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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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.
Because the number of possible combination of genes isn't infinite, there are probably at least 7 humans that looks the same as you.
I pitty my doppelganger... Such an ugly face is a shame to be duplicated!! :'D
I met one of mine when I was 10, a visiting cousin of one of my neighborhood friends. We were the same thinness and height, with the same sort of curly hair and skin color, face shape, everything. We even both wore glasses for nearsightedness. It was so weird to see what I looked like to other people.
Someone found my doppelganger and tagged me in the pictures of twitter. Was pretty bizarre seeing "me" like that.
That is amazing, I wish I could have/meet my doppelgänger if there is one.
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This is not true. Not because the math doesn't check out, but because the math is not applicable. Within your own community you actually look more alike to people close to you because of how we procreate. So you are more likely to have black hair if you live in Nigeria and blonde if you live in Sweden. And so with so many more features. So a few are actually set within families, communities, countries etc. But within those actually very much alike looking ethnicities and communities, the amount of possible gene combinations are still in the same order of magnitude. But the basics (ethnicities) make for a smaller group in which these occur. If we would totally randomly find partners all over the world it would become more likely to create doppelganger and adhere to the mathematics by actually creating one large group of humans that randomly combine genes. And even then there are epigenetics to consider. Google the infinite monkey problem to understand more of it.
Fun fact, it's also why someone who grew up between say a white community might feel all others of a different ethnicity look somewhat alike. It's because we are so used to the common features, we look at more details in people in our daily lives. But I'd a big feature is different, we tend to focus on that and are no longer able to see the details. It's why a mom can identify her identical set of twins with ease and why a globalisation makes it easier to get around that mechanisme because we are actually exposed more regularly to different people with explicitly different features from our close community. It's why I can spot a Dutch person even before they start talking or walking if I meet them anywhere on this planet (of course behavior plays a part too). While for an American or Australian that same person could just as easily be German or French.
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Yes, that was my question too. What chimp downvoted this question?
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Except genetics is not solely responsible for one's physical appearance. Environment, upbringing, and epigenetics have something to do with it to varying degrees. Plus, if you want to nitpick, even the same exact combination of genes is no guarantee of exact sameness - identical twins always have minor variations and different freckles, moles, and birthmarks.
Twins raised in different environments often look noticeably different. Not to mention cloned animals don't even look exactly the same.
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No wonder I keep getting people coming up to me asking if I know them or met before. I just thought I must have a familiar face..lol
That would explain all of those folks saying they saw me somewhere that I wasn't!
I'd love to see them, just to see how I'd look with a different haircut, different weight etc...like a real Photoshop lol.
I keep getting approached by people who are sure they know me, but I have no idea who they are. My social circle is the size of a 5 pence coin, so I am certain that I have a doppelganger in my town somewhere. I am a nondescript middle-aged bald white guy, so I probably look like somebody else.
Actually not, it depends on your race, the Asian race has the lowest genetic diversity and then the Caucasian race has the highest. Don't think that it is racism, Asians do not all look the same, they are close to the same. 7 is a mean number. Actually, for Europe, we can even find people with nobody who looks similar under precision view. Of course, under high precision, any multicell organism is different excluding some plants.
I have never seen anyone that looked like me but I was in a restaurant once where strangers were staring and then came over to say that I looked exactly like the woman’s mother and even dressed like her.
Yep. I have one that lives 30 minutes away from me with the same 1st name as me also. I've never actually met her but I have had people ask me if I worked in a couple of different places ever since I was 18 (34 now). She also is the complete opposite of me she butts into everyone's business and is a b***h. Lately she has been causing a lot of issues with other chicks and their families badly enough that I have gotten a couple of threatening messages from 2 different people that backed off once they realized they had the wrong girl.
I've always gotten that "you look just like...." my whole life. This is probably why. I'm very ordinary looking.
well their outlook depends from the state their soul is in - guess all seven still look quite different
I once met someone who looked almost exactly like my dad, even down to the clothes he wore..it was SO weird!!
I don't believe this. I've read too many articles that tell me human distinctiveness is also a function of DNA content outside of genes, and that while the possible combination of genes isn't infinite, it is a much larger number than would support this fact.
Foxxy, you sound like a great mother and a person with a big heart. That would surely show up in the way you physically shine. I know you were joking, but I wanted to say I appreciate your thoughtfulness anyways.
