What animal can you hear from 5 miles away?


A lion’s roar can be heard from more than 5 miles away.
It’s generally a good idea to keep your distance from lions, which is why it’s reassuring to know that hearing one doesn’t necessarily mean it’s nearby. A lion’s roar is so loud, in fact, that it can be heard from more than 5 miles away. Reaching 114 decibels (about 25 times louder than a gas-powered lawn mower), the sound is louder than that of any other big cat — just one reason why the lion is known as the king of the jungle. They’re able to make such an imposing call thanks to their larynx: While most animals’ vocal cords are triangular, a lion’s are square and flat. This allows air to pass through more easily and results in a loud roar that requires relatively little effort on the lion’s part.

Lions aren’t the only animals that can be heard from long distances. Blue whales make the loudest sound of all, with males emitting a rumbling call that can reach 188 decibels and be heard by potential mates hundreds of miles away. The famous hyena “laugh,” meanwhile — actually a sound the animals make under stress — can reach a distance of 8 miles. Lions, blue whales, and hyenas would all be impressed by the mighty, tiny pistol shrimp, which shoots out bubbles to incapacitate its prey and in doing so creates a sound that can reach 218 decibels, louder than a gunshot. Fortunately for any humans that might be nearby, it lasts only a fraction of a second.

Numbers Don’t Lie

Weight, in pounds, of the largest lion ever recorded
827

Estimated number of lions living in the wild
23,000

Cat species larger than the lion (tigers)
1

Super Bowls won by the Detroit Lions
0

Lions don’t need to drink water every day, but they do need to eat often.
Lions can go for days without drinking water, and get much of their moisture from prey and plants. They aren’t as resilient when it comes to food, however. They need to eat frequently, and typically consume about 17 to 20 pounds of food each day. Males can eat close to 100 pounds of food a day, while females can eat more than 55. Though mostly known for eating medium-sized hoofed animals such as zebras, antelopes, and wildebeest, lions are opportunistic hunters who will also dine on everything from mice and hares to lizards and tortoises.

Popsicles were reportedly invented by an 11-year-old.
A dessert accidentally created by a California kid has managed to stick around for over a century. One frigid night in the San Francisco Bay Area, young Frank Epperson took a glass of water and mixed in a sweet powdered flavoring using a wooden stirrer. He left the concoction on his family’s back porch overnight, and by morning, the contents had frozen solid. Epperson ran hot water over the glass and used the stirrer as a handle to free his new creation. He immediately knew he’d stumbled on something special, and called his treat an Epsicle, a portmanteau of his last name and “icicle.” Throughout his life, Epperson claimed that this experiment occurred in 1905, when he was 11 years old. While most publications agree, the San Francisco Chronicle’s website counters that local temperatures never reached freezing in 1905; they did, however, in nearby Oakland, where the Epperson family moved around 1907, meaning the fateful event may have happened a few years later.

In 1922, after Epperson had married and started working in real estate, he brought his frozen treat — which had since become beloved by friends and neighbors — to the Fireman’s Ball at Neptune Beach amusement park. It was a hit. Within two years, he had patented his ice pop on a wooden stick. Around the same time he began referring to his desserts as “popsicles” (a play on his children’s term for their father’s creation, “pop’s sicle”), but the word was absent from his patent, and a Popsicle Corporation quickly established itself elsewhere. “I should have protected the name,” Epperson later confessed. Although he briefly set up a royalty arrangement with the Popsicle Corporation, by 1925 he sold his patent rights to the Joe Lowe Company, which became the exclusive sales agent for the Popsicle Corporation. Over the decades, Epperson’s naming oversight cost him considerable profits. As of 2020, the global ice pop market was valued at $4.7 billion. A significant share of that revenue comes from Popsicles, a summer staple now sold in more than 30 flavors.
Numbers Don’t Lie

Estimated number of Popsicles purchased globally each year
2 billion

Weight (in pounds) of the largest ice pop ever created
20,020

Total Popsicle sticks in the world's biggest Popsicle stick sculpture (a map of Thailand)
840,000

Year Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” became the first rap/hip-hop song to top the Billboard Hot 100 chart
1990
In 2021, a 4-year-old boy ordered $2,618.85 worth of SpongeBob Popsicles online.
One afternoon in May 2021, after completing some remote learning, Noah Ruiz of Brooklyn used his mom’s laptop and Amazon Prime account to purchase 918 SpongeBob SquarePants-inspired Popsicles. The Prime account was shared with his aunt, and Noah (accidentally or deliberately) sent the 210-pound delivery of 51 cases to her house. There were so many Popsicles that only a fraction could fit in the family’s freezer, and many of them melted. As a graduate student in social work raising three sons, Ruiz’s mom, Jennifer Bryant, panicked at the sudden expense — especially when Amazon refused to accept a refund. After confiding to classmates about her predicament, a fellow student received her permission to set up a GoFundMe page to help her recoup the money. Donors needed just 24 hours to cover the cost of the spending spree. By the end of the fundraiser, more than $25,000 had been raised. Noah Ruiz has autism spectrum disorder, and the surplus will be dedicated to his education. Amazon also made a $2,618.85 gift to Autism Speaks on the family’s behalf.

