The First Recorded Use Of OMG Was In A 1917 Letter To Churchill
OMG would seem to be one of those modern terms that have become popular with the rise of the Internet and text messaging. It and other shorthand messages are one of the main ways that people communicate informally with each other. Despite this, OMG is far from a modern invention. The first recorded use of it comes from a 1917 letter between Winston Churchill and the First Sea Lord of the Admiralty. Pleasingly, Lord Fisher even explains that the acronym stands for “Oh! My God!”
=======================================================================================
Wyoming Only Has Two Escalators In The Entire State
Escalators are a common sight around the world. Whether you are in a mall, a department store, or an airport, it is difficult to find a large building without a set of escalators for people to travel between different floors. That isn’t the case in the US state of Wyoming. There are only two sets of escalators in the entire state, both of them located in banks in the town of Casper. Local government officials believe that the lack of escalators comes from the fact that many of the buildings in Wyoming are older and not suitable whilst stairs and elevators are cheaper to install and maintain.
=======================================================================================
The Surveyors Who First Measured Mount Everest Gave The Wrong Figure On Purpose
Measuring the exact height of Mount Everest was a difficult job, and the first official figure came in 1856, when the Great Trigonometric Survey was carried out by Sir Andrew Waugh. When the measurement was first calculated, the height was revealed to be exactly 29,000 feet. Waugh was so worried that this number would be considered a guess or a rounding-off of the actual height that he decided to add an extra two feet to the total to create a more believable figure. Bizarrely, this actually resulted in a more accurate total as most officials now consider the official height to be 29,029 feet.
=======================================================================================
Sharks Have Been Around Longer Than Trees
It's common knowledge that sharks have been around for a long time. In fact, they have managed to survive at least four mass extinction events and are pretty durable. Still, you might be surprised to learn that they are actually older than trees. The first recognized shark first emerged 400 million years ago. This is a full 50 million years before the earliest species of tree inhabited the land that is now the Sahara desert.
=======================================================================================
Clouds Can Weigh Hundreds Of Tons
Clouds often have certain properties associated with them – such as being fluffy and soft – that lead people to imagine that they must not weigh very much. After all, they float high above the ground, and they have to be light to stay up there. Right? The truth, though, is that clouds can be incredibly heavy. It makes sense when you think about it, as clouds are effectively just water. Even small cumulus clouds can be as heavy as 200 tons, while the super dense cumulonimbus clouds are able to reach weights of up to one million tons.
=======================================================================================
You Can Hear The Difference Between Hot And Cold Water
Various experiments over the past decade or so have revealed that people can quite easily tell the difference between hot and cold water using just their hearing. The sound given off by pouring water is distinct enough that the vast majority of individuals are able to distinguish between them with almost 100% accuracy. The reason is that colder water is more viscous, which effectively makes it thicker and gives it a different sound than hot water, which is less “sticky” and so produces a higher frequency noise.
=======================================================================================
The First Adult Film Was Screened In 1896
The history of cinema dates back to the 1880s, although proper films were not screened until 1895. The very first erotic film, which became known as "stag films," was the seven-minute-long French recording Le Coucher de la Mariée (Bedtime for the Bride). It is believed to be the very first adult film and was screened in Paris in 1896. Only two minutes of the original film have survived, which show the actress performing a striptease behind a screen.
=======================================================================================
Hot Water Can Freeze Faster Than Cold Water
The Mpemba effect is a phenomenon that people have been aware of since ancient times. Although it doesn't always happen, it is easy to regularly observe hot water freezing faster than cold water, something that would seem counterintuitive. The effect has puzzled scientists for decades and there have been a number of theories proposed to try to come up with an answer for exactly why it happens. One of the most recent explanations is that the hot molecules in the water are able to stretch as they move further apart. This allows their covalent bonds to relax and release energy – a process that is effectively the same as cooling down.
=======================================================================================
The Pyramids Were Built By Paid Workers Not Slaves
The common consensus until very recently was that the pyramids of Egypt were constructed using huge numbers of slaves. How else would the ancient civilization have been able to construct such huge structures? However, those involved in the field of Egyptology have known for decades that the people who built the pyramids were paid workers, not slaves. This has been proven with recent tomb finds, which show the workers buried honorably near the massive buildings with beer and bread to prepare them for the afterlife.
=======================================================================================
Time Passes Faster The Higher Up You Get
Due to relativity, time passes slower the closer to the Earth's core you get. This means that your head is younger than your feet, and if you want to live longer, you should live on Mt. Everest. A year is about 15 microseconds shorter there than on the surface.
