A woman disguised herself as a boy to date her friends.

Her name is Gemma Barker, and she made headlines when she created three male personas to date her 16 year old friends. Even though they knew her in real life, they didn’t pick up at all that it was her disguised as a boy. Even the parents of one of the girls was duped.

Gemma, 19 at the time, got in pretty serious trouble because of it. She was charged with two counts of sexual assault and one count of fraud. The fraud count was for claiming one of her male personas assaulted her. She had introduced herself to her friends by making fake Facebook profiles and contacting them that way.

It worked, but trouble arose when one of the girls became suspicious that the other girl was dating the same guy. Today, she is on the Sex Offenders Registry.

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There is a kind of elevator that has no doors and doesn't stop.

While your first thought might be that it sounds like it defeats the purpose of an elevator, we mean it has open doorways, but no closing doors. Basically, think of a nonstop ferris wheel. It’s called a paternoster, and today there aren’t many of it left.

It’s a passenger elevator that is made up of a chain of open compartments that move slowly in a constant loop. The benefit is that, like an escalator, people can get on at any time. People can also get off at any floor without having to select it or wait for others to reach their floors. The drawbacks are obviously safety related, because such a mechanism is pretty dangerous.

Because of the safety issues, most of the lifts are now gone. A few are still around though, like the one in the Arts Tower at the University of Sheffield in the UK.

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Why did In-N-Out stop letting you add all the extra patties that you wanted?

In-N-Out Burger used to let customers add as many extra patties with cheese as they wanted to their burgers until one group of 8 ordered one with 100 patties which contained 19450 kcals.

Apparently, it all started back in 2004 in Las Vegas, Nevada. A group of friends having a good time decided to get a 100 patty burger at In-N-Out, a fast food chain found widely on the west coast of the United States. At that point, In-N-Out allowed people to add as many patties with cheese they wanted. In this case, the 100 patties came to $97.66. The group of 8 managed to down all 100 patties together, and all of them got extremely sick, mostly from the large ingesting of greasy cheese.

The total amount of calories they consumed was 19,490 (a good 10 days’ worth). It took them less than two hours to down them all, and only one of the 8 barfed. As a result of this impressive (?) feat, In-N-Outs now generally only allow 4 patties per burger.

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Nearly 6 million YEARS of game time have been clocked in WoW.

World of Warcraft is the game that probably needs little introduction. Since its release in 2004, it has become insanely popular. Eight years and four expansion packs later, it is still going strong. Though it currently has around 10 million subscribers, its peak was at 12 million not too long ago. Despite these numbers, it’s kind of surprising that as of 2011, 5,930,000 years have been spent in game by the collective player base- which means now it’s no doubt well over the 6 million mark.

That would mean that every player in game at its peak subscription count would have spent almost half a year in game. The reality is that more than 12 million players have played the game- that’s why the number is so high. Players are constantly quitting as new ones join (though less join now than in the past). Still, considering that earlier this year a building in China was constructed in 360 hours, it’s amazing to think what could have been done with all of those man hours.

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The US government keeps a stockpile of smallpox vaccines big enough to vaccinate every man, woman, and child in the country.

If you don’t know what smallpox is, be happy. Most of you reading this will probably never have to deal with it. Smallpox was a highly infectious disease that caused painful blisters to appear all over the body. Its mortality rate was about one third. Once a massive problem, it has since been dealt with and the last case of smallpox was diagnosed in 1977.

 After the disease was eradicated in the US, smallpox vaccinations gradually stopped. Until relatively recently, the vaccine was only circulated to medical professionals for research. Following September 11th, 2001, however, the US government decided to prepare itself further for defense of terrorism- including disease warfare.

Theoretically, one could intentionally release the smallpox virus. The US government has prepared for this by updating and releasing a smallpox response plan, as well as manufacturing enough vaccines to vaccinate every person in the US.

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