Baseball umpires used to sit in rocking chairs. People have been playing baseball since the mid-19th century. In the early days, umpires would officiate the games while reclining in a rocking chair located 20 feet behind home plate. By 1878, the National League also declared that home teams must pay umpires $5 per game.
100 Mind-Blowing Plate Facts
Baseball umpires used to sit in rocking chairs. Baseball has been around since the 19th century. However, in the early games, umpires would sit in a rocking chair 20 feet behind the home plate.
Australia is the only continent without an active volcano. The nearest active volcanoes are located off the continent of Australia but are still within its territory. One is located on Head Island and the other on McDonald Islands. The reason why Australia does not have any active volcanoes located on the continent is that it isn’t on a plate boundary.
In Russia, you can get fined for driving a car that’s too dirty. If the dirt on your car completely obscures your license plate, you might just get fined.
Hawaii gets 3 feet closer to Alaska every year. The Aloha State sits on a tectonic plate, called the Pacific Plate, that shifts closer to the mainland every day.
In the early days of baseball, umpires sat in rocking chairs behind home plate.
Earth has a squishy interior. Earth’s interior is not solid but rather has a semi-solid or ‘squishy’ consistency owing to high temperatures and pressures. This squishy consistency allows the mantle to flow and move over geological timescales, which is responsible for phenomena such as plate tectonics, volcanic activity and Earthquakes. One consequence of this squishy interior is a process known as post-glacial rebound. During the last ice age, large portions of Earth’s surface were covered by glaciers, causing the underlying mantle to deform and sink. As the glaciers melted and receded, the mantle slowly rebounded back to its original position over thousands of years, causing the land above it to rise. This process is still occurring today in places such as Canada, Scandinavia, and Greenland, where the land is still rebounding from the weight of the glaciers that once covered the region. Recent research has found that West Antarctica is rising faster than anywhere else in the world, thanks to data from ESA’s GOCE gravity mission. The study of post-glacial rebound provides important insights into the structure and behaviour of Earth’s interior, and how it responds to changes in the surface environment over long timescales.
Koalas may be cute, but they’re incredibly dumb. No, they have one of the smallest brains out of all mammals, and that’s in proportion to their body weight too! Their restrictive diet of non-nutritious eucalyptus leaves may be the cause, as this diet couldn’t possibly sustain a larger brain. To give you an idea of how clueless they are, when a koala is presented with a branch with leaves and a pile of leaves on a plate, they will eat the leaves on the branch as they cannot recognise those on the plate as food.