A German scientist spent 9 years developing a method that made it possible to harvest caviar without killing the fish or making it suffer. The process looks like this: when a fish seems ready for the egg harvest, farmers start to monitor it using ultrasound. Then they change its diet and implement certain proteins into it. When it’s time to harvest the eggs, the fish gets a special massage that allows it to release the eggs without any discomfort. This process can be repeated every 15 months. The technology is already being used for sturgeon and is currently being tested on salmon.

The company refuses to sponsor people who could harm the company’s brand with their reputation, so it doesn’t work with people who are into Scientology or somehow connected to other cults.

The large, sweet strawberries that we love to buy at the markets in the summer aren’t the result of a scientific experiment, but of the spread of bird droppings.

About 300 years ago, a French spy went to Chile. During his trip, he came across very large strawberries. In Europe, this berry was quite small and looked more like a wild strawberry. So he decided to give a present to Louis XIV and brought him a couple of bushes of his favorite berry. But the problem was that he chose male plants that couldn’t be intercrossed with other types of strawberries.

Luckily, about half a century later, farmers noticed some similarities between this type of strawberry and the other types that were brought from North America. They planted them close to each other and got a bountiful harvest of large and sweet berries. It turns out that this strawberry hybrid was also able to fertilize itself. The scientists later found out that this hybrid had already existed, but made it to North and South America thanks to bird droppings and turned into 2 different types of strawberries.

There’s a type of bacteria that can transfer the genes of one plant into another. As a result, scientists believe that products like tobacco, sweet potatoes, peanuts, cranberries, hops, and even tea are natural GMO plants.

This fruit contains a chemical compound that agitates bees, making them aggressive, and turns a banana and the person who eats it into a target that must be destroyed.

In 1962, a CIA consultant became concerned when he saw soccer fields in Cuba and he pointed out that Cubans like baseball, but that it was the Russians who preferred soccer. He even found the possible location of a Soviet military base. But Kennedy wanted to get hard proof, so he approved U2 flights over Cuba. As a result, he got the photos that started the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Saturn’s rings are temporary. They formed not very long ago and they will exist only for a limited time: about 200 million years. So our descendants may not see this phenomenon.

In Iceland, TV broadcasting was always switched off on Thursdays, until 1987. It was done to encourage people to dedicate this day to their friends and family. So many Icelanders who were born before 1987 joke that they were conceived on a Thursday.

Fetal stem cells can get through the placenta and stay in the mother’s body for years. On the one hand, they help it by promoting the repair of damaged tissues and organs, and speeding up the healing and recovery. On the other hand, they increase the risk of oncological and autoimmune diseases.

Since ancient times, wild boars have been considered military animals. According to a legend, Alexander the Great used them as a secret weapon against the army of the Indian king Porus, who used war elephants. To make an elephant run away and destroy its own army, all that needs to be done is to make the pig squeal. This same trick helped defeat the army of Antigonus II Gonatas, but then he started to keep pigs close to the elephants to accustom these large animals to the squealing sound.

Originally, the submarine periscope was controlled with a joystick that cost $38,000. But officers admitted that it was too heavy and clunky in their hand. Engineers quickly solved this problem and replaced the joystick with Xbox controllers that cost less than $30.

Of course, only noble warriors could afford to wear a light, beautiful, and strong armor that fully protected their bodies, but it wasn’t the armor that saved their lives. It was more profitable for their opponents to not kill, but to capture a knight wearing expensive armor and wait until their family offered a good ransom.

Doctors in the majority of American hospitals still use pagers. This happens because the walls in the hospitals are made in such a way that they can’t be penetrated by X-rays. This means that they may also block mobile signals as well and so, as a rule, mobile phones don’t work very well there.

Prince William and Prince Harry helped the Queen set up her new technology and they recorded this message on her answering machine: “Hey wassup! This is Liz. Sorry, I’m away from the throne. For a hotline to Philip, press 1. For Charles, press 2. And for the corgis, press 3.” The prank worked: Queen Elizabeth’s private secretary almost fell out of his chair when he heard the message. But the Queen actually enjoyed the prank: imagining how people who had called her reacted.

A new product that can save us from icy roads was tested in Wisconsin (USA). It’s a salt brine that is left after cheese production that is then mixed with some regular road salt. This mixture is still effective against ice even if it’s 30 degrees below zero outside.

In the capital of Japan, combustible waste gets burned, but thanks to a cleaning system the harmful fumes and smoke don’t get into the atmosphere and the ash is used as a compound for building mixtures.

A scientist, who researched the processes that happen in the lower mantle of the Earth, managed to create diamonds with the help of carbon dioxide, high pressure, and peanut butter. But it took him quite a long time, so this way of producing these precious stones will unlikely ever become a common practice.

Marine biologist, Stephen Hillenburg, created a comic book about marine creatures to make his lessons fun and more effective. Later, when he became an animator, he used these characters as a reference for the animated television series “SpongeBob SquarePants” that he created.