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#1295: cactus needles and thorns can be used for the needle on a gramophone. they have more flexibility than a steel needle, so can withstand scratches on the record (to my understanding), and don't damage it. apparently they also produce a better quality sound. Burmese colour needles come from the cochineal prickly pear, a cactus native to South America that was introduced (initally invasive, but now naturalised) to Australia and South Africa. in the 30s when these were first used in gramophones, they allegedly had a global shortage.

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#1294: gummy bears and similar sweets are moulded into flour. the machine used is called a "starch mogul", which takes a tray of some sort of starch, often corn, and stamps a bunch of bear- (or bean-, or whatever-)shaped receptacles in. cooked liquid gummy stock is piped in and then it sits to cure and cool. starch has been used for quite a while, as far as i could tell - people working at sweet factories used to get a lot of respiratory problems from working with all the starch, before the invention of the mogul. the starch helps remove excess heat and water, as well as giving it a nice final texture. it's also easy to remove and recycle because it's just flour lol.

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#1293: the endonym for Albania, shqiperia, could be a calque from Slavic - slovene is related to speaking (slovo is the root for words and speech in these languages), and "shqip" could come from shqipoj, meaning to speak clearly. the more fun etymology is from shqipe "eagle", which matches with the double-headed eagle on the flag. the flag has an interesting history mostly because it was used on multiple occasions to unite the peoples against the Ottoman empire, across five hundred years. the red supposedly represents freedom from the Ottomans. it's interesting to scroll through the wiki page quickly and see all the different eagles.

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#1292: across the UK there are hundreds of thousands of arrows carved into stone buildings. small arrows pointing upwards towards a line were used by the Ordnance Survey to measure altitudes very precisely between surveys. they were put on things they were pretty sure weren't gonna move, like old buildings and walls and things. find your local here. the last was placed in 1993, as sattelites can be used nowadays, but there are still over 500k across the country to be found, and once you start looking for them you'll spot them everywhere. they put them on tunnels and things like that, so some of them are quite deep. sometimes they put them on non-vertical surfaces, and a slightly different mark without the horizontal bar is used.

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#1291: wood can melt. under normal conditions, it decomposes much sooner than it melts, but under pressure as well as temperature it can just about melt (well, about as close to melting as any polymer gets). with a bunch of friction, you can basically weld two pieces of wood together. this was discovered by a Swiss research school and recently refined by Cambridge University, basically by vibrating two bits of wood and holding them together. the resultant join is as strong as the wood itself. they're saying that this encourages using wood as a construction material, trapping CO2 long-term in buildings.

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#1290: alpine ibexes (ibices?) (aka steinbocks) have had a rough time - by the early 19th century, they were almost hunted to extinction by guns, and went through a "population bottleneck" of around 100 individuals. thus, all steinbocks in the world are descended from one flock in Italy, so they have very low genetic variation. this proved a slight problem - they escaped the bigger issues of inbreeding by random chance, but are prone to pandemics. a test-and-cull programme in France cut infections in half during outbreaks of Brucella.

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#1289: a mondegreen is when you mishear a phrase for something else - it's autological, so "mondegreen" is a mondegreen from the ballad "the Bonnie Earl o' Moray", where "and laid him on the green" was misheard by Sylvia Wright as "and Lady Mondegreen". she coined the term therefrom because often the mondegreen is better than the original. you probably hear them all the time in pop, rock and rap music ("the girl with kaleidoscope eyes" -> "the girl with colitis goes by", the Beetles; "i kiss the sky" -> "i kiss this guy", Jimi Hendrix; etc) - everyone's got their one that they went "ohhhhh" when they read the lyrics. in the case of the ELO, "Gruss" was mistaken for "Bruce" so often that they just started singing the latter anyway. the game of Chinese Whispers is basically this principle.

