This Invention Is The Only Thing That Can Make Childbirth Worse Than It Already Is

Plus, six other fun facts you definitely didn't already know.

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Conversations are hard. Each week, two-time Jeopardy! winner and awkward silence warrior Terri Pous makes small talk a little easier by giving you random things to blurt out when you don’t know what else to say. Catch up on last week's here.

1. In 1965, a patent was filed for a "birthing apparatus" which would spin pregnant women around at as much as 7G until their baby was flung out from the centrifugal force.

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This, uh, creative childbirth aid, patented by Charlotte and George Blonsky, required a woman to be strapped onto a rotating table and spun around until the baby shot out into a cotton net. Oh, and! It was specifically designed to, among other things, concentrate "as much puke as possible in and around the mother’s face, rather than having it flung outward toward hospital staff." Somehow, it never caught on.

2. A cat co-authored a physics paper in 1975.

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A kitty called F.D.C. Willard is called the Cat Who Published thanks to a grammatical error by his owner, Jack H. Hetherington. Hetherington had said "we" throughout his paper called Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc 3He even though he was the only author. Instead of going back and changing all the we's to I's, he listed his siamese cat Chester as the co-author, and changed Chester's name to the much more professorial-sounding F.D.C. Willard.

3. Cornflakes were invented to prevent masturbation.

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People in the 19th century had a...let's say misguided fear of masturbation, and none other than Dr. John Harvey Kellogg thought he had the answer to all of the physical destruction he thought it caused. Kellogg, who was so anti-sex that he and his wife never consummated their marriage, said a healthy diet filled with plain foods like cereal would curb sexual desire and invented Corn Flakes as part of that diet. His theory didn't quite pan out, but at least he knew a thing or two about breakfast foods.

4. When the University of Nebraska plays football at home, the stadium becomes the state's third largest city.

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College football is huge in Nebraska, as is the Cornhuskers' Memorial Stadium. When the average of 89,998 fans turn up for games, the stadium blows Nebraska's third-most populous city of Bellevue — which has a mere 50,000 people — out of the water.

5. Scooby Doo's real name is Scoobert Doo.

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And Shaggy's is Norville Rogers. How's that for nicknames?!

6. Every year on August 5, the Mars Curiosity rover sings itself a sad, solitary "Happy Birthday."

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After the rover made its triumphant landing on Mars on Aug. 5. 2012, NASA programmed the little guy to sing a lonely "Happy Birthday" to itself every Aug. 5 to commemorate the big day. Awwww.

7. There are turtle tunnels in Japan to save them from being run over by trains.

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Why did the turtles cross the railroad tracks? To risk their lives, apparently. To help the critters avoid a crushing death, Suma Aqualife Park and the West Japan Railway Company partnered up to build tunnels under the tracks. Now, turtles can get to where they're going in one piece, and look pretty adorable doing it, too.