Every new day is a chance to learn something new. It's probably impossible to see and experience everything that the world has to offer, but the internet can really help us to get to know our planet and its inhabitants better.
The Instagram page "Mind blowing facts" is like a treasure trove of interesting tidbits that might surprise even the biggest fans of trivia. Did you know that all blue-eyed people probably have one common ancestor? And have you ever heard that cat allergies might apply even to tigers and lions? Scroll down and see some interesting facts you can surprise your friends and family with the next time you see them!
To learn more about the process of researching interesting things, Bored Panda reached out to Steve Silverman, the creator of the "Useless Information" podcast. Steve has been sharing interesting, lesser-known stories from history for more than 30 years now. He kindly agreed to let us into the research and fact-checking process. Read on to also find out who would be a dream guest for his podcast!
More info: Useless Information | Facebook | X
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These fascinating facts come to you from the project "Untold Hidden Things." The Facebook page, titled "Facts that will blow your mind," is the most popular, with over 4.9M followers. The following for the Instagram page is a bit more modest, with 137k curious minds.
But the creators have also branched out into YouTube, with the channel "Untold Hidden Things" presenting fascinating facts and interesting, lesser-known stories in video format. The scope of the topics is wide: from recent scientific breakthroughs to the legend of the 800-million-year-old mummy.
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Steve Silverman, the man behind the "Useless Information" podcast, has been researching obscure and forgotten true stories for more than 30 years. Back when he got started, there was no Internet, so the research process was quite different. It required more ingenuity and time, naturally.
"In the early days, due to the lack of online newspaper archives, most of my research was confined to books," Steve tells Bored Panda. "The main problem that I found with using books was that the authors were simply reinterpreting what they read in previous books, which resulted in stories that weren't very well-researched," he notes.
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As time went by, Steve's research methods evolved. Now he uses books only as a secondary source. Yet he still runs into some problems here and there. "Ideally, it would be great to interview the subject of each story, but since the bulk of the stories that I share with my audience occurred prior to 1950, that is nearly impossible to do," he shares.
"So, I mostly scour the newspaper archives to pull together the articles that were printed at the time that the story occurred."
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Steven lets us into his rigorous process of finding new fascinating stories. "Of course, it all begins with finding stories that are both obscure and interesting," he says. "The main way that I do this is with search terms. I'll simply type a search term into one of the online newspaper databases and then see if I can find anything."
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He gives us an example: "I may type in 'absurd story' or 'totally bizarre' and so on. Most of the time, I find little to nothing. Then there are days when I sit down and find several new stories in just a few hours." Steve has a spreadsheet to keep track of all the possible search terms to make the process easier. "I compare it to trying to find a needle in a haystack," he quips.
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Some stories, of course, sound so unbelievable a person might even doubt that they're true. But Steven takes pride in his fact-checking abilities. "To verify these stories, I first research the stories as fully as possible. Then, I print everything out on paper, place the articles in date order, and read through the stories in the sequence in which they were originally covered in the press."
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"As I am doing so, I write down any questions that I may have, after which I go back and do further research to see if I can find the answers," he goes on. "Once I am satisfied that I have all of the information that I need, I will sit down to write the story. If I feel that my research is incomplete, I will set the story aside and work on a different topic."
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Throughout his many years of research, Steve hasn't had to make any notable corrections to his published stories. "Occasionally, I will find additional information long after I have written a story, so I then will place the addendum on my website." One example was the story "The Woman with the X-Ray Camera," which he updated seven years after it first came out.
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On April 1st, Steve published the 237th episode of his podcast. He has covered so many interesting events and written about so many fascinating people that it's probably hard to pick one that would make a dream guest. Still, for Steve, it's the 1970s rock star Peter Frampton. The particular story that fascinates Steven is how Frampton magically recovered his most prized guitar after a plane crash.
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"I had heard him tell a story on TV years ago about how his prized guitar, along with all of his tour equipment, was destroyed in an airplane crash," Steve recounts the story. "Amazingly, the guitar somehow survived and was returned to him many years later, after which he had it restored."
"The story fits perfectly with all of the other stories that I tell, but I've never sought out an interview with him, mainly because my podcast is so very far removed from the music industry," Steve tells us.
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