The Hughes H-4 Hercules, nicknamed the Spruce Goose, is the largest aircraft ever to fly. Due to wartime restrictions on the use of metal, it was made of wood. But despite its name, it was made mostly of birch, not spruce.
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The U.S. Secret Service uses code names to refer to members of the Presidential family. Such code-names have included "Rawhide", for Ronald Reagan, "Lancer" for John F. Kennedy, and "Renegade" for Barack Obama.
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The Bristlecone Pine tree, native to the western United States, has the longest life span of any known organism - over 5,000 years.
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The places in the original version of the board game "Monopoly" were inspired by Atlantic City, New Jersey.
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The Jean-Claude Van Damme movie "Bloodsport" claims to be based on a true story about a deadly martial arts tournament called the "Kumite". In reality, it was completely made up.
In the British detective TV series 'Midsomer Murders' the village of Midsomer has had 222 murders, 11 suicides, 11 accidental deaths and 7 deaths by natural causes ....... BEAT THAT FARGO!
In order for Frank Dux's claims about the "Kumite" to be accurate, based on his claimed record of 56 consecutive knock outs in one single-elimination tournament, there would have had to have been 72 quadrillion fighters competing in the tournament at the same time (start with 2 finalists and then double it 56 times). More than 10 million times the current population of planet Earth! And supposedly this all took place on the tiny island nation of the Bahamas. Can you just imagine how hard it was to find a working toilet?? Truly the man is a hero.
curious about the longest lifespan one. There are some jellyfish and some other deep sea organisms that can technically live forever, although I'm sure most of them get eaten by something else long before they reach 5000 years old, so maybe that doesn't count.
If an amoeba splits in two, they are both actually the original amoeba. They each then grow and split in two to form two amoebas that really are the original amoeba. So an amoeba today is actually the original amoeba from millions of years ago ...... right?
Turritopsis dohrnii is a biologically immortal jellyfish. But, like you say, I'd be kinda amazed if one had ever actually made it to anything approaching 5000 years. Also, it's not clear that Bristlecones or any number of other trees experience senescence - ageing, in lay terms - so they arguably match Turritopsis' biological immortality claim, whilst also living longer on average. That said, even then it isn't clear the Bristlecone takes the win. Many clonal colonies (arguably not one tree, but fair to say a single organism) are tens of thousands of years old, possibly up to or exceeding 1 million years. Some Wollemi pines in Australia have been cloning themselves for 60 million years.
#68. The current thinking is that there are quaking aspen trees that are older than 80,000 years. These are genetically identical plants that seem to be individual trees but are connected by shared root systems.