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Someone Asks People To Share Facts That Sound Fake But Are Actually Real And They Deliver (30 Facts)
In the world of fake news, shams, and bogus claims, it’s hard to tell a fact from fiction. And you simply get used to doubting things. You read "unicorns exist" and the mind detects deceit. But what if I tell you they’re just bulky and we call ‘em rhinos? Sounds about right.
So when someone on r/AskReddit asked what fact sounds fake at first but is actually real, redditors rolled up their sleeves. 26K upvotes and 14.3K comments later, we have the finalists of these mind-boggling facts ready down below. Get ready to get that trivia muscle pumped up for the next game after quarantine is over. After you're done, take a look at our previous lists of crazy-sounding facts here.
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#1
Ancient sailors believed that cats were magic and would often risk their own lives, even in an "every man for himself" situation, to save a cat from a sinking ship. All ships had at least one ship's cat as cats would eat the rats that have always plagued ships. The ship's cat would often be given a rank and sailors would generally take excessively good care of their cats.
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#2
Cheetahs can't roar. They meow like house cats.
#3
Because the number of possible combination of genes isn't infinite, there are probably at least 7 humans that looks the same as you.
#4
The sun is so loud, if space was filled with air instead of being a vacuum, we'd be hearing screeching sun noises at 125 decibel at all times.
#5
T-Rex (~64 million years ago) is nearer to now in years than it is to Stegosaurus (~151 million years ago) Images depicting them fighting are very very wrong.
#6
The founders of Adidas (Adi Dassler) and Puma (Rudolf Dassler) are brothers. ..and their HQs are literally next door to each other in Germany.
#7
That most of the oxygen on earth doesn’t come from trees. It’s comes from plankton in the ocean
#8
Distance from USA to Russia 4 kilometers This fact is always amusing.
#11
President Coolidge got sent a raccoon for Thanksgiving one year, but instead of eating it, he granted it a pardon because it was "cute"
#12
Lyrebird's imitations will seriously sound exactly like the thing they're trying to imitate. If they imitate a chainsaw, you will think it's a chainsaw. It sounds like a perfect recording.
#13
Jack the Ripper was still active when Nintendo was founded
#15
There isn’t a single bridge across the amazon river.
#16
Astronomer here! The coldest place we know of in the universe is actually... on Earth! To explain further, the coldest places we know of that naturally occur in the universe are inside dark nebulae with little to no star formation, and thus no starlight to heat things up. The coldest one known so far is the Boomerang Nebula, where the temperature has been measured as low as 1 degree above absolute zero (−272 °C or −458 °F). However, we regularly get below this temperature in labs on Earth! Specifically, absolute zero is at –273.15°C (or –459.67°F) and labs on Earth regularly get to within a tenth or even a hundredth of a degree of that. Pretty cool!
#17
It takes about 3-4 generation before your entire existence is completely forgotten (assuming you don't invent the cure for cancer or discover the fifth dimension or anything like that)
#18
Netflix was founded before Google
#19
Iran arrested 14 squirrels on suspicion of espionage
#20
Orcas are a natural predator to moose
#21
You can fit all the planets in our solar system touching end to end between Earth and the moon.
#22
There is no Date between 03-Sept-1752 to 13-Sept-1752, Checkout the September Calendar of 1752. 11 days are missing in the Calendar. This is due to the fact that we converted our Calendar from Julian to Georgian calendar on 2nd of September 1752.
Wendy Warner 5 years ago
Not cool for the people who had their birthday between the 03 and 13/09/1752 ...
#24
The guy who sang Peanut Butter Jelly Time died in a police shootout. Also, his brother in law was there trying to talk him out of shooting himself. You know who that brother-in-law was? F***ing Snoop Dogg
#25
The Ethiopian calendar is seven years behind the rest of the world. Edit; yeah guys it's still 2013 there
troufaki13 5 years ago
A little heads-up guys: 2020 is gonna be one helluva year!! Be prepared!
#26
One ten inch pizza is more pizza than two seven inch pizzas.
#27
Every Canadian is allowed to get a free Canadian flag from the government. However, if you ordered a flag today you would get it in about 110 years.