=======================================================================================
A Second is Not One-Sixtieth Of A Minute
While there are 60 seconds in a minute, that's not why a second is how long it is. Since 1967, the International Committee for Weights and Measures has measured a second as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.” It can also be measured as a fraction of a year, 1/31,556,925.9747th of a year, to be exact. However, a second has been measured as 1/60th of a minute since the Babylonians in 300 BCE. 
=======================================================================================
Dinosaurs Had More Days in Their Years Than Humans
Because of the drag created by the Moon's gravity, days on Earth have been getting shorter for a billion years. While current years are 364 days, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds long; at the time the dinosaurs went extinct, years were about 370 days long. And during the Cambrian Explosion, the time 542 million years ago when most current animal phyla evolved, years were about 420 days long.
=======================================================================================
The Soviet Union Tried a Five-Day Week And It Failed
In 1929, a Soviet functionary proposed changing from the seven-day Gregorian calendar to a five-day week, in order to not have weekends with lowered production. The idea caught fire with Stalin, and he declared that all manufacturing and commercial enterprises must switch to the "continuous" week, with workers assigned a number and color that would correspond to their days off. An added benefit was to remove the shared worship day from the calendar, moving the country further away from organized religion.
The effect was to isolate workers and families, who would be assigned different days off, and get little or no time for coordinated activities. Families broke down under the strain, and the experiment was ended in less than two years. But even then, the Supreme Soviet couldn't resist screwing around with the calendar, and the next eight years were spent on a calendar of five weeks per month, six days per week, with the sixth day being a shared day off. That lasted until June 1940.
=======================================================================================
Time Really Does Go Faster As You Get Older
If you hear older people saying that it all goes by so fast, they're right. Because of a psychological phenomenon called the "oddball effect," time seems to pass more quickly as you get older, because experiences become more familiar and stand out less from your past.
=======================================================================================
You Don't Have to Go Lightspeed To Have Time Dilation
Most people know that the faster you go, the slower time moves. It's why if you took a journey at the speed of light, then came back to Earth, you'd be younger than the people you left behind. That's why "Interstellar" exists. But it doesn't take a trip at warp speed to make you younger - a plane ride will do it. The BBC did a televised test of the Theory of Relativity, using one atomic clock kept in the same location and another flown around the world. Sure enough, even though the clocks were perfectly synchronized at first, the traveling clock came back missing about 230 nanoseconds. The difference is so slight it can't be detected, but it's there - and the more you fly, the more "off" you are.
=======================================================================================
The Oldest Objects On Earth Are Fake Diamonds
Australia's remote Jack Hills are the source of the oldest known objects on earth - flakes of zircon crystal estimated to be about 4.4 billion years old. Traces of biological material were found on some of these zircons, and have been dated to 4.1 billion years ago, meaning life originated on the planet shortly after Earth formed. While they should not be confused with cubic zirconia, a totally different material, colorless zircons have also been used as substitute diamonds due to their hardness and clarity.
=======================================================================================
The World's Most Accurate Clock Will Be Correct After The Earth Is Destroyed
Developed in 2015, the strontium clock is the most accurate in the world, measuring the vibration of super-cooled strontium atoms with ultra-powerful lasers. The clock is so accurate that even lifting it two centimeters off the ground will throw it off, and if left alone, it wouldn't be a second off for 15 billion years. In contrast, the earth itself will likely be engulfed by the sun after it becomes a red giant in roughly five billion years.
=======================================================================================
Not Only Do We Have Leap Days, We Have Leap Seconds
To help synchronize atomic clocks with the earth's actual rotation, which is imperceptibly slowing, leap seconds are occasionally added to the 24-hour day. There have been 26 leap seconds added to the clock since the first one in 1972. However, this doesn't mean that all of our days are now half a minute longer - only the particular days containing a leap second were one second longer. The last one was in June 2015.
=======================================================================================
India Uses Only One Time Zone
Despite spanning over 1,800 miles from east to west, India uses just one time zone: Indian Standard Time, UTC+ 5:30. This means that sunrise and sunset are two hours earlier on the eastern border than on the western, and some states have to set their clocks back to save energy. Indian lawmakers are constantly trying to advance proposals that would either divide the country into time zones, or move to an hourly time, rather than a half hour. All of these have failed.
=======================================================================================
The Shortest Theoretical Length of Time Is... Really Short
Named after German physicist Max Planck, "Planck Time" is the shortest unit of time that's been theorized. This is how long it takes a photon in a vacuum to travel 1.616199(97)×10−35 meters. It lasts all of about 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001of a second, and because it's so short, it can't be measured. The first fraction of a second after the Big Bang is likely to have taken a length of Planck Time.
