People Are Sharing Mind-Blowing Facts Fit For 5-Year-Olds And Here’s 30 Of The Most Interesting Ones
When I first heard that there are more stars than there are grains of sand on all beaches in the world, I went on a mission to count all the grains out there to see if it’s true. Needless to say, "the world" was the size of my yard and I was five or so. You see where I’m going.
The truth is, kids are naturally curious and always ready to soak up the info they cannot entirely grasp. Tell ‘em about the Bermuda Triangle, and I guarantee they will be pulling all-nighters to solve the biggest puzzle on the planet.
So when one Redditor posted the question “What are some cool facts to tell a 5-year-old?" on r/AskReddit, people rolled up their sleeves. 1,400 comments later, the replies are in, and honestly, some of these may work on adults too.
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When they die, ants release pheromones attracting other ants to come and carry their dead bodies away to their graveyards.
IIRC if you were to douse a living ant with said pheromone it would end up being carried off to the graveyard anyway, despite it still being alive.
A group of zebras is called a dazzle and a group of giraffes is called a journey
Otters sometimes hold hands to sleep when in the water, so that they don't drift apart when floating in the sea
Kids are naturally curious as they have that thirst for exploring how things work in life. No wonder some of these hard-to-believe facts can seriously blow their minds.
It turns out that not only is being curious a valuable trait on its own, it also contributes to academic achievement. This research has shown that cultivation of curiosity in children is linked to later aptitude in science.
And this 2018 study has shown that the more curious the child, the more likely they may be to perform better in school—regardless of economic background.
Dogs can tell when your coming home by how much of your scent is left in the house if you have a daily routine
You're more likely to be bitten by a shark AND struck by lightning than win the lottery.
A single little brown bat can eat up to 1000 mosquitoes in a single hour.
Bored Panda reached out to Kathy Kinsner, the Senior Manager of Parenting Resources at ZERO TO THREE, which brings leaders in the fields of medicine, mental health, and social science to work on a wide range of issues impacting young children and their families.
She has shared some of her insights about the curious minds of children and what parents can do to nurture the hunger for the world around. “The more curious children are, the better they do academically in reading and math once they’re in school,” Kathy explained. Moreover, two traits, initiative and curiosity, are actually goals of early childhood education. Kathy said that these two are the essential qualities of life-long learners.
Astronomer here! Clap your hands once, and then clap them again a second later. The two claps were actually done about 30,000 miles apart thanks to the Earth's motion in space!
The smell of rain is caused by gases released by bacteria in the earth in reaction to rainwater. It's called petrichor, petri meaning stone.
Sharks don't actually like eating people (we apparently taste bad to them), that's why most shark bites stop there. Most sharks bite people out of curiosity or because the person unwittingly provoked the shark
And as all young children are driven to learn more about the world as they “examine every bug and blade of grass when they’re out for a walk, turn a light switch on and off to see what happens,” parents should do what they can to encourage the natural sense of wonder.
Kathy adds that setting “some limits to make sure kids are safe (and that our living space isn’t complete chaos)” is fine, but other than that, just go for it.
If you make an animal sound at the animal, chances are it will answer you back.
Turkeys are a good example, they answer almost every time. Sheep are quite regular as well.
When it comes to the endless streams of “Why?” that can sometimes be quite exhausting, Kathy suggests that parents be glad they’re asking and “know that this stage won’t last forever.”
It’s great if you can slow down and give an answer, but sometimes, when you don’t have the luxury, you might say: “Hold that thought. Let me pay the parking attendant and I’ll answer you when we’re on the highway.” Another way is to reply to “Why?” with an answer like: “What do you think?” or “How can we find out?”
Octopuses have 3 hearts Plus they have 8 arms, not tentacles And they have blue blood
Pluto hasn't completed a lap around the sun since it was discovered
Elephants have special graveyards and mourn their fellow elephants when they die.
