Chinese scientists worked to create the "humanzee," a human-chimpanzee hybrid in the '60s. Female chimpanzees were impregnated with human sperm. The experiment was cut short by the Cultural Revolution - the scientists were sent to labor camps and a three-months pregnant chimpanzee died of neglect. The Soviets attempted a similar program in the '20s.

Fun fact, you can, in fact, make sourdough with the yeast from a yeast infection, and bake with it.

&

This symbol, the ampersand, used to have equal status with letters of the alphabet and was stuck at the end after Z.

That's how it got its name. People would say "X,Y,Z, and, per se, And". (And "sort of" an and). Thus, "And per se And" became Ampersand.

Marx did actually consider human nature

A lot of people know of the April Fools 418 I’m a Teapot error code, but did you know there’s a full Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol from the same RFC for running a coffee pot server? It even includes an HTCPCP method named “WHEN” to let the pot know it has poured enough cream.

HD-DVD and Blu-ray weren't the only HD video disc formats competing for dominance in the '00s. HD VMD which was basically a DVD containing more layers unsuccessfully tried to compete with the two. The company who produced it dissolved in 2008 and only a few titles were ever released on the format.

Not that obscure, but most orange cats are male since the orange gene is tied to the x-chromosom, so male cats only need one copy to appear orange. Female cats have to have the orange gene on both x-chromosom to be fully orange.

And usually only female cats can be calico/tortoise since the orange gene is co-dominant, so if they only have one copy of the orange gene both the orange and black will be visible.

A seemingly male calico/tortoise cat is usually intersex and sterile.

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."
"The truth is always stronger than the lie."

One is a quote made by Joseph Goebbels,
the other is a paraphrase of a paraphrase
of a quote made by Joseph Goebbels,
with the "In British culture" part missing.

Guess which one is which.

(P.S. I disavow German fascism.
It's just the more I learn about the US or UK,
the more I'm surprised that fascism took hold in Germany... (first.))

Several popular graphing calculators from Texas Instruments, including the TI-83 and TI-84, have a display resolution of 96*64, but only 95*63 pixels are used for graphing.

However, the earlier TI-81 did use all 96*64 pixels. The rationale for this change was to establish a central row and column for the axes and a central pixel for the origin. The cursor could only move pixel-by-pixel, and since the axes and origin would end up "between" pixels on the TI-81, they were inaccessible by the cursor.

A large amount of visual inspections on the inside of nuclear reactors is done literally with a camera duct taped to either a really really long pole assembled in sections or a rope. Operators "swim" the cameras to various locations and camera handling is basically an occupation in that field. You also need camera shots for any work being done on the inside of the flooded reactor with, again, really really long poles that end up acting more like pool noodles at such a length. It is silly and difficult work. Also you basically are wearing a trash bag sitting above a hot tub while doing this work. So it is a wild experience.

Diabetics piss has so much sugar in it that you can make high end whiskey with it.

I just touched my nose. Until I posted this, I was the only person who knew this fact.

Darwin drank tortoise piss and, according to his documentation, didn’t hate it.

There are no extant recordings of George Orwell's voice

Living at high altitude for long periods of time can cause a disease that is otherwise most associated with cocaine and meth.

Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension has some weird causes, but it seems that high altitude and having to work for enough oxygen can cause the body to revolt.

it's so easy to break into an apartment in south korea, any basement dweller can do this.

I don't exist. I had a meeting and voted. It was unanimous.

The tiniest park in the USA is located on a city street corner in Portland, Oregon. Mill Ends Park

Edit: I fell down a rabbit hole. Corrected myself having posted it originally as “world’s smallest park” which is how I knew it - apparently it carried that distinction until Feb this year when a tiny space on a Japanese street (which was created in 1988) formally applied for, and was awarded the Guinness book of records title of World’s Smallest Park.

Also this one just popped into my head - the Guinness Book of Records was originally conceived as a means of settling arguments by compiling factual “records”. The original argument related to a shooting trip in England in which the Managing Director of Guinness Breweries partook, where a missed shot led to a disagreement about the fastest game bird. The realisation that arguments such as this would be commonplace, and that no resource existed to settle such matters - the niche for capturing these types of facts was identified and the book was born.

the roslagsbanan commuter rail is the only actively used 2 ft 11 ^3^⁄~32~ in railway in the world.

...honestly, with a wikipedia article that extensive it hardly qualifies as "obscure".

Opossums have 13 nipples

licking doorknobs is illegal on other planets