A first-class ticket on the Titanic would cost approximately $57,200 today.

Factoring in inflation, the $2,500 first-class tickets would be $57,200. The most expensive rooms on the ill-fated luxury liner would cost more than $103,000 now! On the plus side, you could get access to the swimming pool for only 25 cents! Even adjusting for inflation, it’s less than $6. For 50 cents, or less than 12 inflation-adjusted dollars, you got access to the squash courts, and could play with a professional squash player! You also got access to the Titanic’s 60 chefs. You even got the opportunity to see an iceberg up close for free! (too soon?)

The recent earthquake moved Japan closer to the United States.

Geophysicists found that global positioning stations near the quake’s epicenter moved as far as 13 feet eastward! This does not mean that the entire country shifted, but that the nation has actually grown wider. NASA scientists have also found that the earthquake may have shorted the length of the day by a couple of milliseconds and shifted the Earth’s axis!

McDonald's has unique menu items in every country. In Portugal, you can order soup!

More examples: in India (where much of the population does not eat beef) the restaurant offers such fare as the Chicken Maharaja Mac and the potato-patty McAloo Tikki Burger. This does not mean that McDonald’s has replaced its traditional offerings in these locations - they merely supplement their menu with a bit of localized flair in many places.

Rupert Grint’s first car was an ice cream truck.

At age 18 he bought a fully functional ice cream truck, complete with a freezer, a kitchen with sinks, and musical bell. As you could have probably guessed, Grint is a BIT more well off financially than his onscreen persona Ron Weasley. (On the other hand, this car doesn’t fly). The young film star said that he has been interested in the ice cream industry ever since he was a child. If his movie career doesn’t pan out after the Harry Potter franchise comes to an end, at least he’ll have something to fall back on? He may need the job security too, seeing that he dropped out of school at age 16!

Source: Monsters and Critics

The movie Avatar takes up over one petabyte of storage space.

A petabyte is the equivalent of 500 hard drives, each with a capacity of 2 terrabytes (a terrabyte to 1,000 gigabytes!). That’s the size of a 32 YEAR long mp3 file!!

The movie was shot in 3-D and rendered in one of the most powerful data centers in the world. Its computing core adds up to 40,000 processors and 104 terabytes of RAM. It would be realistic to assume that a significant portion of the film's $300 million budget went to storage space.

In Albania, nodding your head means ‘no’ and shaking your head means ‘yes.’

Even more confusing is the way head nodding has evolved over time. The left-right nod means "yes" but also implies confusion and disagreement, so it can also mean "no". Nodding up and down means "no", but it also implies agreement and understanding. 

Albanians are also very nice to strangers. Hospitality is considered to be very important. Albania is supposed to be the most hospitable country in Europe. 

The main voice actors on The Simpsons are paid $400,000 per episode.

In comparison, Charlie Sheen (the highest-paid sitcom star) only earns $350,000 an episode! The deal includes all the lead actors: Dan Castellaneta (Homer), Julie Kavner (Marge), Nancy Cartwright (Bart), Yeardley Smith (Lisa), Hank Azaria (Moe), and Harry Shearer (Ned Flanders). Now in its 22nd season, The Simpsons is the longest running prime time entertainment series in U.S. history – 484 episodes and counting! 

George Washington has a pair of library books that are 221 years overdue.

George checked out a couple volumes from the New York Society Library on October 5th, 1789. This was about five months into Washington’s presidency, back when New York was still USA's capital. The ledger showed no return date, and they were borrowed by a patron who signed his name simply as “President.” 

Alas, ALL libraries DO have due dates, and George’s should have been returned by November 2nd of that year. Being that the books were not returned by that date (or on any day since, for that matter), if you factor in inflation, the first president has accumulated a late fee of $300,000! Fortunately for all you descendants of Washington out there, the library is not actively pursuing the overdue fine - but they would appreciate the books being returned! 

In the 1950s, the United States planned to drop a nuclear bomb on the moon

At the time, the US was lagging behind the Soviet Union in the space race (For example, they sent a man into space before the US did.) Exploding a nuclear weapon on the moon was a way to one-up the Soviet Union. They planned on nuking the moon as a PR stunt, and they wanted to make sure the explosion could be seen from Earth!

This was part of a top-secret Air Force project, "Project A119" which was called "A Study of Lunar Research Flights". Details of the 1958 plan were made public in 2000 by Dr. Leonard Reiffel, the physicist who ran the project. He had worked on the project with famous astronomer Carl Sagan.
Sagan may have also disclosed some of this top-secret information when he applied for the prestigious Miller Institute graduate fellowship to Berkeley. At the time, Sagan thought that a nuclear explosion could reveal whether there was life on the moon.
The explosion likely would have ruined the face of the "man on the moon". Thankfully, years later they decided to send Neil Armstrong to the moon, and not a nuclear bomb.

The biggest sandal!

Now this fact is seriously going to take your breath away! Do you know? The Statue of Liberty wears a sandal of size 879!!

So, how do you feel after knowing this amazing and mind boggling fact? Do send us your comments!

Lightning CAN strike the same place twice!

This is a common misconception. There is no reason why lightning couldn't strike the same place twice. The Empire State Building, for instance, gets struck by lightning 100 TIMES EVERY YEAR on average.

This is actually a picture of lightning hitting two places at once. In this case, it hit the Trump Tower and the Willis Tower (Sears Tower) in Chicago at the same time. This must be one of the luckiest photographers ever.

Centralia, Pennsylvania is a town that's been on fire since 1962!

The fire started with an unauthorized garbage fire that spread to the town's coal mine. The resultant coal fire has been burning underground ever since.

There are an estimated 200 underground coal fires like the one in Centralia that are currently burning in the United States. Thousands more coal fires are burning across the world. These fires alone contribute 48 tons of poisonous mercury into the world's atmosphere every year. An estimate .3% of all the world's carbon emissions come from these fires alone.

The U.S. government has spent over a BILLION DOLLARS so far to put out the coal fires. $42 million has been spent just to relocate the residents of Centralia.

The USA bought Alaska from Russia for 2 cents an acre!

Secretary of State William H. Seward agreed to purchase Alaska from Russia for only $7.2 million in 1867. At the time, critics referred to this as "Seward's folly", "Seward's Icebox" and "[President] Andrew Johnson's polar bear garden".

With approximately 365 million acres, that amounts to less than 2 cents per acre. Still, critics thought Seward was crazy, and the deal only passed the Senate by one vote. Of course, we later found out that Alaska has GOLD and OIL...

7% Americans think Elvis is still alive!

Some people even theorize that the body that is currently buried 6 feet underground in Graceland is actually a wax model, and that the real Elvis was spotted hopping on a plane to Buenos Aires 2 hours before his official time of death, going by the alias "John Burrows".

In reality, Elvis was found dead on his bathroom floor on August 16, 1977. He was overweight and his health was deteriorating due to his drug use. He suffered from glaucoma, high blood pressure, liver damage, and an enlarged colon, and he may have been suffering from degenerative arthritis as well. He was pronounced dead at 3:30 pm at Baptist Memorial Hospital. Though he is most certainly dead, he lives on through his music.