#28
Chickens are one of many species of birds that dont have penetrative genitalia. Read; cocks are cockless. The method of reproduction they use is commonly called a "cloacal kiss" and you can think of it as chickens scissoring, because "bumping holes" is the grossest possible way to phrase chicken sex. Also chickens are not a flightless species like lots of people think and are generally totally capable of short flight.
#29
A typical cumulus cloud actually weighs 1.1 million pounds (498,951 kg)
chi-wei shen 5 years ago
Let's say it is 500,000 kg. In light of the variable weights that's precise enough.
#30
That ants don't take fall damage
#31
Antarctica is technically a desert
#32
No matter where you touch a turtle on its body shell or otherwise it can feel it.
K. aka letmeplaywithkittens 5 years ago (edited)
Oh that makes me so sad. They can feel the pain of being strangled while growing if there are plastic rings around their body. Ugggh we haven’t been doing a good job taking care of each other or the earth.
#33
The yearly risk in the US of dying from a shark bite is around 1 in 250 million and the yearly risk of dying from a vending machine accident is roughly 1 in 112 million. Therefore, vending machines are about twice as deadly as sharks
#34
Cleopatra lived closer *in time* to the invention of the iPhone than the construction of the Great Pyramid. Or that 1980 was FORTY YEARS AGO!
#35
Sharks are older than trees, sharks date back 450 million years, trees 350 million years
Martti Laurson 5 years ago
So for at least 100 million years sharks could not hide behind a tree :D
#36
The entire state of Wyoming only has 2 escalators.
#37
The 10th president of the US, John Tyler (1790-1862), has 2 living grandchildren.
Charl Marx 5 years ago
Yep, John Tyler's second wife was 30 years his junior. His 15th and final child, a son, was born when the president was 63! This son then went on to do the same thing and had children in his 70s. Two of whom are still alive despite being born in 1924 and 1928! Always found this one fascinating.
#38
The Holy Roman Empire still existed when the US was founded.
#39
Disney Is the Second-Largest Buyer of Explosives in the World
#40
The day Michael Jackson's hair caught on fire was the exact middle of his life, to the day.
#42
A bunch of pissed of Scots who hated the way England played rugby is why we have the quarterback position in American football.
#43
The combined weight of all the ants on the planet is greater than all the humans.
Monika Soffronow 5 years ago
This is along the lines of the fact that we have more bacteria in our bodies than human cells, one could even argue that without them, we would not live at all.
#44
When compasses were first used on ships, sailors were afraid of them because they thought it had evil powers. Compasses were stored in boxes called a “binnacle”
#45
On average Mercury is the closest planet to Saturn.
#46
In a room of just 23 people there’s a 50-50 chance of at least two people having the same birthday
Michelle Muirhead 5 years ago
How many of the Bored Pandas have a birthday falling on 1st May?
Aragorn II Elessar 5 years ago
If you take a room of 23 people, the other 22 are trying to match your birthday, so to speak. With 23 people, we have 253 possible pairs. (Matching each person to a different person, Person A to Person B, or Person C to Person D, et cetera)The probability of two random people having a different birthday is 99.7%. However, you take that equation (1-(1/365))=(364/265) and multiply it to the 253 power. (364/365)^253, because the chances of this happening increase with each person that is involved. One chance is pretty low, but comparing the chance hundreds of times raises the odds significantly. This equation works out to be approximately 49.95%. Sorry if this is confusing, but I hope it helps
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Two Silly Pups 5 years ago
There are 13 of us in the office and 3 of us have their birthdays between June 1st and 13th.
Two Silly Pups 5 years ago
And I know 6 people whose birthday falls on May 23rd
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Narfy T. Barfy 5 years ago
I know. my math class has 17 people and i have the same birthday as one
Monika Soffronow 5 years ago (edited)
That was my ex's. My brother is born Jan 5 and my son Jan 6. They've surrounded me.
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SilverLining 5 years ago
I can confirm. A girl in my class at primary school shared my birthday
#47
People in Europe feared the tomato for over 200 years because they thought eating it would kill them. It was even nicknamed the "poision apple"
#49
The Nazis were the first ever people in modern history to start an anti-smoking and tobacco movement. Or being from Scotland, and finding out the national animal is the unicorn!