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#1288: the hot chocolate effect happens when you make hot chocolate and tap the spoon on the side of the mug. after you add in the powder, and hit the cup, the pitch will slowly increase over time. this is thought to be because mixing in the cocoa introduces air, making the liquid more compressible, meaning the frequency decreases. as larger bubbles combine and float to the top, the sound slowly becomes high again. the Wikipedia page specifically says that you can make music using this, because you can stir the foam back in for a while, bringing the pitch down, and it's easy to graduate. as a citation there's this cute YouTube video of someone playing Frere Jacques.

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#1287: in Spanish and Galician, the way you pronounce sounds at the tip of your tongue is one big difference between dialects - for example, a "ze" might be pronounced like an English "s", "th" or somewhere in the middle. from the verb cecear (to make an "s" noise), we get "ceceo" (meaning a lisp) and "seseo" (meaning a distinct lack of a lisp) which is a fantastic little onomatopoeia, even if a bit mean. if you use both "s" and "th" noises, then you speak distinción. depending on where you grew up, you might be a "ceceante" or a "seseante". there's a story that a Spanish king (probably Peter of Castile) had a lisp and people mimicked him, but he lived two centuries before the distinction developed. also, the whole "ce" thing is kind of the opposite of a lisp - the more common non-distinción variety is pronouncing both "ce" and "se" with an [s] sound.

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#1286: on this day in 1782, Mozart's successful opera die Entführung aus dem Serail premiered. even though the first two performances alone brought in 1200 florins, Mozart was paid just a flat 450, and got nothing from subsequent showings. it did make him very famous though, with high praise from the likes of Goethe and Emperor Joseph II. the latter is storied to have said that the composition had "too many notes", although that's probably a mistranslation of "very many notes" (gewaltig viele Noten). which he may or may not have said. the false quote did make it into the 1984 film Amadeus though, so it must be fact, right?

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#1285: in Old English, "man" just meant human being (as it still does today, in some uses) and "wer" meant a male. so if you're going to tell me that using "guys" (fotd#674) in the nonspecific sense is sexist, then i'll tell you that using "world" (wer + old, "age of man"), "wer(e)wolf" (man-wolf) and "virtue/ous" (Latin vir(tus) "man(liness)") is much worse, if you want to be like that. just concede and admit that language is complicated and evolves, and meaning isn't inherently bound to etymology. female and male come from completely different roots (femella and masculus), rather than one being derivative of the other. woman comes from wif-man, from a time when "man" didn't imply either gender.

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#1284: koalas have a pretty intense diet of eucalyptus, which is toxic and very fibrous - so they have the largest caecum (by body size) of any animal, up to 2m long. the caecum is the pouch at the beginning of the large intestine, about 6cm in humans. it contains lots of aerobic bacteria that can digest cellulose, but not very quickly, as well as absorbing nutrients and water. in fact, "koala" as a word comes from the Dharug language (extinct*), meaning "no drink" (or something like that...) because they get all their regular hydration from the leaves. in times of drought, however, they sometimes need to have a sip as well.

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#1283: you're probably decent at counting, but you have a further set of secret number skills that let you count without actually counting. a 1941 study showed subjects a group of objects for 0.2 seconds and asked them how many there were, and how confident they were with their answer. with 2-6, they were all absolutely sure, wavering only a little on 6. this is called subitising (from Latin "sudden") - you can instantly* get the the number of some items with full certainty, up to 5 or 6. in 2006 it was shown that this also works with tactile inputs. another skill you have is counting afterimages, across your whole zone of attention. if you're counting lots of things, you'll move your eyes to focus on each, but if there's a picture "implanted" on your retina, you can't shift them about in your vision, but you can still count them (or subitize). this further helps you count things that you're not looking at for a long time, reliably up to 10s after [1976].

