This is the August 2025 edition of my fascinating facts newsletter, which includes a range of interesting topics. This includes write-ups about the golden disc, a lake that turns animals into stone and food naming.
Fascinating Facts August 2025 Contents
“Fascinating Facts” is a free monthly e-magazine focusing on personal, historical, and military interests. Contributions are welcomed with appropriate credit given. You can download the full newsletter to read HERE; however, some snippets are listed below.
VOYAGER — THE GOLDEN DISC IN SPACE
A brief pictorial feature recalls NASA’s 1977 Voyager probes and the gold-plated phonograph records they carry, intended to portray Earth’s sights and sounds to any extraterrestrials that may encounter the spacecraft. Read More…
THE LAKE THAT TURNS ANIMALS TO STONE
Stunning photographs of Tanzania’s alkaline Lake Natron show how its highly caustic waters can calcify the corpses of birds and bats, leaving eerie, statue-like remains. Read More…
SOME IMPORTANT HISTORICAL JULY DATES / IN SUPPORT OF UKRAINE
A two-page calendar revisits events from previous Julys — Louis Blériot’s 1909 Channel crossing, the first bikini in 1946, Apollo 11 in 1969 and more — while a sidebar reiterates the magazine’s solidarity with Ukraine. Read More…
ANIMAL MIGRATION
Illustrated explanations chart the seasonal journeys of birds, fish, insects and mammals. Highlights include the Arctic tern’s 19,000-kilometre pole-to-pole commute, salmon returning from ocean to river to spawn, desert locust swarms crossing the Atlantic, and wildebeest herds sweeping across the Serengeti. Modern radio and satellite tags are shown to be revolutionising our understanding of these movements.
FAMOUS STUPID SAYINGS
Pages of wry quotations lampoon human folly, with lines from Einstein, Napoleon, Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Nietzsche and Chris Rock reminding readers that ignorance, rather than malice, often drives history.
NAME THAT PRODUCT
The magazine unpicks the etymology of well-known brands: Kodak’s crisp ‘K’, Google’s misspelt “googol”, Adidas from founder Adi Dassler, IKEA as Ingvar Kamprad’s initials plus farm names, WD-40 after forty test batches, and more, illustrating how chance, acronyms and founder surnames become global identities. Read More…
NAMING THE FOOD
Culinary lore explains Battenberg cake (named for a German princely wedding), Earl Grey tea’s bergamot-flavoured recipe for the Grey family’s Northumberland water, Garibaldi biscuits honouring the Italian patriot, Peach Melba devised for soprano Nellie Melba, and Waldorf salad invented for a New York charity ball. Read More…
BY THE TIME YOU HAVE READ THIS YOUR BODY WILL HAVE…
A playful audit shows what the human body does in roughly one minute: creating 120 million red blood cells, beating the heart about 70 times to pump 1.3 gallons of blood, blinking up to twenty times, shedding tens of thousands of skin cells, processing 600 million bits of visual data and filtering a fifth of the blood supply through the kidneys. Read More…
HANG NGA GUESTHOUSE ‘CRAZY HOUSE’
The Vietnamese architect Đặng Việt Nga’s fantastical tree-like hotel in Đà Lạt is profiled. Inspired by Gaudí and local nature, its ten animal-themed rooms, cave-like corridors and branch-shaped stairways earned early scorn yet now attract tourists who pay modest entry or room fees to explore its surreal, expressionist spaces. Read More…
SPITE HOUSES
Examples from Massachusetts to California illustrate dwellings purposely built narrow, tall or awkward to block a neighbour’s light, view or access — a legal grey area in many jurisdictions and explicitly banned in some civil-law countries such as Finland. Read More…
WORLD’S BIGGEST HOAXES
The closing section revisits celebrated pranks: the BBC’s 1957 spaghetti-tree harvest, Charles Dawson’s Piltdown Man “missing link” (exposed as an orangutan jaw and modern skull) and the Denver newspapers’ 1899 fabrication that US entrepreneurs would demolish the Great Wall of China to build a road. Each story reveals how readily even experts and editors can be duped. Read More…
