Fun facts!

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In March 1942, Winston Churchill – Prime Minister of the United Kingdom – published an 11-page essay in the Sunday Dispatch, a newspaper. What was this wartime leader writing about in the midst of mankind's largest war?

Whether or not there was life on other planets in our solar system.

The essay was titled, "Are there men on the moon?" and for the time, raises some excellent points.
Once we admit that the other stars probably also have planets, at any rate a goodly proportion of them, it is more than likely that a large fraction of these will be the right size to keep on their surface water and, possibly, an atmosphere of some sort; and, furthermore, at the proper distance from their parent sun, to maintain a suitable temperature. Do they house living creatures, or even plants? The answer to this question may never be known.
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The concept we know today as the "Goldilocks zone" was not as widely known at the time so he was either familiar with the niche concept or he just arrived at it himself.

He also makes it clear his belief in alien life.
But I, for one, am not so immensely impressed by the success we are making of our civilisation here that I am prepared to think we are the only spot in this immense universe which contains living, thinking creatures, or that we are the highest type of mental and physical development which has ever appeared in the vast compass of space and time.
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Alternate versions of the essay are known to exist, an unpublished draft from 1939 and a version from the 1950s that is held in the National Churchill Museum in Missouri, though the latter only has minor differences from the 1942 version.
 
I would like to tell you about the Australian Duckbilled Platypus.
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Platypuses are a member of the Order Monotreme, which only include the Platypus and Echidna, the Monotremes share characteristics with both reptiles and mammals. The earliest recorded evidence of a monotreme dates to the Cretaceous, over 120 million years ago.
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Platypuses produce milk, but don't have nipples, they lactate through undifferentiated pores on their tummy.
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Platypuses have a two stage gestation process, the mother will lay eggs, bury them like a reptile, construct a compost layer around the eggs to maintain body temperature, when her babies hatch she will carefully place them on her abdomen, where they will crawl into a pseudo womb (similar to a marsupial pouch) to complete the rest of their maturation. Once they leave her pouch, the Platypus babies (called 'Puggles') behave much like a mammal, their mother will nurse them on milk and invest vast amounts of time protecting them.
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Platypuses do not have a stomach in the mammalian sense, as their primary food source is calcium rich aquatic life with thick shells, they use their bills to grind animal matter into a paste, which is pumped directly into their upper intestine via a muscular pseudo-stomach, which does not produce stomach acid, only digestive enzymes.
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Platypuses produce venom. Both male and females can grow a keratin "telson" or spur on their back flippers, but males grow an envenomed gland too. The venom is used by rival males to contest territory, it is painful to other Platypuses, but lethal to small mammals like dogs or rodents, humans who were "stung" by a platypus experienced extreme pain which required hospitalisation and lingering pain for months.
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There are internet memes about 1700s Naturalists disbelieving the veracity of the Platypus, thinking it a forgery, someone attached a duck's bill onto a small mammal, but this is untrue, the reality is much more interesting: the code of Naturalists required a preserved sample along with detailed contextual reports of the animal, the humble Platypus was so remarkable, so outside the established realms of Taxonomy that samples returned to England, France or Russia built a small yet enduring pressure for States to approve funds for Pioneer Naturalists to explore the economically and strategically unimportant parts of Australia, which unintentionally led to the discovery of New Zealand's fauna and the Southern Pole.
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I don't know where else to share this thought that needs expressing but isn't worth a thread.

If there is one historical artifact I would near give my life to personally own, selfishly, it's this friendship quilt I saw at, I think, Ford's Theater.

Friendship quilts were a common Southern - probably common in the Anglophone world in general, right, but South is what I know - custom of women making a quilt that eveyrone contributes a piece to and signing, girly-like, their names to. Gay shit, right.

The Confederate brass had one made. I assume by the wives. Davis' name, I think was on it, most of the generals like Jackson and Lee were on it. And what made my eyes pop when I saw this thing was that Stand Watie's name was on it. The Cherokee chief that was the last Confederate general to surrender was present for it too.

I can't even find any mention of it online, but that thing is, in its way (pure signatures, as I recall), as close to a tapestry of the Confederate high command as you will find. A culturally meaningful piece of art.
 
The females of all butterflies (and most common moths) have two separate genital openings: one for intromission for the male penis and one for egg-laying. The males of some species take advantage of this arrangement to plug the intromission opening after copulation.
 
I have some that come to mind...

■ Mosquitoes aren't all blood-suckers - that's just the females. You hardly ever come across, or know you'd come across, a male one, 'cos they drink nectar.

¤ John and Jim Belushi were/are of, at the least, Albanian background.

♤ Len Waters was the only known Australian Aboriginal pilot to actively take part in the Pacific Theatre.

◇ I saw someone mention Liam Neeson in a crappy film in one of the threads - 'Movie & TV Show Recommendations - he was named after the priest of the church in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, where he was christened.

• Mad Jack Churchill *Uncle Ruckus voice*, no relation, was annoyed that the Americans laid waste to Hiroshima and Nagasaki - not because he gave a shit about the death toll - but because he was miffed that he didn't get the lead Blighty's boys to victory against the Axis Powers, before the "damn Yanks" beat him to it.

♧ Daniel Defoe was a junkman before he was an author. A lot of his experience as a young man, working on trading ships and junkboats, went into inspiration for Robinson Crusoe.
 
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For some infectious diseases, such as measles, chickenpox, and polio, it has been observed that girls who get the disease from boys, and boys from girls, are more likely to die than those infected by same-sex peers. It is postulated that the pathogens retain the "memory" of the sex of the previous host through epigenetic means.
 
NASA had several contingency plans in place to handle emergencies during the Space Shuttle program, with the most ambitious/risky of them being the Return to Launch Site (RTLS) abort mode. This was the first made available immediately after the solid rocket boosters were jettisoned (SRBs cannot be shut off after ignited).

To summarize: in the event of a main engine (aka the 3 on the back of the orbiter) failure, the Shuttle would continue downrange to burn excess propellant, and then turn all the way back around in order to use the remaining fuel to put it on a course to a landing site. The stabilization/RCS thrusters (along with the "secondary" Orbital Manuevering System engines) would also be utilized to ensure stability during the separation from the external orange fuel tank. All of this would occur at roughly ~230,000 feet, and in the span of about 25 minutes from liftoff to (hopefully) landing.

That was the best case scenario, which would involve the loss of only one main engine very soon after liftoff. If a second engine failed, the crew would be forced to perform a literal bailout by blowing out the hatch and using a pole to get out of the Orbiter. All three engines fail? Well, NASA just calls that a "LOCV" (Loss of Crew and Vehicle).

This scenario was considered so risky that it was never attempted even under controlled conditions. While engine failure actually did occur several times over the course of the Shuttle program, it was always late enough into the flight that the crew could compensate with a lower orbit height.

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Steven Spielberg casted Tom Sizemore in Saving Private Ryan on one condition: if he failed any on of his daily drug tests, Spielberg would fire him and recast him and reshoot all of his scenes no matter how deep into filming.
 
Oliver Reed, whilst filming Hannibal Smith in Austria, smashed up a pub that had a shitload of flags adorned in the place - except for a Union Jack.

The little boy who portrayed Damien in the original The Omen landed the part because the director told him to attack him in his nether-regions during the screen test, which the 4 year old did.
 
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