In April 1936, the bodies of five English schoolboys were found half-buried in the snow in the German Black Forest. The truth about what happened would remain buried for 80 years. But the truth has a funny way of getting out eventually.

Humans get a new skeleton about every 10 years.
The human skeleton is sometimes called the scaffolding of the body, and the name is apt because, like scaffolding, our bones are less permanent than you might think. Human bones grow in a process known as modeling, and once a person reaches adulthood, the skeleton system refreshes itself in a process known as remodeling. During remodeling, certain cells in the body break down bone and funnel its minerals into the bloodstream, while other cells build healthy bone back up. Every year, the body replaces around 10% of bone via remodeling, which means we get an entirely new skeleton about every 10 years.

Bone remodeling is just one of the ways in which our bodies are in a constant process of regeneration. Human hair is replaced every two to seven years (and around 100 hairs fall out of our heads every day), fingernails take about six months to replace, and our intestinal lining — constantly under assault from digestive acids — regenerates every week (or less). One of the most dramatic examples of regeneration is the production of red blood cells; the body creates upwards of 3 million of them every second, and totally refreshes these cells every four months.

Does all this rejuvenation mean that humans are essentially a walking, talking Theseus’ paradox? This philosophical question, first proposed by Greek philosopher Plutarch, ponders whether something that slowly replaces itself is still the original object or something new. However, there are a few things in the human body that remain the same. Parts of our heart stick with us forever, and we’re born with most of our brain’s neurons. Also, our teeth can’t regenerate once grown, and the core that makes up the lens of our eye forms during prenatal development and never changes. So while many things in our body do change, some stay the same — meaning that humans are always a mix of both the new and the old.
Numbers Don’t Lie

Estimated percentage of the animal kingdom that has an internal skeleton
5

Age (in years) of the oldest known Homo sapiens skeleton, found in a Moroccan mine in 2017
300,000

Number of human bones (out of 206) that aren’t connected to another bone (the hyoid)
1

Annual number of bone fractures that occur each year in the U.S.
6.3 million
Scientists once thought dinosaur fossils belonged to giant humans.
Around 1677, English naturalist Robert Plot discovered a dinosaur fossil nearly a century and a half before science knew what a “dinosaur” was. Analyzing a femur that belonged to what we know today to be a megalosaurus, Plot suspected that it might be an elephant bone, before ultimately theorizing that it had belonged to a giant human. For more than a century, naturalists like Plot attempted to describe dinosaur fossils as belonging to giant versions of animals that existed on Earth, including humans. In 1763, British physician Richard Brookes even labeled certain dinosaur bones Scrotum humanum, believing the bones resembled the genitals of a male human. It wasn’t until 1824 that scientists identified Plot’s bones as belonging to a giant lizard they named megalosaurus. As a result, the first dinosaur was named before scientists even knew these creatures existed. Finally, in 1842, the word “dinosauria,” meaning “terrible lizard” in Greek, officially entered the lexicon, and humanity’s perception of Earth history changed with it.

Amelia Earhart once took Eleanor Roosevelt on a nighttime joyride.
Although her aviation career lasted just 17 years, Amelia Earhart remains one of the most famous people ever to take to the sky. In addition to being renowned for her many firsts — including being the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and the first person to fly alone from Hawaii to the mainland U.S. — she’s known for her 1937 disappearance and the many theories it spawned. Less well-known but considerably more fun to imagine is the time she took Eleanor Roosevelt on a nighttime joyride from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore on April 20, 1933. The brief flight took place with both of them in their evening wear following a White House dinner party.

“I’d love to do it myself. I make no bones about it,” the First Lady told the Baltimore Sun after the flight. “It does mark an epoch, doesn't it, when a girl in an evening dress and slippers can pilot a plane at night.” In fact, Roosevelt herself had recently received a student pilot license and briefly took over the controls of the twin-engine Curtiss Condor, borrowed from Eastern Air Transport at nearby Hoover Field. Eleanor's brother Hall also ditched the dinner party in favor of the flight that night, as did Thomas Wardwell Doe, the president of Eastern Air Transport, and Eugene Luther Vidal (head of the Bureau of Air Commerce) and his wife Nina Gore, parents of author Gore Vidal. When the plane returned after the short journey, the Secret Service guided everyone back to the White House table for dessert. Needless to say, they all had quite the story to tell at their next dinner party. Roosevelt and Earhart remained friends for the rest of Earhart’s life, sharing an interest in women’s causes, world peace, and of course, flying.
Numbers Don’t Lie

Distance, in miles, of Earhart’s solo 1935 flight from Hawaii to California
2,408

Years Roosevelt spent writing “My Day,” a syndicated newspaper column
27

Women who received their pilot license before Earhart
15

Honorary degrees received by Roosevelt (four more than her husband)
35
Harry S. Truman considered Eleanor as a potential Vice President.
Truman ascended to the presidency following the death of Franklin Roosevelt just a few months into the latter’s unprecedented fourth term in 1945. Though he went without a Vice President for his first four years in office, Truman “indicated that she [Eleanor] would be acceptable to him as a vice-presidential candidate,” according to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library. Eleanor declined the role due to a lack of interest in elective office. Instead, Alben W. Barkley took the reins as Truman’s veep during his second term, and Eleanor served as United States delegate to the United Nations General Assembly, where she helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.