Wiki Learning

1. All members of the genus Conus, sea snails, are venomous and can hurt you.

2. Apparently, it's possible to be a tourist in Antarctica, and not just on a cruise! Oh man, I WANNA GO!

3. Today I learned that adult howler monkeys do not often rely on their tails for locomotion, but juveniles frequently do. Meaning I saw a juvenile one in Guatemala, and it was still friggen huge!

4. Galapagos actually means "turtle"

5. Cockatoos are monogamous.

6. Prior to Katrina, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake was the biggest disaster in US history.

7. My grandfather was a "sapper" - or basically an engineer who dealt with mines and clearing mine fields in the army.

8. Augustine of Canterbury was the first Archbishop of Canterbury.

9. Parthenogenesis - or embryos without fertilization - is possible in animals.

10. Egyptian gods could be murdered and die.

11. Yom Kippur War and Ramadan War refer to the same war.

12. Death Valley used to be booming, but now has mostly ghost towns.

13. Someone seriously wrote a satirical poem about a dictionary.

14. In 2013, the Czech republic will directly elect its president for the first time in its history.

15. There were three popes in 1978.

16. Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson had a song together.

17. The governor of Tennessee fought in 3 wars.

18. The IRA hunger strike lasted 7 months 10 days.

19. Queen Elizabeth is from Scotland.

20. A small group of cabins in California has their own city.

21. There are hurricanes in the Pacific Ocean

22. France is in their 5th republic

23. Sugar is extracted from the stem of two species and the flower of a third.

24. The Marx, Engles, Lenin, Stalin Movement of Botswana exists.

25. The 1989 San Francisco earthquake took place the last time there was a world series between two San Fran teams.

26. In 1906 80% of San Francisco was destroyed by an earthquake.

27. 2000 was only the second time the olympics were held in the southern hemisphere.

28. Sydney is the most populous city in Australia.

29. Sydney has been inhabited for over 30,000 years.

30. Approximately 70% of the Eora - a group of Australian aborigines - died out of smallpox, other diseases, and destruction of their food crops in the 19th century.

31. Darwin wrote more than one book on evolution.

32. This one guy was elected Prime Minister of Greece seven times. Nonconsecutively.

33. There have been biological terrorist attacks in the USA.

34. Typhus is spread by louse feces, rather than bites.

35. Bounding mines bounce, explode at waist level, and send shrapnel flying.

36. After WWII, some countries forcibly expelled their German populations. Germans have the nerve to call these "death marches."

37. The beam of a ship is its width at its widest point.

38. Capitalist Piglet included a cartoon that depicted Jesus performing fellatio on a pig. There were no riots.

39. There are actually 35 species of garden eel.

40. A serial killer is someone who has killed 3 or more people over a period of more than a month with downtime between killings, and whose motivation is based on psychological gratification.

41. Some species of frog actually care for their young.

42. Queen Elizabeth II has owned over 30 corgis since 1952.

43. October 5, 1582 does not exist in several countries thanks to the conversion to the Julian calendar.

44. There were only 6 years between a world record flight of 39 miles and the first intentional casualty in air combat.

45. PBS was founded in 1970.

46. There is a Chinese writer from the 1000s named Su Shi.

47. The economy of the Ming dynasty was the largest in the world at that time.

48. The Ming dynasty created wage labor in China.

49. There are only seven named creeks in Ontario.

50. There's a fictional character named Daniel Meehan on HBO show Oz.