That the world-famous ‘thinking horses’ of Elberfeld are not fakes, that they extract cube roots, read and spell by rational processes rather than by means of trick signs from their trainer, is the conclusion reached by one of the leading European authorities on animal psychology …

The cube root of 5832 was proposed by one of the ladies present, written on the board for the horse and the answer, 18, given correctly in a few seconds. and were likewise given correctly — 124 and 26 in about ten seconds. Mr. Krall and the attendant groom had left the hall immediately after the exercise was written on the board in each case. …

[ ]. Correct reply in a few seconds: 28. The horse was then alone in the room. All the spectators had also gone outside.

[ ]. Reply after 30 seconds: 117. Wrong. The horse corrected it himself to 144, but finally gave up rather despairingly.

— “Can Horses Think? Learned Commission Says ‘Perhaps,'” New York Times, Aug. 31, 1913

In August 2006, the Newhaven Marine railway station in East Sussex was closed to passengers due to safety concerns. But it remained legally open, and under an 1844 regulation a train was required to call there once a day.

So until its closure in 2020, the station received daily train service, though its platforms were inaccessible to the public. The service was listed in timetables, but passengers who wished to travel to the next station were ferried there by taxi instead.

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The territory of Madha is an exclave — it belongs to Oman, but it’s surrounded by the United Arab Emirates.

And Madha itself contains an enclave — the village of Nahwa belongs to the United Arab Emirates.

This makes Nahwa a second-order enclave — it lies within the boundaries of its nation, but it’s surrounded by the territory of another state.

The oldest living rose bush grows on the apse of the Hildesheim Cathedral in Germany — documentation confirms its age at approximately 700 years (it’s visible in the engraving at right above, which dates from about 1845).

Allied bombers destroyed the cathedral in 1945, but the rose’s roots survived, and it flowered again among the ruins.

The oldest known bottle of wine is the Speyer wine bottle, unearthed from the tomb of a Roman nobleman in 1867 and dated to 350 A.D. Though it remains sealed, it’s presumed to contain liquid wine.

The ethanol will be gone, but the remaining liquid has been preserved by olive oil and wax that the Romans used to protect it from the air. For safety’s sake, its curators have forborne from opening it.

The Pentagon has a detailed strategy for surviving a zombie apocalypse.

CONOP 8888, “Counter-Zombie Dominance,” arose when military planners needed to create a planning document that the public could not mistake for a real scenario. They imagined a “clearly impossible” emergency in which planners needed to “undertake military operations to preserve ‘non-zombie’ humans from the threats posed by a zombie horde.”

“The document is identified as a training tool used in an in-house training exercise where students learn about the basic concepts of military plans and order development through a fictional training scenario,” spokeswoman Pamela Kunze told Foreign Policy. “This document is not a U.S. Strategic Command plan.” But, a disclaimer reads, “this plan was not actually designed as a joke.”

Here it is.

Walt Disney World draws its power from a pylon surmounted by a circular steel tube and two elliptical rings.

The whole arrangement weighs 30,000 pounds.

On the coast of the Kimberley region in Western Australia are two successive gorges that restrict the tide — seawater builds up rapidly at these bottlenecks, creating temporary “waterfalls” through the gaps, which are only 10 and 20 meters wide.

With each change in the tide, the falls reverse direction, and the cycle renews itself.

Wyoming’s Intermittent Spring is well named: It runs and stops alternately, in segments of about 15 minutes. The mechanism isn’t known for certain, but scientists suspect that a cavern in the rock face is filling continuously with groundwater, and when the water reaches a certain height it spills through a tube that empties into the valley. This produces a natural siphon effect that draws down the reservoir until air enters the tube, which disables the siphon until the cycle starts again. University of Utah hydrologist Kip Solomon says, “We can’t think of another explanation at the moment.”

Solomon’s tests show that the spring water has been exposed to air underground, which lends support to the theory.