Half of the Newspaper

How far does half of a newspaper go and what can you use it for? Today most is simply recycled and turned into, well, other newspapers. That's rather uninteresting but what people used to do with them is a whole other story.  
Famously, fish and chips were usually wrapped in newspapers and some still are today. Is this for that nostalgic feel or, as I once heard, a way of adding to the flavor? No, that second one is complete nonsense. It was for simple reasons, Newspapers were the cheapest thing that a local seller could get their hands on that was also a clean sheet.
In the golden days of football as your granddad may refer to it. You know, when players were hardly regulated, hacking was prominent and very easy to get away with due to the lack of eyes on the pitch and a lack of shin-pads made it even worse. Yeah, that era. Rather than face sustaining a serious injury players would stuff a newspaper into the back of the socks to try and cushion the blow.
But possibly the strangest use of half a newspaper came from the toilet industry. Not toilet paper, but in fact something else. Toilet flushes had to be at an exact standard, a standard of being able to flush down half a newspaper. Today of course there are less wasteful methods of testing this but back in the day, I forget which one exactly, toilets were tested by flushing newspapers. 

How to Track a Penguin from Space

This may be one of the more bizarre facts so far on this blog. Penguins always attract public attention, even if they are not voiced by Elijah Wood, and now people from space are interested in following penguin activity for certain reasons. No this is not the oddest and most poorly planned alien invasion ever, it is for environmental purposes. 
Previously the method involved tagging their flippers but the massive increase in mortality rate caused them to call that plan off. Their was a great (or mildly important) need to track penguin populations in a safer way. The answer came in the form of what they left behind, from their behind. The way that penguins excrete, or crap for non-literates, is in streaks. The pressure under which it leaves the body is four times more than that of a human so it really shoots out of them in the crudest of terms. It travels up to 30 centermeters away from their body.
The method tracks their numbers and movement without the penguins knowing that they are being watched or even the slightest interference with their daily lives. A pretty good result from a crap idea.

The Longest Experiment

I opened this blog with the world's longest living thing, now I have an interesting fact concerning its longest experiment. The obvious answer may be something like M Night Smymalan's career as a director, 'Okay chaps, we tried it for a while with only a few positive results, clearly it is not working as a long term plan, let's just end it now.'
It began in 1840 but it may have actually lasted longer than that, with evidence suggesting that it may have started as early as 1825. It is also still going to this day. It is in fact a battery, in Oxford. This contraption contains two domes and a climber. The idea being that when one climber hits the dome it causes the charge to be transferred to the other one.
The point of this? To see how long the battery lasts, and the answer is quite a while. This process has been run ten billion times over the course of its life and estimates indicate that the battery will keep going for 350 years, so we've got a long time before it ceases to do whatever it does yet. The main problem with this is that no one is sure what it is made of due to the fact that its inventor failed to take notes during the building of the device. 

Imagining Things

Most children may have had an imaginary friend at some point in their childhood. Everyone has at least some form of entity on their mental capacity in which they talk and express emotions to. The whole purpose of an imaginary friend though is for a child to have a specific and exact figure that they can relate to for one reason or another.
Now of course this all may sound as if I'm specializing in child psychiatry most of this can be attributed to speculation and personal preference. Obviously there's no exact way to generate an idea of every child's imaginary friend, or whether they even possessed one. 
Parents on the other hand have notoriously tried to discourage this in some cases. I'm not saying every everyone does before I get angry comments (ha, as if I'd get comments at all) but some do rather than desensitize their children to reality like a Fast and Furious movie. Some of them may also be based more on a fear endued fixation, less of an imaginary friend and more of a manifestation of terror.
But studies indicate that having an imaginary friend may significantly improve the social skills of a child. Their ability to communicate and interact could already be at an advantage having been communicating with their own entity for such a long time. So if you talk to yourself you're actually more sociable, wait a minute...    

The World's Longest Living Thing

Of course the wording of this fact could come to mean two things, do I mean as in length or age? I am referring to age in this context. Of course certain creatures beneath the sea have been known to possess a progressively long life, such as the Jellyfish, a creature theoretically possible of undergoing a regeneration process, not unlike Doctor Who, in which it can revert to a younger state and grow old again. Looking at the world of plants might appear to be a more logical answer as certain trees live to be hundreds of years old, such as the Giant Redwoods. Or you could just try to be funny and say Cher or something.
This particular organism is potentially immortal. The world's longest living thing is actually Lichen, a symbiotic organism between fungus and algae. An odd couple of a different variety but a beneficial one as each component perfectly complements each other despite being wildly different, not unlike the best sitcoms.
The fungus provides an environment that it can comfortably live in and the algae is capable of continually photosynthesizing and due to the protection of the fungus, is kept alive to carry on photosynthesizing which provides the fungus with enough energy to survive and carry on protecting it and... you understand the idea by now hopefully. 
One particular example is estimated at being 9000 years old and not only is this organism immortal, it is everywhere. For over 8% of the surface of the Earth it is the dominant vegetation. So if you're worried about a Day of the Triffids style apocalyptic event, start destroying the immortal Lichen first.  

What Do We Do Here?

Welcome to the House of Random Facts. This blog is exactly what it says on the tin as every day (mostly) it offers new, strange, awkward, interesting, unbelievable, obscure, inquisitive and baffling facts that you probably didn't know already. From everything under the sun and beyond at some point there'll be something to say about it here. Do you want to stimulate intersting conversations, make yourself look more intelligent than you really are or just really, really fascinated by the prospect of finding out about random stuff that you have no idea why anyone would bother to even research it in the first place. 
Well if any of the above applies to you then this is most definitely the place to come. Enjoy discovering something new every day (or not if you already knew it) and then share them with what must surely be an active social group if you're reading this blog (I admit that insulting the two readers I have is not a good place to start but hey, most of the stuff on here is rather unusual as well). I hope you enjoy it.