History factoids which are largely unknown

In a few stretches of the Western Front in WWI, tacit understandings between the warring sides kept fighting to a minimum in long informal truces. Often the upper echelons on both sides would dictate attacks or operations in these places, which the soldiers very naturally resented.

Yes, there were some Christmas truces and even some soccer games.

No one liked the incredible stench in the muck of the trenches. Rotting corpses of soldiers and horses buried in mud, no one had dry feet or sufficient food. Machine guns good kill and it looked like the victor would be determined by the birth rate for women back home.

Quote: Fleastiff

no one had dry feet

Anyone who hasn't experienced long stretches of wet feet probably doesn't realize the true misery index of it.

Of course in war, it's one of several items.

Quote: rxwine

Anyone who hasn't experienced long stretches of wet feet probably doesn't realize the true misery index of it.

You get the most persistent fungal infections.

In WWI, trench foot was a kind of frostbite caused by long stretches standing on wet, muddy trenches.

Asimov called WWI a monumental stupidity. I think his assessment falls far short.

Quote: Nareed

Asimov called WWI a monumental stupidity. I think his assessment falls far short.

It was not just a 'march to folly' but since there was no assessment of soldiers, all the best and brightest, the most educated, the most clever, .... they were ALL canon fodder. Ex-convicts and graduate students were processed identically.
Go over the top, get hung up in barbed wire in no man's land, get machine gunned, die. Then send in the next wave and hope this time something different happens. It never did. Until the British started to use gas without realizing that the Germans were better chemists.

Two elements were created shortly after the Big Bang: Hydrogen and Helium. They remain the most common element sin the Universe to this day.

While there's plenty of helium in Earth, none of it is primordial (ie from the Big Bang). Earth's gravity is too weak to retain any helium. What we have is a byproduct of radioactive decay of heavy elements, which emit essentially a helium nucleus when their atoms break up. This can, ins some case, be trapped underground.

The Sun, though, does retain a lot of primordial helium.

Helium was first discovered by analyzing absorption lines in the Sun's spectra. This means we discovered primordial matter as well, but didn't even know it.

Which country was the first to land a man-made object on the Moon?

Quote: Ayecarumba

Which country was the first to land a man-made object on the Moon?

Luna 2 did not land. Luna 9 did (and it was just as ugly)

The Paris Conference at the close of WWI, was the first time in centuries of European history when major powers involved in a war were not allowed to participate in peace negotiations.

This exclusion did not apply only to the Central Powers (Triple Alliance) of Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, but also to the USSR (nee Russia), which became a pariah nation after instituting Bolshevism. Although representatives of White Russia, who were fighting the Red (Communist) Russians, were allowed to take part.

At the conclusion of WWII, the defeated powers were allowed to negotiate a final peace settlement, even after accepting unconditional surrender.

Today's factoid is that, from time to time, people are capable of learning from experience.

The guy who patented and promoted tetraethyl lead as a gasoline octane booster and the guy who invented CFCs is one in the same. Thomas Midgley Jr. The propagation of leaded gasoline was unconscionably reckless, resulting in 7 million tons of a known neurotoxin being blasted out of US tailpipes alone. If you were a child in the US in the 60s you probably experienced lead levels in your blood that would be called elevated today. However I'd give him a pass on CFCs. At the time, the refrigeration industry was growing and the refrigerants being used were toxic or flammable or both. Midgley introduced a non toxic non- flammable refrigerant with almost perfect thermal properties that could be mass produced. Would refrigeration have progressed as fast without it? Would they have continued to use ammonia or butane or worse? How many lives were saved and how could anyone in 1930 possibly know it would deplete the ozone layer if enough was released?