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#1202: at the end of Queen Elizabeth I's reign, there was a grand total of zero dukes. there weren't any royal dukes (because she never married or had kids) and she managed to get most of the other dukes killed. there were also very few other peers: 1 marquis, 18 earls and 37 something or others. then when James VI ascended and the crowns were (kinda) united, all the dukes of Scotland became dukes of England. there was one.

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#1201: although it may seem like one of historical preservation things (like London's famous views), the reason that all the buildings in Washington DC are shorter than the monument has nothing to do with that: in 1894, the Cairo Hotel was constructed at 164ft and people hated it so much that in 1899 (amended 1910), all buildings' heights were restricted to the width of the road they stood on (plus 20ft), and there was a hard cap on 130ft. buildings already above this limit were grandfathered in and many exceptions were made throughout the past century, but it still makes the city stand out among the other American metropoleis. Mayor Bowser (yeah, really) is trying to change it, but it'll need congressional approval which seems unlikely rn.

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#1200: frogs' voices don't change in helium. their ribbits sound identical. frequency distribution analysis on five species showed no difference under different gases. this is actually quite cool because it means the vocal sacs (those big ballooning throats) don't have "cavity resonance", ie they don't make noise with the air inside them (like our larynx does). they're simply just wobbly bits of skin that vibrate. humans and dinosaurs, however, would of course be affected (see fotd#641) by heliox.

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#1199: the first computer ever to discover a shape starred in the 1980 sitcom Laverne & Shirley. it was trying to look for the biggest shape (don't worry, it's not as stupid as it sounds) and i guess to fund itself, it had a side-hustle as an actor. it also featured in the Land of the Giants multiple times. it was a 1957 Burroughs 220, and ran on vacuum tubes; even though transistors had already been invented, it had quite a good stage career because it looked properly sci-fi. the B205, of the same series, trumps that by far, appearing in dozens and dozens of shows and films, from Batman to Transformers to Austin Powers. there's a website that's basically the IMDB of computers, and people scour the screen to figure out what model of computer everything is.

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#1198: an inherently funny word is one which is humorous without context. for example, Vaudeville theatre made comedy from the sound /k/, like in "car keys", "cucumber" and "Alka Seltzer". according to "the world's funniest joke" (not to be confused with fotd#91), an experiment by Richard Wiseman, quips rated most comical were ones with "k" sounds, like "two ducks were sitting in a pond. one of them said 'quack'. the other said 'i was going to say that!'" or "what's brown and sticky? a stick". other words that tend to be inherently funny are those that sound similar to rudeness because they invert your expectations, leaving you with "a sense of relief - of getting away with it". for example, "focky" or "whong". other theories involve Shannon entropy, positing that these words are funny because of their unlikeliness - "skritz", for example, is a very improbable string of letters.

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#1197: King John of Bohemia went blind, but still insisted on fighting in battle. he absolutely loved war, so he got together with France and tried to take a stab at England. this was during the 100 Years' War, so the French were absolutely up to the job. it led to the battle of Crécy, with 15-30 thousand deaths on the Romanic side and around 200 on our side. a complete whitewash. John rode into battle with his horse strapped between two of his attendants'. he wafted his sword around vaguely and i don't think anybody will be surprised to hear that he didn't last long. alongside him, nine princes, ten counts, a duke, a bishop, an arch one of those, and roughly 1500 noblemen were slain.

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#1196: the reverse Tinkerbell effect (see fotd#1167) is when believing in something causes it to be less true. for example, if you believe driving is safe, you're likelier to get in a car, resulting in more people on the roads, making it more dangerous. another one is the belief that your vote matters: if you believe so, and you go and vote on this premise, then you've just made your ballot and everybody else's slightly less important.

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#1195: Friz Frelang, creator of Looney Tunes, wanted someone with a stutter for the character of Porky Pig, to distinguish him: Joe Dougherty was hired. the sound editor, Treg Brown, had to edit together some lines by Count Cutillo (that's an actor, not a cartoon) when the stutter went on too long. after only two years, the role was recast to the one and only Mel Blanc. he obviously had to put on his stutter, but it meant he could control when and where it happened. the famous catchphrase "that's all folks" (which is on Mel's grave - those were his last words, what a guy) was coined by Joe when he couldn't get the word "end" out.

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#1194: shambles comes from the Old English word scomul "stool" (see also: German schemel), ultimately from Latin meaning "little bench". the meaning of the word evolved over time from a footrest to a table, to a stall, to a vendor's display stand, to a meat shop, to a slaughterhouse, to a "place of butchery", to eventually a "mess" which gives us the sense of confusion we know and love today. throughout its 700-year journey, it only became plural in the past century or so. along its slow semantic saunter, it stopped off at a few places: for example, the Shambles is the road where food was sold (ie. the marketplace), most famously in York. it has nothing to do with the shambolic look of the crooked, narrow street, although the coincidence does go to show how good the worldbuilding is in this AU. shambolic, btw, dates to 1961, and is just based on shambles (according to Etymonline, possibly on the model of symbolic).

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#1193: Glasgow's city chambers has more marble than the Vatican (or so it claims) with over 1.5 million tiles and the largest marble staircase in Western Europe (which feels like a slightly arbitrary prize but i guess you gotta give it to them). it's built from Carrera marble imported from Italy, alongside 10 million-odd bricks and 10,000 cubic metres of stone. the Scottish city is also home to the world's first ultrasound, the remains of Saint Valentine, and chicken tikka*.

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#1192: Edward Jones was a kid who somehow broke into Buckingham Palace four times in the span of three years (1838-41). the police tried to get rid of him by enlisting him as a sailor, and he signed up to the Navy (and deserted twice). he then robbed a bunch of places, was sent over to Australia, and managed to come back to burgle a bit more. he was quite the celebrity for getting into the royal quarters so many times, and "Boy Jones" remains as a (slightly archaic, probably) nickname for an informant.