Markus Holstein 5 years ago
The Unicorn was picked because it was believed to be the natural enemy of the lion - the national animal of England
#50
During the Cold War the US had an idea to drop XL condoms labeled Medium all over Russia to make them think they are more "Manly"
Martha Meyer 5 years ago
This - in a nutshell - is the reason we are probably better off with female leaders, I think.
#52
An octopus has blue blood
#53
During WWII, the Polish Army had a brown bear in their ranks. The bear was really helpful to the force, particularly for carrying heavy artillery.
#54
The previous owner of the company Segway died from driving a Segway off a cliff
#56
There used to be a species of parrot native to what is now Kentucky and Tennessee.
#57
The US government kidnapped and experimented on its own population
#59
There was a week in American history where Tim Allen had the #1 film, tv show, and book.
#60
Stop signs used to be yellow. In 1922, the American Association of State Highway Officials met to determine a standard design for stop signs, and that's where they decided on the color: yellow (because they thought that would grab drivers' attention). They'd also considered red, but there was no dye available at the time that wouldn't eventually fade. By 1954, sign-makers had access to fade-resistant porcelain enamel, and could finally start making stop signs the red color recognized today.
Monika Soffronow 5 years ago
There are several variations, it depends on where you are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_sign
#63
The US and Russian military employed dolphins as part of their marines.
#64
Pumpkins are rarer than diamonds in Minecraft.
#65
The average amount of arms humans have is less than 2
Trick Question 5 years ago
One person missing one arm lowers the average by a tiny tiny amount but still brings it below 2.
#66
A Russian luxury SUV Manufacturer attempted and failed to use whale penis skin for their SUV interiors.
#67
A barnacle has a penis up to 10 times the length of its body.
#69
When large ships were first sailing sailed through electrical storms they would sometimes see a blue glow at the top of their mast. There was no lightning and they thought it meant they were cursed.
#70
The average density of the universe is 1 proton in 3 cubic meters and the average temperature is 2.73 kelvin.
#72
If Titanic had had more lifeboats on board, more people would have died. There are lots of unique factors that go into this. But the simple version is there was no time. Titanic's crew acted incredibly quickly as soon as it was known the ship had no chance of surviving. Preparing these massive, heavy lifeboats for launch and lowering them takes a lot of time and effort. Despite their efforts, the last two lifeboats were floated off deck. They needed every available second to launch the boats they did have. Titanic had no time to launch more lifeboats. If there had been more boats on board, they would have been stacked which would have added time to the already laborious and lengthy preparation and launch of the boats. They also would have been stored on deck which would have added to an already crowded, chaotic scene the night it sank.
#73
One of the largest stadiums in terms of crowd seating in the world is located in North Korea
#74
In his 19 year career in the NBA,Shaq only ever made one 3-pointer.
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What do you think ?
John Louis 5 years ago
MORE!, MORE!, MORE! Does boredpanda not understand that many of it's readers are full-on information junkies. We rely on boredpanda for our daily fix.
Michelle Muirhead 5 years ago
Very informative and makes me want to look into some of these facts in more detail.
Toni 5 years ago
I leave the room to get something, and as soon as I get out, I forget it. this is also a gift...
Daria Z 5 years ago
Very cool, I can already imagine myself throwing some of these facts into conversations :D
Christina Uhlir 5 years ago (edited)
I hope that the key word in your comment is "some".
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Christina Uhlir 5 years ago
First couple of these posts were good, the rest are .... Please Bored Panda.
John Louis 5 years ago
MORE!, MORE!, MORE! Does boredpanda not understand that many of it's readers are full-on information junkies. We rely on boredpanda for our daily fix.
Michelle Muirhead 5 years ago
Very informative and makes me want to look into some of these facts in more detail.
Toni 5 years ago
I leave the room to get something, and as soon as I get out, I forget it. this is also a gift...
Daria Z 5 years ago
Very cool, I can already imagine myself throwing some of these facts into conversations :D
Christina Uhlir 5 years ago (edited)
I hope that the key word in your comment is "some".
Load More Replies... Christina Uhlir 5 years ago
First couple of these posts were good, the rest are .... Please Bored Panda.
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