Fun Facts That Are

Buford, a Pyrenees-Anatolian ranch dog, found 2-year-old Boden Allen alone in the Arizona desert and walked him 7 miles home through mountain-lion country. State police spotted two mountain lions on his trail. Boden told his rescuers: "I followed the dog back." Buford became an honorary search and rescue member.

Muhammad Ali got a call: Joe was on a 9th-floor fire escape in Los Angeles. He would not come down. Police, a psychologist, and a chaplain had all tried and failed. Ali drove over, leaned out a window, and said: "You're my brother. I love you and I couldn't lie to you." Twenty minutes later he had his arm around Joe and walked him inside. Ali drove him to the hospital himself.

Julia Roberts became the first actress ever paid $20 million for a single film - a tier that until then belonged only to men like Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks. She broke it with Erin Brockovich, then won the Oscar for Best Actress. The men had to make room.

Jhonatan Gonzalez was hiking the Narrows at Zion National Park with his family - kids as young as 1 - when the calm river suddenly turned waist-deep and raging, choked with logs and debris. He and his brothers planted themselves in the current and formed a human chain. Strangers on the bank grabbed on. Dozens of hikers, including toddlers, passed hand-to-hand to safety. Everyone made it out.

In 1901, sponge divers exploring a 2,000-year-old shipwreck off Greece hauled up a corroded lump of bronze. Decades of scanning revealed what it was: a mechanical computer of around 30 interlocking gears that tracked the Sun, Moon and planets and predicted eclipses. Nothing this complex appears again for more than a thousand years.

Deep inside Neptune and Uranus, heat and pressure squeeze carbon from methane into diamonds that sink toward the core. In 2017, scientists at SLAC recreated the conditions and watched diamonds form.

Cleopatra lived closer in time to the 1969 Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid (around 2560 BC). The pyramids were already about 2,500 years old in her lifetime.

Socotra broke away from Africa millions of years ago; about a third of its plants exist nowhere else, including the umbrella-shaped dragon blood tree that bleeds red sap.

In open-label placebo trials, patients told plainly they were taking sugar pills still reported real symptom relief for conditions like IBS, back pain and migraine.

Roy Sullivan, a US park ranger at Shenandoah National Park, was struck by lightning seven times between 1942 and 1977 and survived every one - the most lightning strikes ever survived by a person, per Guinness World Records.

Octopuses have three hearts and blue, copper-based blood. About two-thirds of their neurons sit in their eight arms, which can taste, touch and act semi-independently, and they can edit their own RNA.

Roman concrete has lasted nearly 2,000 years and can self-heal cracks: lime clasts from hot-mixing dissolve and recrystallise when water seeps in. MIT identified the mechanism in 2023.