The more you know!

[Doppleganger]

It's possible that there is life on Mars and the moons of Jupiter. But life didn't originate there, it came from Earth.

The Chicxulub asteroid that murdered the dinosaurs and ended the Cretaceous was so powerful, it send huge chunks of Earth debris hurdling into space. This debris eventually collided with other planets or satellites within our Solar System.

[Loki]

Ants developed fungus farming after the Chicxulub asteroid extinction event likely due to shortage of other foods. While some ants will just farm wild fungus, more modern species of farming ants have fully domesticated their fungus and the two could not survive without each other.

[Doppleganger]

The "jelly bean rule" was a regulation adopted by the FDA in 1994. It was meant to curb advertising trends that started in the 1980s where food companies would claim candy and/or junk food was healthy by zeroing in on the absence of fat, sodium and cholesterol, or adding vitamins/minerals and claiming the candy had nutritional value.

[Doppleganger]

Luke Skywalker's homeworld of Tatooine was famously un-inhabitable, to the point that one of its major industries was farming moisture out of the atmosphere.

Scientists discovered a real planet orbiting two suns and drew an interesting observation - when the gravity of two stars influence a planet's orbit, they tend to put that planet directly in the habitable zone, or a distance from the star(s) where water becomes a liquid.

So a planet like Tatooine, in a binary star system where it's so hot water only exists as a vapour, isn't realistic.

Just another case of George Lucas getting science wrong!

[Doppleganger]

'Les Poissons', sung by a French chef in The Little Mermaid, has the same melody as 'Be Our Guest', sung by a French candelabra, in Beauty and the Beast.

"A Pirate I was Meant To Be" from the Monkey Island series features a leitmotif from 'LeChuck's theme'.

[Doppleganger]

Whales have a pelvic bone just floating between their muscle and blubber, completely unconnected to their spinal cord.

[Doppleganger]

It's estimated that there have been 119 billion humans who have ever lived.

The world population in 2023 is ~8 billion people. Meanng 6% of the humans who ever lived are alive today.

[Doppleganger]

The Theia impact (9th Planet in the Solar System colliding with Earth, creating the Moon) had a total energy yield of 3.0 x 10³¹ Joules.

The strength of a Death Star superlaser required to destroy the Earth is 2.24 x 10³² Joules.

That means that the Death Star needed power about ~8x the strength of the Theia impact in order to actually destroy the planet.

[Doppleganger]

The word "orangutan" literally means "forest person". Ancient Malays were convinced orangutans were people.

[Doppleganger]

Little Caesar's Pizza is obviously styled after the Romans, but its founder, Mike Illitch, was actually the son of Macedonian ("Greek") immigrants.

[Doppleganger]

Toucans are inextricably associated with tropical rainforests.

As it turns out, toucans, particularly the toco toucan (which Toucan Sam is based on), prefer loosely forested areas to dense jungle, meaning that they actually benefit from deforestation and are likely to increase in population as rainforests get cut down/burned.

[Doppleganger]

In binary+ star systems, a type of neutron star called a redback pulsar can form. This neutron star is named after a black widow species because it "eats" the other star in the system, siphoning its companion's mass away into its own gravity.

If a redback consumes enough mass, it can revert the star back into a gas giant planet. Stars need enough mass to sustain nuclear fusion, at least of hydrogen, and a redback can eat enough mass to basically turn off the lights.