By 2010, Rick Astley had only made $12 from the Rickrolling phenomenon.

This is just an example of how poorly the YouTube profit-sharing model works for artists. In August 2010, a German judge ordered Google to do a better job of detecting and removing uploaded videos on YouTube that use copyrighted material. At the time of the ruling, the official video for Rick Astley’s Never Going to Give You Up had been viewed 39 million times on YouTube, but Astley only received $12 in YouTube royalties (he was only the performer, not the writer, of the song). Of course, the song itself had obviously been viewed many more times illegally on YouTube during the “Rickrolling” internet sensation.
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Just kidding. Here's the actual source.

Until 2007, all Russian cosmonauts had to bring guns with them to space.

This wasn’t so that the Russians could shoot extra-terrestrials, or have space battles with U.S. astronauts. The idea was that in the case of a Russian spacecraft landing in hostile territory, the cosmonauts could protect themselves. This practice is a relic of the Cold War era, though it was only recently put to rest when the Russian government introduce an international treaty banning the transportation of weapons into space.

The gun itself was pretty awesome. It’s triple barreled pistol that could shoot rifle bullets, shotgun shells, and flares. It also comes with a shovel and a machete attached. You could call it the gun equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife. The gun was stored in a metal case between the seats on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, only to be used in emergencies. After a successful landing, the rare gun was offered to the ship’s commander as a gift.
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It’s illegal to serve margarine instead of butter in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin, which is known for its dairy products like butter, actually banned the sale or use of margarine colored to look like butter back in 1895. The law wasn’t repealed until 1967 after a Wisconsin State Senator and butter enthusiast underwent a blind taste test and discovered that margarine tasted better.

From 1967 until now, it’s still been illegal to serve margarine as a replacement for butter in diners. Breaking this law is punishable by up to 3 months in jail, though that’s never been enforced. The law also requires that butter be served in Wisconsin’s schools and at state institutions, including prisons.
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In the 50's a white man, passing himself off as black, traveled through the deep south and wrote about what happened to him.

John Howard Griffin underwent treatment in 1959 to darken his skin. He shaved his head and with a combination of drugs and ultraviolet he made his skin dark enough to pass off as an African-American. He traveled around in different states in the South and wrote about his experiences in his book, Black Like Me.

As a “black man” Griffin faced insults, racial slurs, and threats of violence, and he found himself denied access to restrooms, jobs, and places to live. The book revealed a lot about racism under Jim Crow, and was later adapted into a film. Griffin died in 1980. Rumors at the time asserted that his death was caused by the skin treatments he underwent for his controversial experiment. These rumors have been debunked.
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The astronomer who coined the term "Big Bang" actually intended to make fun of the theory!

In the 1950s, British astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle made a name for himself by taping a series of televised lectures called "The Nature of the Universe". Hoyle was of the belief that the universe came from a continual pattern of development that has no beginning or end. This meant that he expressed a great deal of public criticism of the competing theory that the universe had come from a single explosion of dense matter.

This came to a head in the final episode of the series, in which Sir Fred invented a real zinger of a phrase in the hopes of shaming the alternate belief once and for all - "the Big Bang". Unfortunately for Hoyle, this name stuck...but in a good way, and served only to increase the theory's overall popularity!
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