Birds like chickens descended from dinosaurs. Watch them look at their chicken nuggets in absolute awe
wait until they realize that the dino shaped chicken nuggets complete an evolutionary cycle :D
When you look up at the night sky and see a star, it's because a little particle of light called a photon shot out of the star and traveled across the vast distance of space and time to land safely in your eye. You're catching a little bit of ancient star whenever you see one
And some of those stars already died thousands of years ago, but you are just seeing their light now.
There are butterflies that mimic the pattern of Monarch butterflies to avoid being eaten by predators because Monarch butterflies are poisonous and predators avoid eating them. In nature, this is called mimicry.
The oxygen that we breathe is the same oxygen that has been around since ancient times. In other words, the air you breathe may very well be the same air breathed by a dinosaur
Oxygen has been around for a very long time and will never run out (well not until the planet burns up via heat death due to an expanding sun). Breathable air for humans though? Probably about 50,000 years the way we’re going. We’ll be the only species to make ourselves extinct.
Brocolli is man-made. It was bred out of wild cabbage by human beings. It didn't appear naturally until human beings created it
Brocolli, cabbage, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, romanesco, kale and kohl rabi have all been bred from wild cabbage.
There are species of jellyfish that are thought by scientists to be immortal. The only way they can die is by disease or injury.
Some ants can learn to farm aphids for their honey as humans farm cows for milk
Yes! they move the Aphids to the nicest part of the plant so the aphids will be happy and produce
There are numbers below zero
Do most people, even children, really find the existence of negative numbers amazing and mind-blowing? Wow, wait until we start talking about fractions.
A person gives off more heat than a person-sized piece of the sun.
We will never experience tomorrow as by the time it's "tomorrow", it will be today
By the standards of the universe,you are both stronger and weaker than millions of things
Every point of light (about 3000 in total) in that photo is a galaxy. The photo was taken by Hubble and it only covered a patch of sky the size of a tennis ball held at arms length. Imagine how many more galaxies there are out there. Blows your mind really.
Dogs don't just have a great sense of smell, they can actually smell each individual ingredient. So, a dog can't just smell that cookie you're eating, they can tell you what it's made of too. That's why police tracking dogs are so clever.
Surely they could help contestants in Masterchef during the replication challenges
Everyone was once the youngest person on earth
Cats and kittens can fit their bodies almost anywhere they can squeeze their heads into, so be sure to exercise the utmost care and caution when kitten-proofing your house.
Their adorable little heads can fit just about anywhere!
A million seconds is a little over 11 days, but a billion seconds is more than 31 years.
People have less than 2 arms on average
LEGO is the world’s leading tire manufacturer.
Sloths can't defecate off a tree, they have to climb down - but due to their slowness in eating too, they don't have to very often
Animals and people with white fur and red eyes are called albinos. Albinism is a condition caused by the lack of pigmentation, resulting in extremely pale skin, white hair, and red/purple eyes. Red/purple eyes are themselves the result of seeing blood vessels in the back of the eye.
Your body has more bones in it than the body of an adult because your bones haven't fused together yet.
As children our bodies have more bones than an adult because they haven't fused together to create your full skeleton. Your knee caps are actually cartilage when you're first born, if they were already bone we'd blow our knees out while learning how to walk.
Many rodents, (mice, rats, moles) front teeth are always growing...
Ancient Egypt was more ancient to the Romans than Ancient Rome is to us
The time gap between the Great Pyramid (Cheops) and Cleopatra was about 2500 years while Cleopatra died 2050 years ago.
It takes 8 minutes for light from the sun to reach the earth. So when we look at the sun, we're actually seeing how it was 8 minutes ago.
The core of the Earth is hotter than the surface of the Sun.
That ants belong to a community that helps each other survive through sheer teamwork.
Spiders' webs when woven is stronger than steel.
Every (if I can remember) 7 years your cells regenerate meaning every 7 years you basically have a completely different body.
