11 Things We Didn't Know Last Week

News, discoveries and ... fun

1. A cobra can bite and kill someone even 20 minutes after its head is severed. (Learn more at Daily Mirror)

2. Celebrity deaths do not generally come in threes. (Learn more at NY Times)

3. How rare is a blue lobster? One in 2 million. (Learn more at Associated Press)

>> 12 Foods Sabotaging Your Sleeep

4. With the national unemployment rate at 6.2 percent in July, 20 U.S. cities are under 4 percent. (Learn more at Vox)

5. You can buy a house in a picturesque Sicilian hilltop village for $1.30. (Learn more at Agence France-Presse)

6. A restaurant in Fort Myers, Fla., refuses to serve ketchup to patrons over age 10. (Learn more at Yahoo! Food)

7. After 80 years, Oakland, Calif., no longer bans pinball machines. (Learn more at Wired)

>> Get travel discounts with your AARP Member Advantages.

8. Methane is seeping into the Atlantic Ocean from hundred of leaks on the ocean floor along the East Coast. (Learn more at Nature)

9. How to make the world's most expensive coffee ($70 a serving): Feed coffee beans to elephants, pick the beans out of the dung, wash, rinse, grind and brew. (Learn more at NPR)

10. City spiders grow larger and reproduce more often than country spiders. (Learn more at PLOS ONE)

11. Nearly 1 in 3 "retirees" say they would like to return to the labor force. (Learn more at Reuters)

Bonus video: You may have seen the precocious "apparently" kid earlier in the summer. But have you heard him sing?

 

Learn something this week? Mail your ideas to  11things@aarp.org, and we'll try to include your story next time.

On Twitter, we're using the hashtag #11things.

Let us read 11 Things to you:

[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/165053114" params="color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%" height="166" iframe="true" /]

 

Images - Cobra: iStock/aletsix; Lobster: Flickr/Richard Wood; Italy: Wikimedia user Azotoliquido; Pinball: Flickr/Jenni Conrad; Elephant: Black Ivory Coffee promotional video screenshot; Spider: iStock/papkin

Music - AlexBeroza: Spinnin'; Songify This

Also of Interest

• Most Stolen Vehicles and Other Things We Didn't Know Last Week
• 3 Classic Cruise Ship Rip-Offs to Avoid
• Fight fraud and ID theft with the AARP Fraud Watch Network.
• Join AARP: Savings, resources and news for your well-being

 

See the  AARP home page for deals, savings tips, trivia and more