That year, King Harald V knighted Nils Olav. The ceremony was lavish, and a crowd of several hundred joined 130 guardsmen as Nils received his knighthood. He reportedly was on his best behavior and stood proudly as he was knighted.

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In the prehistoric times, there was a flightless bird that ate horses!

We may laugh at the flightlessness of birds like ostriches and penguins nowadays but you did not want to mess with their oldest ancestor, Phosurhacida. Aka: The Terror Bird. It was the largest species of predators in South America between 62 million to 2 million years ago.

They were roughly 3 to 10 feet tall and munched on small mammals. They used their massive beaks to either pick up prey and slam them into the ground or inflict precision strikes on critical body parts. Archeologists say that this species left the world at about the same time we got here.

(Source)