=======================================================================================
Daylight Saving Time Had Very Little To Do With Agriculture
In 1784, Benjamin Franklin jokingly proposed waking the people of Paris up earlier during the summer so they could toil extra hours in the fields and not have to waste candles. Franklin's satirical idea was just that, and was never intended to catch on with the public. It would take over 100 years for daylight saving time to actually become a workable idea.
English builder William Willett, who enjoyed riding horses and campaigned for clocks to be moved back in the summer to give people more daylight, advocated for British Summer Time in 1905. Ten years earlier, in New Zealand, the so-called "founder" of what became Daylight Savings Time, entomologist George Hudson, proposed a plan to shift time so he had more time to collect bugs in the afternoon hours. Both men wanted more daylight, but neither did so for agricultural purposes.
=======================================================================================
The First Country To Adapt Daylight Saving Time Was Imperial Germany
While England rejected Willett's bold idea for daylight saving time, its arch-enemy in World War I didn't. On April 30, 1916, Germany embraced daylight saving time as a measure to help conserve electricity and allow more hours for war production. Weeks later, the United Kingdom did so as well, and introduced “summer time.” While Germany discarded it after the war, Nazi Germany reintroduced it, and put the countries it conquered on German time - often creating chaos and ill feelings toward the concept.
=======================================================================================
Time Travel Is Plausible, But Not Possible - Or Is It the Other Way Around?
Scientists continue to theorize about the possibility and plausibility of time travel or traveling faster than light. A few years ago, researchers at CERN thought they'd measured subatomic particles traveling faster than the speed of light, but it was an instrument error. Wormholes might be a possibility for traveling great distances faster than light, but there's still no conclusive evidence they actually exist. Astronomer Frank Tipler came up with an idea to essentially build a huge tube, into which you'd put a chunk of matter 10 times the mass of the sun. If you can get it spinning to a few billion rotations per minute, anything that travels in a precise spiral around the cylinder could end up in a loop that takes it back to the point where it started spinning. Sadly, the tube would need to be infinitely long. 
Even if you were able to go back in time, it's likely that the universe would balance out any actions you take, meaning if you kill baby Hitler, there will just be another baby Hitler.
=======================================================================================
It Took 1500 Years And A Pope To Get The Calendar On Track
Early Christians adopted the Julian calendar and assumed that all years were 365.25 days long. However, this is about 10-11 minutes too long. Those extra minutes began to add up, and by the 1500s, the calendar was off by over a week. The spring equinox was tied to the date of Easter, and these two events had drifted farther apart over the centuries. In 1563, the Council of Trent under Pope Gregory XIII prepared a plan to add days to the calendar to correct the sync issues, and in 1582, ten days were added. However, it took centuries for the Gregorian calendar to be universally adopted.
=======================================================================================
Russia Eliminated Two Time Zones In 2010
From end to end, Russia spans a gigantic 11 time zones. Wanting to make business and communication with far-flung cities easier, Vladimir Putin simply abolished the use of two. On March 28, 2010, at 2 am, Russia turned its clocks forward, except for Udmurt Republic, Samara Oblast, Kamchatka, and Chukotka. They were told to neglect daylight savings, as their time zones were deemed no longer necessary.
The Udmurt Republic and Samara Oblast jumped an hour ahead to GMT + 04:00, putting them on the same time as Moscow. Meanwhile, Kamchatka and Chukotka joined the time zone of nearby Magadan Oblast, bringing themselves eight hours ahead of the capital rather than nine. The change didn't last long, and the two time zones were reinstated in 2014. However, Russia eliminated daylight saving time in 2011.
=======================================================================================
Time in Spain Is A Total Mess, Thanks To Hitler
Much of Spain is farther west than the UK, but is an hour ahead of it. This puts it on the same time as Poland and Hungary, which are much farther to the east. This anomaly is due to General Francisco Franco moving Spain's clocks ahead an hour to align with Nazi Germany syncing the clocks in all its conquered nations to Berlin time. The country never bothered to switch back after World War II ended, and kept on the same messed-up schedule ever since
So the sun both rises and sets later than it should in Spain. This gives the people their reputation as night owls - and almost an hour less sleep during punishingly long work days with late meals. The Spanish government is considering switching back, but is probably too tired to think about it.
=======================================================================================
China Is As Big As The US - And Has One Time Zone
While the country historically had time zones, Chairman Mao decreed in 1949 that all of the country would be on Beijing time, for national unity. This means that in the far-west Xinjiang region, the sun can set at midnight or rise at 10AM. Complicating things even more is that the region's largest ethnic minority observe their own time - which is two hours behind. Most of China's population is located on the eastern side of the country, and regard the one time zone as an inconvenience.