Nintendo was founded less than a year after Jack the Ripper's murders.
Nintendo began as a Kyoto playing-card company on September 23, 1889; the Ripper's five canonical murders took place in London in late 1888.
HISTORICAL ARCHIVE
Sources · November 1, 2026
Every claim from this day’s challenge, with its verdict, explanation and sources.
Round 1
The Statue of Liberty is green.
Today, yes — but it was unveiled in 1886 a shiny copper-brown, like a new penny. It took about 30 years for weather to build up the green patina that now protects it.
Koalas are a small species of bear native to Australia.
Koalas are marsupials, not bears. The "koala bear" misnomer was coined by late 18th-century English settlers solely due to their physical resemblance to teddy bears.
Round 2
Butterflies taste with their feet.
Chemoreceptors on their feet sample leaves for food and check whether a plant is safe to lay eggs on.
Stomach acid can dissolve a razor blade.
Partly, in a lab: blades left 24 hours in simulated gastric juice lost about a third of their weight. In a real stomach, contents move on within hours — far too fast to dissolve one.
Elephants drink water through their trunks like a straw.
The trunk is a nose, not a straw. Elephants suck water partway up it — remarkably fast — then curl it to their mouths and squirt it in.
Round 3
A giraffe's neck has the same number of bones as yours.
Both have seven neck vertebrae — the giraffe's are just enormous, each one more than 25 cm long.
Every planet in the solar system fits between Earth and the Moon.
Using average distances: Mercury through Neptune lined edge-to-edge span ~380,000 km, just under the 384,400 km mean gap.
Walt Disney's body was cryogenically frozen.
Disney died in December 1966 and was cremated two days later; his ashes are at Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale, California. The first human cryonic preservation didn't happen until a month after his death.