Mr. Smarty Pants Knows

Bill and Melinda Gates are the top farmland owners in the U.S. They own 242,000 acres in more than a dozen states.

We get bacterial illnesses like strep throat not from the bacilli directly but from those bacilli that have been infected by a bacteriophage. The infecting bacteriophage causes the strep throat organism to produce the toxins that make us ill.

Reader's Digest suggests that to keep ice cubes from sticking together you should store them in a paper bag.

Merlina, the queen raven, is missing at the Tower of London and presumed dead. A prophecy dating back to at least the 1600s says the kingdom will fall if the six resident ravens ever leave the Tower. However, there were seven ravens (one to spare), so Great Britain should be safe.

To achieve the sound of buzzing bees in the film Fantasia, animators stretched and plucked condoms.