According to Salon, more than 82% of the surface area of the planet that’s over 12,000 feet high is in the Tibetan Plateau alone.

In 1942, New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia banned pinball throughout the city. The ban lasted until 1976.

Ulysses S. Grant’s real first name was Hiram, but he so hated his initials, H.U.G., that he went by his middle name. The S stood for nothing, although many people think it stood for Simpson.

U.S. Olympic runner Bob Young gave Adolf Hitler the finger
in 1936.

According to Scientific American, dimethyltryptamine, or DMT – first synthesized by a British chemist in the 1930s, its psychotropic properties discovered some 20 years later – is the only psychedelic compound known to occur naturally in the human body.

This article appears in February 1 • 2013.

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