Residents in a Peruvian village have a day to beat each other up!

The village of Santo Tomas is located in the mountainous area of Peru. It is tucked into the Andes at 12,000 feet above sea level and for the most part is isolated from the areas and government surrounding it. Every year, the villagers take out their anger on each other. 

Ironically, they take the opportunity to take a whack at each other on Christmas morning. The festival of fighting is called Takanakuy. Everyone fights one another, from the youngest kids to the oldest of the elderly. Some people just fight because they’re drunk or for the sake of the festival. Other people have real disagreements to sort out. 

In general, people who fight out disagreements in the festival tend to accept the final result. Whoever wins the fight, has won the fight they had in the previous year. Only on a rare occasion does someone appeal the results of the fight. The festival of fighting is a good way to solve problems, since they are so isolated and getting to a real judicial court would be very difficult. 

There are some precautions put in place to keep it from getting deadly. For example, there are referees with whips to keep fights from getting to one-sided as well as a crowd to rush in and prevent someone on the ground from getting beaten up. It’s still pretty brutal though. 

(Source)

The discoverers of insulin chose not to patent the drug!

Diabetes is a lifelong disease in which there are high levels of sugar in the blood, and for which there is no cure, only treatment. In the case of Type 2 diabetes, the treatment is almost always a change in diet and exercise habits. However to keep Type 1 diabetes at bay, daily doses of insulin are often required. 

In 1922, Sir Fredrick Grant Banting and Charles Best discovered insulin and its significance. Now, it would have been very easy for them to patent the idea and spend their entire lives rolling around in dough. But instead, they decided they wanted to share the life-changing effect of their invention with the entire world. 

By not choosing to patent the drug, relatively inexpensive insulin therapy could be immediately available world-wide. For the price of an injection a day, dozens of people with type 1 diabetes have been able to avoid falling into a coma, heart disease, kidney disease, blindness, amputation, and impotence. 

This part of history dealt with an question that is perhaps even more relevant today; are the inventors of drugs ethically obliged to make the life-saving products accessible to all those who need them? 

(Source)

There are such things as fruit salad trees!

There was a time when you needed to visit several different trees in order to get that perfect bowl of fresh fruit salad. Now there’s one tree that makes things a lot more efficient by holding up to 8 different kinds of fruits. 

It’s rightly called the “Fruit Salad Tree.” The Fruit Salad Tree Company (yes there actually is a Fruit Salad Tree Company) created it with the use of an asexual plant propagation technique known as gafting whereby tissues from one plant are inserted into those of another so that the two sets of vascular tissues may join together. 

There are four types of Fruit Salad Trees; stonefruit (which grow peaches, plums, nectarines, apricots, and peachcots), citrus (which grows oranges, mandarins, lemons, limes, grapefruit), multi-apples only, and multi-nashi fruit only. And here you thought that prepackaging was impressive!

(Source)

Alcohol cooked in food still has up to 85% of the original alcohol content!

It is commonly believed that when you use alcohol in cooking all of the alcohol is burned off. In general people believe that the processes of cooking mean that none of the alcohol remains in the dish, only the flavor of the alcohol. 

The reality is that the amount of alcohol that remains in the food varies greatly depending on time cooked and many other factors. Studies done on the alcohol remaining in food varied widely. 

On the high end, 85% of the alcohol remained in the food, and that was when the food was prepared by adding alcohol to a boiling liquid and removing it from the heat. By cooking a food for about two and a half hours you can burn off about 95% of the alcohol, but it’s still likely that you have a small amount of alcohol still remaining. 

It seems like the best way to ensure you have absolutely no alcohol would be cooking if for three or more hours! Although, you may be able to cut down on this time slightly by using a larger pan, which gives the alcohol a greater surface area to evaporate from. 

For people who don’t drink alcohol for ethical or religious reasons or for parents, this is a significant finding. People might accidentally be getting alcohol from dishes they believed no longer contained alcohol! 

(Source)

The first person to be photographed was a stranger getting his shoes shined.

The picture was taken by Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre in 1838 in Paris, France. It is called “Boulevard du Temple,” simply named after the location it shot. In the picture, shown on the right, one can see the man getting his shoe shined on the bottom left. 

What’s neat is that there were cars (carriages) travelling through the street the whole time, but because the exposure time was over ten minutes, the cars don’t appear at all. Neither do any of the people who may have been walking by. 

Daguerre was a French artist and physicist, and is most notably recognized for his invention of the daguerrotype process of photography, which was the first commercially successful form.

He is today considered one of the fathers of modern photography, but he was also an accomplished painter and a developer of the diorama theatre. 

(Source)