Cotton Mather, commonly associated with the Salem Witch Trials, was pro smallpox vaccine, and in November 1721 an anti-vaxxer tried to bomb his house.

Queen Elizabeth’s horses produce up to 2 tons of manure a day and it is used to help fertilize the gardens at Buckingham Palace.

The late Keith Moon, drummer for the Who, once dressed up as Batman and broke into Mick Jagger’s hotel room in the middle of the night to wake him up. Moon entered the room through the fire escape.

Over the next 45 years, China’s population may be cut in half due to lower birth rates.

The first lab animals in space were fruit flies. They were blasted into space from White Sands, N.M., on Feb. 20, 1947, on a V-2 rocket (seized by the U.S. from the Nazis), reached an altitude of about 68 miles in less than 200 seconds, then parachuted back to Earth.

This article appears in October 8 • 2021.

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