Sentinelese people. Tribal society living on an island in the Bay of Bengal. No evidence of fire or agriculture. Have violently resisted outside contact.

Wow! signal. Strong narrowband signal detected by SETI in 1977. Unexplained origin.

Fan death. Widely held urban legend endemic to South Korea. Sleeping overnight with a fan on in the same room results in death. In the summer, the South Korean press reports on numerous fan-associated deaths.

Sokal affair. Hoax perpetrated by physicist Alan Sokal. Publishing a nonsense paper in a postmodern cultural studies journal.

United Fruit Company. Now known as Chiquita Brands International. Involved in setting up Banana Republics in Central America to control the western world fruit supply. Backed a 1954 coup in Guatemala to keep their lands intact.

Cymothoa exigua. Parasitic isopod. Eats and replaces the tongue of the spotted rose snapper. Goes on functioning as the fish's tongue.

Racetrack Playa. In Death Valley. Stones move in irregular patterns in a dry lakebed, leaving trails in the mud. There are good hypotheses for how the rocks move, but actual movement has never been observed.

William James Sidis. Child prodigy born in 1898. IQ estimated to be between 250 and 300. Graduated from Harvard at 16 and starting teaching at Rice. Left academia. Arrested for being involved with socialism. Found menial work and published under pseudonyms for the rest of his life.

New Caledonia. Island off the coast of Northeast Australia. Part of the ancient Gondwana supercontinent. Unique ecology. The giant turtle Meiolania lived here until 2000 years ago. Dominant predators were small arboreal crocodiles.

Blue field entoptic phenomenon. Looking into a uniform blue field allows you see the white blood cells in the capillaries in front of the retina of the eye.

Foraminifera. Single-celled amoeboid protists possessing calcium-carbonate shells. The largest recorded specimen was 19cm in size.

Semantic satiation. Repetition bleeds a word or phrase of its meaning.

Stargate Project. US government project investigating the military applications of psychic phenomena, active until 1995.

Gigantopithecus. South Asian lineage of great ape existing until approximately 100,000 years ago, contemporaneous to anatomically modern humans. Stood 9.8 ft tall and weighed 1200 lbs. Two to three times the size of modern gorillas.

Chalicotherium. Extinct genus of ungulates with long clawed forelimbs. Possibly walking on their knuckles similar to giant sloths and pandas.

Göbekli Tepe. Oldest known human monument. Massive stones with carved with beautiful animal forms. Erected by hunter-gatherers approximately 11,500 years ago, providing evidence that religion and complex social structures predated the agricultural revolution (as well as pottery, writing and the wheel).

Viroid. Smallest known infectious agents (as small as 220 nucleobases) that spread via self-reproduction. Only RNA, no protein, taking advantage of the cell's RNA polymerase. Some have catalytic properties.

Tidal acceleration. Tidal forces between the Earth and the Moon cause torque to occur resulting in a gradual slowdown of the Moon's orbit and Earth's rotation. Eventually (if the sun didn't go nova) the day and the month will be the same length of time. Geological evidence shows that 620 million years ago, there were 22 hours in the day, 13 months per year, and 400 days per year.

Principality of Sealand. WWII era British sea fort claimed as a sovereign state by Major HRH Prince Roy of Sealand.

Acoustic Kitty. CIA project to use cats in spy missions.

Tsar Bomba. Fifty megaton hydrogen bomb detonated by Russia in 1961. This was the largest explosive ever created with a yield of 2500 that of Fat Man. The mushroom cloud was 40 miles high.

Dyatlov Pass incident. Unexplained death of nine ski hikers in 1959 in the Ural Mountains. "Investigators determined that the hikers tore open their tent from within, departing barefoot in heavy snow. Though the corpses showed no signs of struggle, two victims had fractured skulls, two had broken ribs, and one was missing her tongue." Read into this, probably the most frightening thing I've ever heard of.

Antikythera mechanism. Ancient mechanical calculator dating from 100 BC Greece. Designed with 37 gears to calculate astronomical positions. Recent work with X-ray tomography has helped to reveal its function.

Lift. Airfoils do not create lift via the textbook explanation of an equal transit time for packets of air on the top of the wing and on the bottom of the wing.

Graphology. Assessing personality through by analyzing handwriting samples is pseudoscience.

Polygraph. Generally perform little better than chance in controlled trials, achieving accuracy in the 60% range. A 2003 National Academy of Sciences report found that polygraph research was "Unreliable, Unscientific and Biased."

Whale song. Only humpback whales and blue whales produce true whale song. The songs have an amazing nested hierarchical structure. Each song last approximately 30 minutes and is continually repeated, slowly morphing over time. All whales in an area create the same song. The song's evolution over time is shared among the group.

Flynn effect. IQ has been steadily increasing over time. IQ is normalized to a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15 independently for each gender every year. If children from 1932 were measured using the 1997-scale, they would only score an average of 80. The world is getting smarter.

Silver Spring Monkeys. Events that lead to the founding of PETA and the introduction of the 1985 Animal Welfare Act, which provides federal regulation for scientific experiments involving animal subjects. It presents a microcosm of the dilemmas of animal testing, as although undeniably cruel, these experiments lead to the discovery of neuroplasticity and eventual treatments for Stroke victims.

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