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50 Facts That Might Mess With Your Knowledge Of The World
Tomatoes may not be vegetables, but did you know that pumpkins are berries? While this sounds like the sort of factoid your older brother would tell you so you’d embarrass yourself at some point down the line, it’s actually absolutely true. As it turns out, there are a lot of facts about the world that are exactly like that.
So when one netizen asked the internet “What’s a fact about the world that sounds totally fake but is 100% true?” we gathered the best responses out there. So get comfortable as you scroll through, upvote and memorize your favorites and be sure to share your own thoughts and ideas in the comments down below.
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#1
Cows have best friends and get stressed when they're separated. Honestly more emotional intelligence than some people.
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#3
Magnolias are one of the oldest flowering plants, with a lineage that dates back over 95 million years to the age of the dinosaurs. At that time, bees had not yet evolved, so magnolias developed a pollination strategy that relied on beetles, which are still their primary pollinators today.
#4
Most of what makes human life so hard is human made mass delusion.
Edit: It's funny how so many came to argue, only proving my point.
#5
T-Rex lived closer in time to the cell phone than it did to stegosaurus.
Sharks have been in the ocean on earth for longer than Saturn has had rings.
#8
Wood is one of the rarest things in the galaxy. Much rarer and more valuable than any precious gems or metals.
#9
Cleopatra was alive closer to our own modern times than to the building of the pyramids in Egypt.
#17
The first BBC radio broadcast in a foreign language was a broadcast to Egypt in Arabic.
Air France used to be the aviation arm of the French postal service.
American Express used to deliver packages.
The Portuguese were the first European sailors to make contact with the Indians and the Japanese.
Speaking of the Portuguese, the Portuguese border is the oldest, unchanged border in Europe.
#19
The human body is estimated to contain more bacterial cells than human cells, with trillions of microorganisms living on and inside you.
#21
I had some reason to google the French Foreign Legion yesterday, because it couldn’t possibly still be a thing, but it is, and it’s still old school. The only way to sign up is to literally knock on the door of a recruitment center in France.
#22
The last civil war pension was paid in December of 2020.
Helen Viola Jackson, lived until December 16, 2020, to the age of 101. At 17, she married 93-year-old Union veteran James Bolin in 1936 during the Great Depression. Their marriage was arranged so she could receive his pension, a fact she kept secret for most of her life.
#24
90% of the trash floating around the oceans of the world come from 10 rivers in Asia and Africa.
#25
There are three candidates for the tallest mountain on earth, depending on how you define the tallest.
* Highest elevation above sea level: Everest (Nepal/Tibet) at 8,848.86 m / 29,032 ft
* Tallest from base to peak: Mauna Kea (Hawai`i) at 10,205 m / 33,481 ft
* Tallest from earth's centre to peak: Chimborazo (Ecuador) at 6,384.4 km (3,967.1 mi) vs Everest at 6,382.3 km (3,965.8 mi).
#28
Running your hand on stainless steel removed smells from your hands. Onions. Garlic. Metal rust. Try it!
#29
We are closer in time to Shakespeare than he was to the time people spoke in Old English. Yet half the English teachers in the US tell kids “Shakespeare wrote in Old English.” Drives me insane.
#30
The earth is missing a giant mass of itself which - after divesting itself of this mass in a collision with another celestial object - became our moon.
#31
There’s water reservoirs located over 400 miles beneath the Earths surface that hold 3x more water than all of Earths oceans combined.
#34
Bismuth was formerly understood to be the element with the highest atomic mass whose nuclei do not spontaneously decay. However, in 2003 it was found to be *very slightly* radioactive. The metal's only primordial isotope, bismuth-209 (^(209)Bi ), undergoes alpha decay with a half-life roughly *a billion times longer than the estimated age of the universe.*
So if you have, say, 1 gram of bismuth -- a cube about 0.5 cm on a side -- you will get approximately 105 atoms decaying *per year.* That's one alpha particle every three and a half days. BUT: alpha particles have very little penetrating power -- a sheet of paper or human skin completely stops them, and bismuth is a heavy element with far greater absorption than either of those -- only those decays which occur very near the surface will ever be emitted outside the sample: all the rest will be trapped inside. So while it is technically *radioactive*, the actual *radiation* is ridiculously low.