There's a disease know as Münchmeyer's disease, wherein the afflicted's damaged muscle tissue is 'healed' with skeleton tissue, eventually culminating in the afflicted's muscle system being converted into a secondary skeletal system, hence it's a common name, second skeleton disease. It's completely incurable and largely untreatable. & since it symptoms usually don't appear until the age of 10, you could have it & we wouldn't know for another 5 years.
Thanks to a couple of quantum mechanical things that most adults would have problems comprehending, let alone a 5-year-old, it's entirely possible for what's know as a 'hard vacuum' (a place where no matter can exist) to spontaneously form anywhere in the universe. Once formed, it would propagate at lightspeed until it destroyed all matter in the universe
People who have it have to be very careful to not bump into things or get injured.
Octopus have part of their brain all over their body!
They have a cluster of nerves in each tentacle (like a tiny brain), they can control each tentacle independently or all together.
There is a number so big you can't even use the entire universe worth of atoms to write it.
Snails can have up to 25000 teeth
A lot of dinosaurs had feathers, and birds are descended from dinosaurs. Because hair and feathers break down much more easily than bones, it's possible many dinosaurs had fur/feathers, but because all that remains of them are bones, archaeologists can only speculate what they looked like. There's a very interesting post talking about this somewhere on the internet, I recommend looking it up. According to that post, our modern conception and depictions of dinosaurs is like if scientists in the future tried to recreate the dogs and cats of today based solely on their bones, without any fur.
Slight correction. Bipedal Saurischian dinosaurs, especially theropods (under which birds are categorized) had feathers. This would include well known species such as the T-Rex and velociraptor, And most related species. Whilst quadrupedal Ornithischian dinosaurs,such as stegosurus, and aykylosaurus, did not.
Bats never leave their young behind. They climb on the mother when finding a new place to roost.
Flies only sleep 75 minutes a day.
Some pigeons can make a whistle with their feathers that can alert an entire flock that there’s danger. What’s more is that there’s a specific sound and amplitude and tone to it, it’s not random
Hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly backward
Elephants cannot jump.
Queen bees are created by bee larvae being fed royal jelly.
Polar bears don't really have white fur. Their fur is actually translucent, but due to the way it reflects light, it appears white. (This may or may not be true of all white-furred/white-haired mammals, I'm not sure.)
Flamingos get their pink colour from shrimp they eat
There are bugs that poop on your eyebrow
On your eyelashes too. There are three mite species that live on your face.
Starfish actually walk along the ocean floor, so slow you can't see it, and they have no brains.
There are more possible games of chess than there are atoms in the observable universe
Thunder is the sound of lightning but because the light is faster than the sound they take place at separate times
Not strictly true. You can't hear lightning. The sound is the air coming together where the lightning has just been.
The reason your veins look blue but blood is red is because it's harder for red light waves to travel through solid objects than blue/purple waves. (Optional: that's why you can wear a red bra under a white shirt and you can't see it.)
The weight of all the ants in the world is greater than the weight off all the humans in the world.
Horses can't puke.
Sea turtles live 200 years.
Every E in “Mercedes” is pronounced differently
Mammals have a turning point in sleep patterns. Smaller mammals sleep longer and it gets shorter up until about the size of a black bear, then it starts to get longer again.
Sharks can sense the location of other creatures via their muscle movement
Some sharks also can’t ever stop swimming because otherwise they can’t get water through their gills and they’ll suffocate
You can fit all the planets tip to tip in the distance between the earth and the moon
And their actual distances apart are quite staggering (relatively speaking of course)
Tigers are cats. Domestic House cats are cousins of the tiger.
Also, hyenas are more closely related to cats than dogs.
Many common household plants and flowers are poisonous, such as hosta, buttercups, azalea, etc.
I don't know why but the fact that buttercups are poisonous makes me sad.
Lizards can make their tail fall off, and if they lose their tail, it will regrow.
