Things I learned lately 25 December

• Centuries ago, it was common to tell ghost stories on Christmas Eve, a tradition rekindled by the Christmas Carol book by Charles Dickens.
• Nobody knows for sure which came first, the gingerbread house or the Grimm fairy tale Hansel and Gretel.
• Someone in Calgary rode a Bird e-scooter for 58km this year, one trip, with stops along the way. YYC also had the highest total number of trips taken on Bird Canada scooters in 2021, with 1,323,394 kilometres. Bird is one of 2 scooter companies operating in YYC.
• Elon Musk is an advocate for the removal of ALL government subsidies, including oil and gas. He believes that every business currently getting subsidies should be able to survive without them. He noted that Tesla never asked for credits for buyers of EVs, it was GM.
• Tesla has made 2/3 of all the American EVs on the road today.
• 40% of a dog's brain goes entirely to their sense of smell. They have a completely different organ that is designed purely to take in the smell, separately from the oxygen they breathe. A cancer alert dog kept marking to one mole on a woman's arm. They had already tested it and it was negative. They decided to retest due to the dog's behavior, and found an incredibly small fraction of a cancer cell in the spot.
• For over 300 years Europeans could not grow vanilla seeds since bringing it from South America. In 1836 it was finally discovered that a bee from Mexico was the only capable pollinator of the vanilla orchid.
• Mexico has now banned animal testing for cosmetic products, becoming the first country in North America to enact the law. Globally, the country is the 41st country to implement such a ban, which also outlaws the manufacturing, importing and marketing of cosmetics that have been tested on animals elsewhere in the world.