Wacky Facts

The Mechanical Turk toured Europe from 1770 and beat players including, reportedly, Napoleon. A skilled human chess player was hidden inside the cabinet. Amazon’s crowd-work service is named after it.

The race, first held in 1903, has around 21 stages including high mountain climbs.

Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts described a mathematical model of a neuron in 1943.

Opened in 80 CE, it had numbered entrances to move crowds quickly — like a modern stadium.

The name comes from Hindi. India is the world’s largest exporter of basmati rice.

Garba is danced around a lamp or image of the goddess, symbolising the cycle of life with the divine at the centre.

He became a grandmaster in 1988 and later won the world championship five times.

Short answer: The Moon experiences moonquakes. Apollo astronauts installed seismometers that recorded vibrations from deep tidal stresses, shallow tectonic events, meteoroid impacts and the expansion and contraction caused by extreme temperature changes.

How were moonquakes discovered?

The Apollo programme did more than collect rocks. Astronauts deployed scientific packages on the lunar surface, including seismometers. A network of four stations operated from the Apollo era until 1977, sending years of data back to Earth. The instruments detected signals that scientists could separate by their depth, shape, timing and relationship to impacts.

What causes the Moon to shake?

There is not one single cause. Deep moonquakes occur hundreds of kilometres below the surface and repeat in patterns connected with Earth’s gravitational pull. That tidal force continually flexes the Moon. Shallower events appear to be tectonic: the Moon has cooled over billions of years, contracted and developed thrust faults as its brittle crust adjusted.

Meteoroids also strike the airless lunar surface and send vibrations through the ground. In addition, rocks near the surface expand in intense daytime heat and contract during the freezing lunar night. This thermal cycling can create small, very shallow seismic events.

How are moonquakes different from earthquakes?

Earthquakes are often driven by moving tectonic plates, while the Moon has no Earth-like system of active plate tectonics. Lunar rock is also much drier and more fractured. NASA notes that some moonquake vibrations can continue for more than ten minutes because seismic energy is scattered and loses energy differently inside the Moon.

Is the Moon still shrinking?

Images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter show thousands of small thrust-fault scarps. These cliff-like features indicate that the crust has been compressed as the Moon cooled. NASA estimates that the lunar diameter has become about 50 metres smaller over the last several hundred million years, and some faults may still be active.

Why moonquakes matter for future bases

Engineers need to know how often strong shaking occurs and where faults lie before building long-lived habitats, landing pads or observatories. Apollo’s instruments covered only a limited area on the near side, so future seismic stations—especially on the far side—can reveal a much fuller picture of lunar activity and internal structure.

Four useful categories

• Deep: connected with tidal flexing.
• Shallow: likely tectonic and potentially stronger.
• Impact: caused by natural or planned objects striking the surface.
• Thermal: caused by rapid heating and cooling of surface rock.

Evidence and limits

“Moonquake” is a convenient broad name, not proof that lunar geology works exactly like Earth’s. Apollo locations and instruments limited the precision of some estimates, and researchers continue reanalysing the old recordings with modern methods. New measurements are necessary to map hazards reliably across the whole Moon.

Sources

• NASA Science: moonquakes
• NASA Marshall: Apollo lunar seismology

Seeing, hearing or even thinking about yawning can trigger a yawn.

The largest recorded in the US measured about 20 cm across, found in South Dakota in 2010.

Soft ground caused it to tilt in the 12th century. Engineering work finished in 2001 reduced the lean.

The fort’s wall in Rajasthan runs for about 36 km and is wide enough in places for several horses side by side.

Most of Whittier’s roughly 270 residents live in the 14-storey Begich Towers, which also houses the police station, post office and shops; the town is reached by a one-lane tunnel shared with trains.

It was built for the 1889 World’s Fair with a permit for 20 years. It survived partly because it proved useful as a radio transmission tower.

The world’s first commercial Internet domain name, symbolics.com, was registered on March 15, 1985, by Symbolics Inc., a computer systems manufacturer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Symbolics pioneered early Lisp machines and workstation computing. When the company went bankrupt in the 1990s, the historic domain was acquired in 2009 by an investment group, making it the oldest continuously operational .com domain on the World Wide Web.