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Probably!?? Horsefeathers!The likelihood of someone looking like like you in all 8 facial aspects are 1 in a trillion! The chance of a "Doppelganger" (someone who looks exactly like you) is 1 in 136!
Look like you, the chances of them looking and having the same names as you... If you find someone like that you should also try your luck at the Lotto
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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.
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.
The founders of Adidas (Adi Dassler) and Puma (Rudolf Dassler) are brothers.
..and their HQs are literally next door to each other in Germany.
That most of the oxygen on earth doesn’t come from trees. It’s comes from plankton in the ocean
Distance from USA to Russia 4 kilometers
This fact is always amusing.
President Coolidge got sent a raccoon for Thanksgiving one year, but instead of eating it, he granted it a pardon because it was "cute"
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.
Jack the Ripper was still active when Nintendo was founded
There isn’t a single bridge across the amazon river.
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!
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)
Orcas are a natural predator to moose
You can fit all the planets in our solar system touching end to end between Earth and the moon.
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.
Not cool for the people who had their birthday between the 03 and 13/09/1752 ...
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
The Ethiopian calendar is seven years behind the rest of the world. Edit; yeah guys it's still 2013 there
A little heads-up guys: 2020 is gonna be one helluva year!! Be prepared!
One ten inch pizza is more pizza than two seven inch pizzas.
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.
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.
A typical cumulus cloud actually weighs 1.1 million pounds (498,951 kg)
Let's say it is 500,000 kg. In light of the variable weights that's precise enough.
No matter where you touch a turtle on its body shell or otherwise it can feel it.
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.
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
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!
Sharks are older than trees, sharks date back 450 million years, trees 350 million years
So for at least 100 million years sharks could not hide behind a tree :D
The entire state of Wyoming only has 2 escalators.
The 10th president of the US, John Tyler (1790-1862), has 2 living grandchildren.
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.
The Holy Roman Empire still existed when the US was founded.
Disney Is the Second-Largest Buyer of Explosives in the World
The day Michael Jackson's hair caught on fire was the exact middle of his life, to the day.
A bunch of pissed of Scots who hated the way England played rugby is why we have the quarterback position in American football.
The combined weight of all the ants on the planet is greater than all the humans.
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.
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”
On average Mercury is the closest planet to Saturn.
In a room of just 23 people there’s a 50-50 chance of at least two people having the same birthday
How many of the Bored Pandas have a birthday falling on 1st May?
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"
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!
The Unicorn was picked because it was believed to be the natural enemy of the lion - the national animal of England
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"
This - in a nutshell - is the reason we are probably better off with female leaders, I think.
An octopus has blue blood
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.
The previous owner of the company Segway died from driving a Segway off a cliff
There used to be a species of parrot native to what is now Kentucky and Tennessee.
The US government kidnapped and experimented on its own population
Maine is the closet US state to the continent of Africa.
There was a week in American history where Tim Allen had the #1 film, tv show, and book.
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.
There are several variations, it depends on where you are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_sign
There are more tigers in captivity in America than in the wild
The US and Russian military employed dolphins as part of their marines.
Pumpkins are rarer than diamonds in Minecraft.
The average amount of arms humans have is less than 2
One person missing one arm lowers the average by a tiny tiny amount but still brings it below 2.
A Russian luxury SUV Manufacturer attempted and failed to use whale penis skin for their SUV interiors.
A barnacle has a penis up to 10 times the length of its body.
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.
The average density of the universe is 1 proton in 3 cubic meters and the average temperature is 2.73 kelvin.
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.
One of the largest stadiums in terms of crowd seating in the world is located in North Korea
In his 19 year career in the NBA,Shaq only ever made one 3-pointer.
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.
Very informative and makes me want to look into some of these facts in more detail.
I leave the room to get something, and as soon as I get out, I forget it. this is also a gift...
Very cool, I can already imagine myself throwing some of these facts into conversations :D
I hope that the key word in your comment is "some".
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First couple of these posts were good, the rest are .... Please Bored Panda.
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.
Very informative and makes me want to look into some of these facts in more detail.
I leave the room to get something, and as soon as I get out, I forget it. this is also a gift...
Very cool, I can already imagine myself throwing some of these facts into conversations :D
I hope that the key word in your comment is "some".
Load More Replies... First couple of these posts were good, the rest are .... Please Bored Panda.
