12 Farm-Fresh Trivia Tidbits for Thursday, April 24, 2025

A guy got stuck in quicksand while on a romantic stroll on a Michigan beach, and when his date called 9-1-1, she had to explain that “my boyfriend is stuck.” Meanwhile, he was making his own call, saying, “I think my girlfriend is also trying to call.” This was the first time they’d referred to each other as such.

Chinese scientists just ran the world’s first thorium nuclear reactor, and in another world-first, replaced its radioactive fuel while it was still running. This was all done using foundational research that the U.S. spent hundreds of millions of dollars on, but abandoned in the 1960s.

Researchers have found that wild salmon are getting exposed to sleeping pills that are dumped in rivers, which is paradoxically making them faster swimmers.

On the night of April 25th, for about an hour, a rare alignment will make Venus, Saturn and the crescent Moon look like a gigantic celestial smiley face.

There are 141 scientifically useful T. rex skeletons, and 71 of them are sitting in private collections. They’re auctioned off for tens of millions of dollars, which many scientific institutions can’t afford.

It’s been 100 years since a groundbreaking 1925 study on the common cold, and in all that time, people are still getting the same symptoms for the same amount of time at the same rate.

A study found that the key to happiness is six hours of family time, two hours of friend time, two hours of exercise and no more than six hours of work. That leaves eight hours for sleep, and zero hours for drinking alone and mourning what could have been.

MIT astronomers have discovered a planet with a comet-like tail that’s shedding one Mount Everest-worth of matter every 30.5 hours.

The strain behind the 2016 scare never made the jump to humans because it was unable to bind to our receptors. But a study of the virus found that it was exactly one mutation away from being able to do exactly that.

The Kola Superdeep Borehole is a big ol’ hole dug for “research purposes” in Russia from 1970 to 1989. They had to quit when it reached about eight miles because the drill bit got stuck in a rock. 

Unfortunately, they can afford it. Sam Altman said that adding “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT prompts costs the company millions, but he encouraged users to keep doing it because, in his words, “You never know.”

A 2024 survey found that 67 percent of American users are nice to A.I. — 55 percent because “it’s the right thing to do” and the remaining 12 because they fear a future A.I. uprising.