12 Farm-Fresh Trivia Tidbits for Friday, April 25, 2025
Generative A.I. can do anything: tank your mayoral campaign, put your parents in a bad mood, end of list.
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There’s a New Type of Paint That Assassinates Microbes
While brass has strong antimicrobial properties, it’s expensive and unwieldy to cover public or medical surfaces with it. Scientists have developed a gloss resin with similar bacteria-murdering properties that doesn’t require expensive metals.
Andrew Cuomo’s Running Mate Is ChatGPT
When the disgraced former governor and NYC mayoral hopeful announced his housing plan, internet sleuths keenly noticed that the text of the announcement directly cited ChatGPT, presumably by mistake.
Outsource Your Relationship With Your Aging Parents to A.I.
A program called inTouch allows you to stay out-of-touch with your parents by staging a daily phone call with them, prompting them with questions about their life that a good son or daughter might ask. It then sends you a summary of the conversation, along with warnings if they were in a “bad mood.”
A Citizen App for Medieval London
This interactive map paints a picture of the safer and more dangerous parts of town by recording the location and type of various deadly incidents. If it was a murder, it’ll indicate what the weapon was as well. For example: “Saddletree-maker dies three weeks after his finger is cut off” and “Goldsmith kills carpenter in late-night attack.”
Yale’s Namesake Kicked Off Their Remarkable Endowment With a Pretty Measly Donation
Elihu Yale, who got the school named after him when he donated some books, artwork and textiles, also donated £562 in 1718 that has ballooned into the university’s storied $41 billion endowment.
They’re Dipping Into Their Endowment Big-Time
Schools across the country are stockpiling cash to fight inevitable legal battles with this zombified corpse of a federal government, and Yale is selling about $6 billion of its private equity holdings. This is significant because they’re the ones who invented the “invest in private equity to hoard unimaginable wealth” model in the first place.
The Secret to Removing Your Opponent’s Free Throw Game
L.A. Clippers owner Steve Ballmer managed to cut his opponents’ free throw average to 74.8 percent — almost five percent lower than the league average — through some tricky architecture. The seats behind the basket, known as The Wall, are exceptionally steep and 51 rows high. Furthermore, only the most annoying fans are allowed to sit there, and they’re all expected to stand the whole game.
British Nerds Were Drinking Out of a Human Skull Up Until 2015
A new book on the bleak and disgusting history of colonialism and the desecration of human remains reveals that some Oxford academics used a silver-rimmed human skull to drink wine at special dork functions. They only stopped serving wine (and used it instead to serve chocolate) when it started to leak.
Airborne Ferries Are Taking Over the World
Stockholm has electric ferries with hydrofoil underwater wings that keep the hull largely out of the water, making them twice as fast as most ferries in the U.S. with just two percent of the carbon footprint. The company behind them has begun producing ferries for countries around the world.
The Most-Viewed YouTube Videos of All Time
The list of the 500 most-viewed videos of all time is capped off by Cocomelon’s “Wheels on the Bus” (7.4 billion views), Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito” (8.7 billion) and the infamous “Baby Shark Dance” (15 billion).
Sea Turtles Are the New Ozone Layer
After decades of local and federal conservation efforts around the world, the populations of 48 species of sea turtle are making a comeback in over half of the globe.
The First Scientists to Notice the Big Bang Thought It Was Bird Poop
When scientists first heard cosmic microwave background (CMB) picked up in their instruments, they thought they must have been working with a broken antenna. Rather than recognize it as direct evidence of the reverberations of The Big Bang, a leading theory was that a family of birds had gotten into their equipment and pooped all over it.
