A musical performance that started in 2001 will finish in the year 2640.
John Cage's "As Slow As Possible" is being played on a German church organ at a tempo stretching it to 639 years.
HISTORICAL ARCHIVE
Sources · October 17, 2026
Every claim from this day’s challenge, with its verdict, explanation and sources.
Round 1
Pure water is an electrical insulator.
Distilled water barely conducts; the danger in "water + electricity" comes entirely from dissolved salts and minerals carrying the current.
A frozen wood frog's heart keeps beating slowly beneath the ice.
The miracle is that the heart fully stops. Beating resumes only at thaw — an intermittent heartbeat would be far less extraordinary, and untrue.
Round 2
Entire ecosystems run on chemistry instead of sunlight.
At hydrothermal vents, microbes harvest chemical energy (chemosynthesis), supporting food webs in absolute darkness.
Your body contains more bacterial cells than human cells.
Barely: a 2016 recount found ~39 trillion bacteria vs ~30 trillion human cells — not the famous 10-to-1 ratio, which came from a rough 1972 guess. And the bacteria are so tiny they make up only a sliver of your weight.
Hippo milk is pink.
Hippo milk is white or cream like other mammals'. The myth mixes it up with hippos' red, oily skin secretion — a natural sunscreen that only occasionally smears into it.
Round 3
A man hiccupped nonstop for 68 years.
Charles Osborne hiccupped from 1922 to 1990 — the longest recorded attack, roughly 430 million hiccups.
Mushrooms are more closely related to humans than to plants.
Fungi and animals belong to the opisthokont supergroup — a more recent common ancestor than either shares with plants.
Vomitoriums were rooms where Romans vomited to keep eating.
A vomitorium is an amphitheater exit passage; the "spewing forth" referred to crowds pouring out, not stomachs.