Mondays are always exhausting. Long work days, school wok piling up, and another five days until the weekend. It's the first day of the week and our brains are already fried! Sometimes we need a break and time to relax learning... well, completely useless things that we'll probably never use in our professional careers. You know, how the plastic tip of your shoe lace is called an aglet! Or how elephants don't have knees! Maybe even how brains don't feel pain!
So sit back, relax, and enjoy these ten useless yet amusing facts for your Monday.
1. Mt. Everest Is The Highest Mountain In The World, But Not The Tallest
Mt. Everest is the tallest mountain, coming in at 29,029 feet from base to tip, but the highest mountain is Hawaii's Mauna Kea. Mauna Kea rises 33,465 feet, making the tip of Mauna Kea higher than the tallest mountain.
2. Shakespeare Invented Over 1,700 Words
Shakespeare combined words, changed nouns into verbs, and created even new words! By doing this, he created over 1,700 new words.
3. Your Brain Can't Feel Pain
The coverings of the brain can feel pain, but the brain itself has no pain receptors. That means when you're having brain surgery, the brain can't feel any pain associated with it!
4. Elephants Can't Jump
The bones of an elephant are all pointing downwards, so the elephant can't "spring" upwards link other animals can. Add in the four tons of body mass and that jump just isn't going to happen.
5. The Asteroid That Killed The Dinosaurs Was 150x Faster Than A Jet Airliner
At 30 meters per second, a six mile wide meteor crashed down on the dinosaurs! No wonder 70% of life was wiped off the Earth!
6. The Average NFL Game Really Only Lasts 11 Minutes
Even though an NFL game takes up a three hour time slot, they're only actually playing for around 11 minutes on average. The rest is filled with breaks and commercials.
7. George Washington Carver Discovered Over 300 Uses For The Peanut
Best known for his work to promote racial equality and helping southern fields recover from overuse, Carver also claimed to have found over 300 uses for peanuts! None of them ever became commercially successful, but that's a lot of uses for peanuts!
8. "Lego" Came From A Danish Phrase Meaning "Play Well"
Founded in Billund, Denmark, the founder of Lego combined the words "leg godt," meaning "play well," into the widely recognized Lego brand we know and love.
9. Alexander the Great's Childhood Mentor Was Aristotle
Before he was Great, 13-year-old Alexander III of Macedon became the pupil of Aristotle. If not for Aristotle, Alexander the Great's love for reading may have never been discovered.
10. The Grinch Was 53-Years-Old When He Stole Christmas
In Dr. Seuss's "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas," the Grinch groans and complains that he's been listing to the Who's Christmas singing for 53 years! To reconnect with Christmas, 53-year-old Dr. Seuss wrote the story of a 53-year-old Grinch who needed to learn the true spirit of Christmas!
