A man trained crows to find loose change in exchange for peanuts!

Josh Klein is an animal behavior researcher in New York. He is working towards changing people’s minds about crows. Instead of seeing them as a nuisance, he says they are a highly intelligent and trainable animal that we could benefit from.

How intelligent? He says they are smarter than chimpanzees and dolphins! Klein has created a Crow Box that dispenses peanuts when the crows deposit loose change found on the street into it. It’s estimated that at any given time there is $250 million in lost change lying around on city streets. Though, Klein has never revealed how much he’s made off of the trained crows, he is sharing his Crow Box idea.

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Trees can EXPLODE!

Things like extremely cold temperatures will cause trees to explode under certain circumstances! The explosions can actually be caused by three different elements: cold, fire, and lightning. It is also caused by stresses in the tree trunks.

For example, Maple trees explode when their sap freezes and it’s said to sound like a gunshot. The Sioux and the Cree Native Americans call the first new moon of the year as the “Moon of the cold exploding trees.” Some trees, like the eucalyptus native to Australia are highly flammable and explode during bush fires.

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The Lion King may have been stolen from a 1950s Japanese anime series!

The Lion King wasn’t released until 1994. The original Japanese anime series was called Kimba the White Lion. Kimba-Simba…coincidence? Simba was referred to as Kimba in earlier drafts and concept art showed him as a white lion! Other similarities between the cartoons include a wise baboon and a wart hog.

Both have scenes in a valley of bones and sport a large rock from which the lion king perches. They also both have a lion speaking from the sky and very similar speaking lines. Check out the link and make your own decision on whether Disney stole it or paid homage to it.

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The first non-native man executed in Connecticut was done because his face resembled a piglet’s!

George Spencer was an ugly, balding servant with a fake eye born in 1600 in Boston. He was a troublemaker and later he moved to New Haven, Connecticut where he continued to be a nuisance to his master.

He was said to be a godless man and one who was often accused by neighbors of doing illegal and depraved acts. In 1642 a stillborn piglet was born to a sow that was malformed and only had one eye. The Puritans took it as a sign from God of Spencer’s sins and put him on trial for sodomy and sexual acts with an animal.

They used his confession and the stillborn piglet as the two witnesses of the trial. He was found guilty and hung, while the sow was put to death by sword. 

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Your Facebook status can be no longer than 63206 characters long!

The increase was more than 10x the previous maximum of 5,000 characters in September 2011. That's extremely long. For comparison, you can fit 450 tweets (filled to the brim) in a Facebook status. 

How did they arrive to such a specific number of characters? The answer is extremely nerdy. A Facebook engineer explained: “I set the exact limit to something nerdy. Facebook … Face Boo K … hex(FACE) - K … 64206 - 1000 = 63206 :-).”

What would you fill with over 63k characters? 

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