A thread for exceptional facts

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CricketVonChirp said:
In older classification systems, most amoebas were placed in the class or subphylum Sarcodina, a grouping of single-celled organisms that possess pseudopods or move by protoplasmic flow.
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The term "Sarcodina" so old-fashioned that it literally triggers me to the point of literally shaking.

CricketVonChirp said:
However, molecular phylogenetic studies have shown that Sarcodina is not a monophyletic group whose members share common descent. Consequently, amoeboid organisms are no longer classified together in one group.
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That's better. Modern phylogenetic analysis recognizes the group Amoebozoa, which is purely delineated with molecular data with no known morphological correlates. This group includes the most familiar genuses Amoeba and Chaos, but not all medically-relevant "amoebas" belongs to this group. Naegleria, the "brain-eating amoeba", belongs to the Excavata group. Rhizaria is another group that has received many of the refugees from the old "Sarcodina", while a few odd "amoebas" made their way into various other groups, including Opisthokonta as distant relatives of fungi.
 
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About half of autistic people, in the UK at least, are diagnosed as mentally challenged.

Based on our findings from this website, this is a severe underestimate.
 
Spotted hyenas were considered hermaphrodites for many years. This is because females have an external vagina called a pseudopenis. This makes forced sex impossible, consensual sex difficult, and can lead to a newborn getting asphyxiated during birth if it gets stuck in this appendage.
 
Positron said:
There is a well-liked clip of dolphin passing a puffer like a fucking bong:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=msx3BAhIeQg
Though I'm a bit skeptical about whether the dolphins are really "blissed out" as tetrodotoxin shouldn't be able to pass through the blood-brain barrier.
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Humans also consume pufferfish largely for its neurotoxic properties. From what I've heard, it's more of a body buzz, though those can be quite pleasant themselves.
 
The Gypsy Moth, one of the most destructive pests in North America, was introduced from Europe as an indirect result of the Civil War -- as the war cut off the supply of cotton from the South, people started to contemplate an American silk industry, and the Gypsy Moth was one of the species considered. Its silk turned out to be useless, and the insect escaped from captivity and devastated the forests.

Introducing animal and plant species for harebrained commercial purposes continues. Currently the Golden Apple Snail, originally from South America, is wrecking havoc in Southeast Asia's rice fields. This fast-growing, highly prolific snail was originally introduced as a plan to start an industry for "Asian escargot". The snail turned out to be not really that tasty (people won't eat them unless they're drowned in spices; you can often find them, prepared this way, in Asia's food streets), and the escaped snails proved a very troublesome pest.
 
The phrase "A nu, cheeki breeki i v damke," is such thick slang that even native Russian speakers have a hard time deciphering it. The best translation we have is "Hurry up, do it quick, king me!" In this case, "king me" is in reference to checkers.
 
Male calico/tortoiseshell cats are extremely rare, roughly one out of 3,000 cats with the coat pattern is a boy. As the orange and black coat patterns are from the X-chromosome, they're also sterile due to a genetic abnormality where a male has two X-chromosomes in addition to the Y-chromosome (XXY).
 
If you're 28+ years old, then all the dogs that were alive on the day you were born are all dead. All of them. You're welcome!
 
If you ever stain your clothing with your own blood, spit on it. Each person's own spit has the perfect enzymes needed to break down their own blood.
 
Bogs said:
Graham's number is an unimaginably large number that is a proven upper bound to the solution of a certain problem in Ramsey theory. It is so large that the observable universe is far too small to contain an ordinary digital representation of Graham's number, assuming that each digit occupies one Planck volume, possibly the smallest measurable space. Even the form a^b^c... is insufficient for this purpose; however, the last 12 digits are: 262464195387.
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graham's number is negligeable compared to what you can represent with the arrow notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth's_up-arrow_notation
 
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