#36
That octopuses have three hearts always blows my mind. Feels like something a kid would make up on the spot but nope, completely real. They’re just built different.
#39
Whales share a common ancestor with wolves, thus are more closely related to wolves than other marine animals.
#41
Although exercise is necessary, we actually build muscle when resting, especially while sleeping.
#49
When I was in high school, I woke up one morning to a bright sunshiney day with birds chirping. I opened the door to my room and went across the house and it was dark clouds and heavy rain literally on the other side of my house, was surreal. No one believes me when I tell them that this really happened.
#51
The oldest ever U.S. secretary of defense and the youngest ever secretary of defense… were the same person.
#52
If the history of the planet earth was laid out as a football field, with one end zone being the planets beginning and the other being today, human history would fit into one blade of grass at the end of the field.
#54
1 million seconds is 11.5 days. 1 billion is over 31 years. A trillion seconds…..over 31,000 years.
#55
* Strawberry: Not a berry.
* Raspberry: Not a berry.
* Pumpkin: A berry.
* Starfish: Not a fish.
* Jellyfish: Not a fish.
* Seahorse: A fish.
#58
The interference patterns in the wifi signals inside your home can be used to track your movements in the room.
#59
The distance from the equator to the North Pole is exactly 10 million meters.
If the Earth were a marble with a diameter of 1 inch, it's surface would appear as smooth as glass.
#60
Remember John Tyler, the 10th president of the United States? Served 1841 to 1845? His grandson passed away earlier this year.
#61
Lake Superior contains enough water to cover all of the continents of North and South America to a depth of 1 foot.
#62
There was a map drawn in 1513 that had l has an accurate depiction of the land features of Antarctica without the ice. Antarctica wasn't "discovered" until 1820 and most of those features were not discovered until a high tech scan in 1997.
#63
On a geological timescale, all coal was basically formed at the same time (give or take a couple million years).
#64
The Roman Empire existed at the same time as the following empires: Macedonian, Greek, Carthaginian, Seleucid, Persian, Ethiopian, Malian, Ottoman, Incan, Mayan, and Aztec. It actually didn’t officially end until about 25-30 years before Christopher Columbus set sail.
#65
The fact that record players work by tracing sound waves translated on the record sounds like cartoon logic.
#67
Hawaii is tied with Alaska as being the coldest state. Neither has ever recorded a temperature above 100°.
#68
Lean over the planet, peel North America off the map like a magnetic sticker, and slap it on the Moon. It would cover two-thirds.
#69
To calm hyperinflation, Brazil invented a completely fictional currency. Everything was listed in the actual currency and the virtual currency. Peoples pay slips also had the virtual currency alongside the real currency. The actual currency would go down in value every day, but the virtual currency remained the same.
It worked. Hyperinflation slowed down and one day they made the virtual currency a real currency. Which is why their currency is called the “Brazilian Real”.
#70
Statistically speaking no one is likely to replicate a random card shuffle of a deck of 52 cards in their lifetime.
#72
The entire world's human population could fit in Texas and every man woman and child would have ~1000 square feet to themselves.
#74
There’s orders of magnitude more molecules of water in a glass than glasses of water on earth.
#75
Electric signal, the power behind electricity travels nearly at the speed of light. The electrons in wires mostly travel along the surface of the wire and only move a few centimeters an hour. Almost all the electricity you ever used in your house is mostly electrons sitting in your wires, moving back and forth really, really fast.
#79
The Great Lakes of the American Midwest in the current formation are about as old as the oldest continuously inhabited cities like Aleppo (6,000 year old). Whereas Lake Baikal is about as old as when the Arabian Peninsula broke off from Africa (30 million years old).
Cut me some slack on the precision of the numbers.
The Great Lakes are mere puddles after the most recent spring melt.
#80
If your finger was the size of the earth and you were feeling the planet’s surface, the human finger is sensitive enough to feel and distinguish the difference between the cars and houses.
#81
We are overdue for a magnetic pole reversal and the pole movement is currently accelerating. This could result in the earth itself rotating around 90 degrees from its current axis, pretty much terraformimg the planet through enormous tsunamis and tectonic chaos.