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#1282: Greek fire was an incendiary chemical weapon used by the Byzantine Empire. they kept it a closely guarded secret - so well in fact that 571 years later we still don't know what it's made of (although there are a couple of good guesses. i won't spill the beans tho). they'd put it in a grenade and throw it in a catapult up to half a kilometre away, and it would burn on water or boat. some called it a "ship-killer" and some said that it was easily avoidable.

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#1281: mosquitoes are attracted to you by a wide range of things, but not blood type or sweet blood. the biggest thing is probably carbon dioxide, because that propogates for up to 30m around you, attracting mozzies. hence, if you're taller, older or doing exercise you're probably more attractive. they're also attracted to body heat, which is affected by similar things. they also seek out acids in your sweat, which are adjusted by the microbiota on your skin, as well as genetics to an extent. there are a few other things that studies have shown to attract the blighters, but many we're yet to know the mechanism behind; like alcohol, pregnancy and dark colours. garlic isn't a repellant though - that one's a myth.

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#1280: syndrome K was a made-up illness used during WW2 to protect Jews from persecution. Fatebenefratelli Hospital in Rome illegally let Jewish doctors work when Italy started going hardline antisemitic, and when the Nazis raided a ghetto in 1943, they let people take asylum in the hospital. they made up "Il Morbo di K" (named after Kesselring, a Luftwaffe general stationed nearby at the time, but could've been interpreted as Koch's or Kreps disease) so the doctors knew they weren't actually poorly. the symptoms were kept vague so that the refugees could fake generic sickness and people wouldn't investigate for fear of catching it. they probably saved about a hundred people over about half a year (they moved them to safer places over time, and they eventually did get raided and some got detained).

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#1279: your boss is probably incompetent. the Peter principle dictates that people who do well at a job get promoted to a new post, where the skillset might be slightly different, and this keeps happening until they're no longer any good, called Peter's plateau. a 2018 study on sales companies between 2005-2011 found that this holds, and most marketers promoted to administration were poor managers. a 2010 model found that a much more efficient way to run a business is by randomly promoting people, which won the researchers an Ig Nobel Prize. they also showed that most success is down to luck and that firms following the Peter principle are likelier to be overtaken by competitors, getting them a second Ig Nobel Prize.

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#1278: colour TV was first used in 1950 by the US, although only for around a year, as it was a trial of the field-sequential colour system. it was first demonstrated in 1940, and works (i think) by playing just the red image, then just the green, etc, and your brain fuses them together into one smooth picture. the actual transition to colour started in 1953, and the last country to switch from monochrome was Cambodia in 1986. commercial TV only really started in 1926, so that's a fairly quick advancement - FSC, at least, is fairly similar to black-and-white in terms of complexity. in fact, patents for mechanical colour broadcasting were filed as early as 1896. John Baird, who basically invented TV, demonstrated a proof-of-concept of colour TV only a few years thereafter.

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#1277: blackmail was originally a practice around the Scottish Borders as late as the mid-18th century, where protection rackets were run against farmers. that's where they were coerced by chieftains into paying for invulnerability against pillaging. "black" refers to the scamminess of it, perhaps as a play on "white money" (or equivalent). "mail" comes from Norse then Middle English, meaning rent or tribute. thence also comes "silver mail" (rent paid in cash, as opposed to labour/goods) and "buttock mail" which is not a suit of armour for your rear end, but a fine for extramarital fornication...

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#1276: Torysh, or the Valley of the Balls, is a valley in Kazakhstan filled with marble-shaped boulders. most are around 3-4m, but they can vary in size wildly. thing is, nobody knows where all the balls came from - mainly because of a lack of research. contendors are megasulphurites (cristalline balls formed in volcanoes), cannonball concretions (sediment accumulating) and spherical weathering (the conditions being just right to form round rocks). similar are the Moeraki Boulders in New Zealand, which are carbonate-rich concretions of Paleocene mudstone, exhumed by coastal erosion. they went all-out with electron probing, x-ray crystallography and optical mineralogy to analyse their composition, finding high magnesium and iron.