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#1191: in October this year, NASA will send off their Clipper mission to perform 49 flybys of Europa, a moon of Jupiter. the gas giant gives off a bunch of radiation, so they'll keep all their "science instruments" (their words, not mine) in a "massive vault" sealed by a millimetre-thick tantalum plate. this metal sheet has been engraved with the waveforms of people saying "water" in 103 different languages, as well as the ASL sign for it, a poem about it, some equation or smth, and 2.6 million names. it actually looks quite cool, and you can view the individual sounds at the bottom of this website.

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#1190: you breathe through one nostril at a time. for example, I'm breathing through my left right now. your brain subconsciously switches this every couple of hours in "the nasal cycle". your "conchae", two spongey bones protruding into your cavities, periodically congest and clear alternatingly, making one hole much narrower than the other. this means your nose can re-moisten itself regularly, which is important for inspiration. in multiple senses of the word. it also means that air flows more slowly over some of your olfactory receptors, so you can smell a wider range.

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#1189: the Ms in m&m's stand for Mars and Murray, hence the apostrophe. the specific process of "hard panning" the chocolate, which he got from British smarties, was patented by Mars, the son of Mars, as in Mars. Murray was the son of Murray, president of Hershey's, which had control over chocolate, which was rationed at the time.

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before today's fact, it brings me great pleasure to announce that the fact about the Swiss cheese plant is completely true. the oglefish is a photoshop job, Irish was invented by Duolingo, Nonresia nomeni is latin-ish for "fake name", dancing sperm (i mean, seriously?), and U IDIOT is short foe uni-isodiiodide-oxythalyn.
#1188: the wood frog can hold its pee for up to eight months. when it hibernates, which i would've thought was cheating, but apparently most animals take whazzes in their winter-slumber. it has a special type of bacterium that can recycle the urea back to nitrogen.

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ok it's time to end this charade. the last fact was, unsurprisingly, another April fool's.
#1187: but wait!! one of the six facts i've published today is actually 100% real!!! and you know i'm telling the truth because it's after midday here!! which one is it? anyone who guesses correctly in the next 24 hours will win 50k pokédollar!!!! NO GOOGLE/WIKIPEDIA/WHATEVER else I'll go poor!! have some mercy haha

do NOT share the #aFactADay2024 hashtag PLEASE!!!! if you must share a hashtag, use #aFactADayAPRILFOOLS and share this whole post if you so please. no obligation to though, simply comment below your guess (either a number between 1 and 6 or the topic of the fact you think is a truth). if you comment multiple times, i'll use whichever is wrong so i don't lose all my money.

answers revealed in the comments and on the next fact in 24h

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ok i'll be real with you: the last fact was also a joke. this is actually quite fun. anyway time for some seriousness:
#1187: not all whiskey is vegan! whiskey absorbs flavours from the barrel it's stored in, so different things are done to it to affect the flavour of the whiskey. often, the inside is charred, but sometimes they fill it with smoke. on white oak casks, this produces a chemical, uni-isodiiodide-oxythalyne, which acts as an emulsifier, allowing the whiskey to also mix with the oils in the barrel. in some American distilleries, they often take this to their advantage, synthesising this substance in its unnatural powder form. they add this in large quantities alongside animal fat, which has a very similar consistency. the compound makes the change in colour and taste almost unnoticeable, but they're able to dilute it as much as three times and sell it at the same price. keep your eyes peeled on the ingredients!

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maybe i'm becoming predictable: the last fact was another April fool's. maybe it's finally time to give you the real one:
#1187: just like your heart can (under certain conditions) beat at the same tempo as the bassline in music, some other motor cells can too. in your sleep, when you're not blinking, the tiny muscles controlling your tear ducts will contract in time with the music. recent research shows that this can also be done to sperm cells too. the scientists used ultra-precise targeted low-frequency sound waves on a petri dish of cells and managed to move them around, both in unison and individually. their corkscrew-shaped tail means they can reach some interesting manoeuvres: here's the choreography [yt shorts link, sorry i couldn't get it on a proper video] that the scientists achieved by suspending the cells in a slightly acidic saline solution. (the music was added in post, obviously)

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this may come as a shock to you, pun intended, but there is no such thing as a bird-bourne, voltage-breeding bacterium. here's the real fact, for suresies this time:
#1187: the Swiss Cheese Plant has the specific name Monstera deliciosa, and i think that's a fantastic description of Swiss cheese. the fruit supposedly tastes of fruit salad, hence why it's also called the "fruit salad tree", as if you can grow all sorts of fruit on it. it's also called "monster fruit": the 10-inch-long fruit takes over a year to ripen, and before it's ready, its flesh is filled with needle-like crystals which will literally stab you if you try to eat it. (i wonder if that's why it's called the delicious monster.) but it smells of fruit salad!! mmm

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haha fooled again, you loser!! the Irish language was actually invented by Mark Okrand in December 2024 after the reunification. here's the real fact:
#1187: Nonresia nomeni is a fairly common species of bacteria. it's an extremophile, unique in that it thrives in high voltages: it uses the power to keep functioning without nutrients for long periods of time. it's usually found on electricity pylons; some cultures have been isolated from fuseboxes and the likes but not many. microbiologists reckon it must've evolved in the past century or so. they have an interesting life-cycle: they live most of their lives on overhead wires, and travel between them on the feet of birds that land on them. during the "avian" stage, it enters a massive feeding frenzy and rapidly increases in size, but while "sessile", they slowly undergo mitosis several times, thinly covering lengths as long as a meter from a single grandmother cell, in an environment without competition.