This tiny jellyfish can kill you within 20 minutes!

The Irukandji jellyfish is a tiny species of jellyfish that lives in the waters of Australia. Although they're usually  no more than 1 cubic centimiter in volume, they can be extremely poisonous.

What makes them deadly is that they can fire their stingers into their victim. If you get stung, you develop something called the Irukandji syndrome. If left untreated, this syndrome may cause the victim to go into cardia arrest and die within 20 minutes!

Since they're so tiny, it was originally dificult to determine what caused the syndrome. So in 1964 a (very dedicated) doctor decided to prove that it was the tiny jellyfish's making by capturing and letting himself get stung

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Not only is the word OMG in the dictionary, its usage has been traced to 1917!

The Oxford English Dictionary traced the first recorded use of OMG to a 1917 letter from a British Admiral in which he wrote: "I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis—O.M.G. (Oh! My God!)—Shower it on the Admiralty!"

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Cartographers add fake landmarks to their maps to catch plagiarizers!

This is one of those facts that makes so much sense once you hear it. Cartography is the mapping of uncharted territories, and despite common belief, Magellan and Cortés haven't done all the work that needs to be done. With the rise of GPS units, and things like Google or Bing maps becoming so useful, there's a lot of mapping to be done in the world, and it's tempting to just steal someone else's work and pass it off as your own.

In order to prevent plagiarists from stealing, cartographers draw traps into their maps. They add things like fake streets, or fake parks and rooms. If they're found in any other map, then you know that person stole from you and it makes it easy to catch and sue them!

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The chances of flipping a coin aren't 50/50!

If you have a fair coin (not weighted, double faced, shaved, etc) then we usually assume the chances are 50/50 between heads and tails. However, there are a number of other factors that can change that. There's a 31 page study (!) on the science of coin flipping that has come up with 7 different premises for the physics of coin flipping. For example, a coin that is caught with someone's hand has a 51% chance of landing on the same side it was launched. 

 The source gives 7 tips to gain an advantage at coin flipping. Here's a few: try to alway toss and choose, if you catch the coin, flip it some times (but not every time) so that people don't take advantage of the principle we described above. Now you know, read the source and you'll be on your way to being 1% more successful at coin tosses

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It's OK to stuff your mouth with candy!

Dentists have said that it's ok for parents to let their kids eat up as much candy as they want at one time. They say that it's actually better to eat a lot of candy at one than eat it spread out over a period of time.

There are a few reasons for this: if you eat 5 candy bars at one time, your mouth will salivate more than if you eat one each hour for 5 hours. All that saliva will neutralize the harmful acids that corrode teeth. If you eat one each hour, there is more acid than saliva, which harms them.

The other reason is that people who eat a lot of candy will most likely brush their teeth after eating, whereas just one candy bar might not tip the scales. How much candy did you eat this Halloween?

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