John McCarthy and colleagues used the term in their 1955 proposal for a 1956 summer research project at Dartmouth College. The organisers hoped significant progress could be made in one summer. It took rather longer.

Most of a shrimp’s vital organs, including the heart, sit in the cephalothorax — the fused head and chest section.

Short answer: Walt Disney supplied Mickey Mouse’s original sounds and speaking voice when the character began talking in 1928. The role later passed to specialist voice performers, but Mickey’s first recognizable voice came from his creator.

What happened?

Mickey Mouse appeared in the sound cartoon Steamboat Willie, released in November 1928. The film was not Mickey’s first production, but it was his breakthrough because picture, music and effects were carefully synchronized. Mickey’s vocal performance was still simple—laughs, cries and short sounds rather than the dialogue-heavy acting used in later cartoons—but Walt Disney performed those sounds and then continued as Mickey’s speaking voice.

Why did Walt voice Mickey?

Early animation studios were small, experimental operations. A creator could write a story, direct a sequence and step behind a microphone when a character needed a voice. Walt also understood the personality he wanted: cheerful, mischievous and optimistic rather than aggressive. His light falsetto became part of Mickey’s identity and helped connect the drawing on screen with a distinct character.

How the voice changed

Disney’s official historical account says Walt provided Mickey’s original speaking voice from 1928. Sound-effects artist Jimmy Macdonald assumed the regular role in the 1940s, beginning with the period around Mickey and the Beanstalk. Wayne Allwine took over in 1977 and voiced Mickey for more than three decades. Later performers maintained the same recognizable high, buoyant quality while adapting it for television, games, theme parks and modern shorts.

Why the fact matters

The detail is more than a piece of casting trivia. It shows how closely authorship, performance and technology were linked during synchronized sound animation’s early years. Mickey was not designed first and voiced by an unrelated cast much later; his screen personality developed while Walt and his team were discovering how sound could make an animated figure feel alive.

Evidence and limits

It is safest to say Walt was Mickey’s original voice, not his only voice. Different performers supplied the role over time, and early shorts contain varied vocal effects. The central claim is confirmed by D23, Disney’s official historical organization, which dates Walt’s original sounds and speaking performance to Mickey’s talking debut in 1928.

A quick voice timeline

• 1928: Walt Disney supplies Mickey’s original sounds and speaking voice.
• 1940s: Jimmy Macdonald succeeds Walt as the regular voice performer.
• 1977: Wayne Allwine begins a run that lasts more than three decades.
• Later years: additional performers carry the role into television, attractions, games and new animated shorts.

The handover illustrates a rare kind of continuity: each performer inherited a recognizable character but still had to act, time jokes and respond to new animation styles.

Sources

• D23: the official history of Mickey’s principal voice performers
• D23 profile of Jimmy Macdonald

Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s 1996 research search engine analysed backlinks to judge a page’s importance, hence “BackRub”. It was renamed Google, a play on “googol” (1 followed by 100 zeros), in 1997.

Dimples create a thin turbulent layer of air that reduces drag, letting the ball travel much further than a smooth one.

UPI, launched in 2016 by NPCI, became India’s most used digital payment system, handling billions of transactions every month.

No horned Viking-age battle helmet has ever been found. The image became popular in the 19th century through Romantic art and costume designs for Wagner’s operas.

Seeing a high “original price” first makes a discounted price seem like a better deal.

Bottlenose dolphins develop signature whistles and respond when others copy their whistle.

A small population survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic until about 4,000 years ago, after the Great Pyramid was completed.

Buttons made of shell have been found at Mohenjo-daro; an ivory scale from Lothal has fine graduations for measurement.

Known as the Mpemba effect after a Tanzanian student who noticed it in 1963. Scientists still debate when and why it happens.

Its climate and freeze-thaw cycles seem to prevent mosquitoes from establishing, though they live in nearby countries.

On the exoplanet HD 189733 b, astronomers think silicate particles form clouds, and winds of several thousand kilometres per hour could blow molten glass droplets sideways. Its deep blue colour comes from those clouds.

“Shunya” means empty or void; ancient Indian texts also used words like “kha” (sky) for zero.