You Can't Make This Stuff Up!

[Lee Stewart]

[Lee Stewart]

Bent railroad tracks after a New Zealand earthquake

[Lee Stewart]

[Lee Stewart]

Princeton University has been around since 1746, but the school didn't start officially awarding doctorates until 1879. And though it took more than a century for the university to formally begin graduate studies, it actually had its first graduate student back in 1771. His name was James Madison—the fourth president of the United States.

[Lee Stewart]

The long arms of Mongolian herdsman Bao Xishun—who, at 7', 8.95", was the tallest man in the world in 2006—saved the day when a pair of dolphins were found to have swallowed plastic shards that could not be extracted from their stomachs using standard instruments. Bao's unusually long arm proved a more effective tool and saved the lives of both creatures.

[Lee Stewart]

Arrector pili muscles, fan-shaped muscles at the base of each hair follice, are responsible for goosebumps: These muscles contract when the body is cold in an effort to generate heat and cause a person's hair to "stand up straight" on their skin.

[Lee Stewart]

In 2016, the iconic sparkly dress that Marilyn Monroe wore to serenade President John F. Kennedy on his birthday sold for a staggering $4.8 million at auction. This remains the world record for the most expensive article of clothing ever sold, beating out the record previously held by… another one of Monroe's dresses, her costume from The Seven Year Itch.

[Lee Stewart]

The DeLorean was not always the way Marty McFly was supposed to travel to the past. As /Film recounts, in the original draft of Back to the Future, the time machine was attached to a refrigerator, and "taken to the Nevada desert test site for the atomic bomb, where it was strapped into the back of a truck and driven into the atomic explosion in order to harness the power from the nuclear explosion. Marty had to climb into the fridge as the truck barreled towards ground zero."

[Lee Stewart]

Boasting "a one-of-a-kind international collection of more than 100 innovation failures," the touring Museum of Failure features displays on such bad ideas as Harley-Davidson perfume, Colgate beef lasagna, and Google Glass.

[Lee Stewart]

The molds manufacturing process of Lego bricks is so accurate and effective that just 18 out of 1 million are found to be defective. That's out of the 20 billion pieces that are manufactured every year.