Honey and items immersed in honey can be preserved for centuries. The long shelf life is due to an enzyme found in the stomachs of bees.
100 Mind-Blowing Preserved Facts
The oldest “your mom” joke was discovered on a 3,500-year-old Babylonian tablet in Iraq in 1976. The tablet has since been lost, but the text remains preserved.
Albert Einstein’s eyeballs are in New York City. They were given to Henry Abrams and preserved in a safety deposit box. Abrams was Einstein’s eye doctor. He received the eyeballs from Thomas Harvey, the man who performed the autopsy on Einstein and illegally took the scientist’s brain for himself.
Napoléon Bonaparte’s penis was stolen. Posthumously, if that makes it any better. The genitalia were removed from his body by his doctor during the autopsy. Allegedly, it was given to a priest in Corsica. However, his junk was not properly preserved, so now it has been compared to dried leather and beef jerky. It was first displayed in a museum in 1927. Currently, the daughter of a urologist (who bought it for US$3,000 to keep under his bed) keeps it. Bids for the shrivelled genitalia have reached US$100,000.
The salty taste of bacon isn’t natural. The salty flavour that we all love comes from the curing and brining process. After the meat is prepared, it is flavoured and preserved.
A sound engineer once got accidentally high on LSD while cleaning an old radio. When Eliot Curtis tried to restore an old Buchla Model 100 synthesizer, he ended up tripping on 50-year-old LSD. He only noticed a crystalline substance that had gathered on the radio, which he wiped off. Since he found it in a dark closet at a university, the psychedelic components were preserved. The LSD residue dissolved in his hands and got him into a 9-hour trip. How’s that for wild funny facts?
Graffiti used to be a term used to refer to inscriptions and figure drawings found on the walls of ancient ruins, like Pompeii or the Roman Catacombs. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius preserved the graffiti in Pompeii.
Handy brandy. Rather than bury Nelson’s corpse at sea after his death at the Battle of Trafalgar, it was preserved in a cask of brandy stored in the hold of HMS Victory for a London burial.