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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.
RELATED:
#2
I was once the youngest person on the planet.
#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.
#6
It was 66 years between the wright brothers first flight and landing on the moon.
#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.
#11
Oxford University was founded 332 years BEFORE the founding of the Aztec Empire.
Barbara Hill 1 week ago
According to Guinness World Records and UNESCO, al-Qarawiyyin University (also written as Al-Karaouine) is “the oldest existing institutional of higher learning in the world.” founded in 859 A D by a woman ,Fatima.
#12
Norway is separated from North Korea by one country: Russia.
#14
The number of vertebrae in a giraffe's neck is the same as in a humans - 7.
Judy Reynolds 1 week ago
The only mammals with non 7 neck vetebrae are manatees and one of the sloths.
#15
Less than 1% of the atoms that you were composed of at birth are still there at age 70.
#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.
Pa Pa Panda 1 week ago
Don't tell a certain European despot about the border fact! God bless and protect Ukraine!
Pieter LeGrande 1 week ago
Speaking of the Portuguese, how do we know that Japanese and Indians didn't visit Europe earlier. After all there are reports of Chinese fleet visiting east Africa. Not impossible that some may have ventured further.
Gebidozo 1 week ago
There are no records of the Japanese visiting Europe prior to the Europeans visiting Japan. I’m not sure about Indians in Europe. At any rate, Europeans were in India almost 2000 years before those Portuguese sailors - Alexander of Macedonia and his army. Maybe they emphasize the “sailor” part, specifically. As for the Chinese, they were in East Africa for sure. They also visited Constantinople, the capital of Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, which is technically in Europe, in the Tang dynasty era (7th-10th centuries AD), forgot when exactly.
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Scott Rackley 1 week ago
Portugal is also in the oldest treaty between two countries in the world. It was signed between Portugal and England in 1386. It is still in force.
BeesEelsAndPups 1 week ago
Maybe it's the oldest treaty that is still in effect. But the oldest surviving record of a peace treaty between two nations was the Treaty of Kadesh, between the Egyptian and Hittite empires from around the 12th century BC following a battle of the same name. Ramesses II was the Pharaoh at the time, but I don't remember the Hittite king, sorry. The actual history of the Battle was fascinating. It's been two decades since I learned it, but from what I remember the Ramesses sent four divisions north to take Kadesh as it was a major trading hub in modern day Syria or Lebanon (don't remember exactly). The Hittites allowed two "spies" to be captured by the Egyptians, but those spies told their captors that the Hittite army encampment was far to the north of the city. When Ramesses sent in his forces it was an ambush. They drove the Egyptians out of the city, but then they got overconfident. Believing they Egyptians to have been beaten, they allowed them to regather their forces.
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Trashy Panda 1 week ago
Amex got into financial services when they started selling money orders
#18
Moose can dive 20 feet deep to graze on the bottom of lakes.
Multa Nocte 1 week ago
Wiki says: " Orcas are the moose's only confirmed marine predator as they have been known to prey on moose and other deer swimming between islands out of North America's Northwest Coast. However, such kills are rare and a matter of opportunity, as moose are not a regular part of the orca diet."
#19
The human body is estimated to contain more bacterial cells than human cells, with trillions of microorganisms living on and inside you.
#20
All the ants 🐜 in the world weigh more than all the people in the world!
#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.
Multa Nocte 1 week ago
"You must travel at your own expense to continental France, in Europe. There, you can be enlisted in the Legion in its two preselection centers (Paris and Aubagne). Both of these centers are open all year round and all day long, 24/7/365, even on weekends and holidays, and at night. That means you can enlist in the Legion every day of the year there. In addition, there exist also information and recruiting offices (smaller recruiting posts called PILE) in France, which are open between Monday and Friday, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. (09:00 to 17:00). Once you are allowed to enlist — which refers to once your passport/ID card and clothes are taken away — free accommodation, free food, and free clothing are immediately provided to you by the Legion."
#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).
BeesEelsAndPups 1 week ago
The tallest mountain in the solar system though is Olympus Mons 25 km (16 miles). The second tallest is my belly when I lay down :(
#26
A teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh about a billion tons.
Stardust she/her 1 week ago
Did you know that there’s a subset of neutron stars called magnetars and they spin millions of times a second which winds up their magnetic field so much that just by going near it, the field will shred your body. Also another fun fact, the material neutron stars are made of is called ‘nuclear pasta’ because that’s actually what the inside of a neutron star looks like
#27
Data Centers now consume about 5% of the world’s total energy .
#28
There’s water reservoirs located over 400 miles beneath the Earths surface that hold 3x more water than all of Earths oceans combined.
#29
Running your hand on stainless steel removed smells from your hands. Onions. Garlic. Metal rust. Try it!
#30
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.
Callum Young 1 week ago
Not if they have an actual English degree. Or, in Old English "Nese gif hīe ānlīepe Englisc grād habban."
#31
Of all the humans that have ever lived throughout history, about 7% are still alive.
Jeremy James 1 week ago
Before I learned this, I thought it was pretty special to be living in the End Times. Turns out, everybody is here. It would have been much more unique and rare to have been born any time else.
#32
Australia is wider than the moon. 🌙.
#33
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.
#34
There are, in fact, Native Antarcticans - 11 people were born there.
#35
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.
#38
Anne Frank and Martin Luther King, Jr were the same age.
LakotaWolf (she/her) 1 week ago
I think what OP is trying to say is that they were born in the same year (1929.)
#40
Whales share a common ancestor with wolves, thus are more closely related to wolves than other marine animals.
LakotaWolf (she/her) 1 week ago
So THAT'S why I love water and swimming so much! Explains a lot!
#41
Although exercise is necessary, we actually build muscle when resting, especially while sleeping.
iseefractals 1 week ago
Muscle growth is the result of damage. Lifting to, or near the point of failure causes microscopic tears to form in muscle tissue, your body responds to this damage by increasing muscle tissue as it repairs the damage, which yes occurs during periods of rest. However, strength can be increased independent of muscle growth, essentially the training of brain and nervous system to more fully, and efficiently utilized. Your brain learns to fire more motor units, release more calcium and convert slow twitch muscle fibers to fast twitch muscle fibers. Pound for pound, mountain climbers are among the strongest people in the world.
#43
-40 degrees Celsius is the same as -40 degrees Fahrenheit.
#45
Crocodiles are more closely related to birds than they are to lizards. .
Pieter LeGrande 1 week ago
And both descended from dinosaurs. And the aggressive, cyclist-attacking magpie behind my rear fence is descended from the T.Rex
#46
Nearly 30% of the weight of your 💩 is bacteria.
iseefractals 1 week ago
It varies actually, "wet" weight is between 25-75% bacteria, while "dry" weight is 25-54%
#47
The actual sea level varies by up to 90 meters in various places from the mean sea level.
Zig Zag Wanderer 1 week ago
It's not really a static thing, what with two major (and many minor) tides and everything. It gets 'heaped up' in places, too. And it's constantly sloshing around because of our rotation and winds.
#48
Water, as a total of Earth's mass, makes up less than 1%.
Jeremy James 1 week ago
If you scaled the Earth down to 30cm across, the size of a classroom globe, the total volume of water would be about 1 tbsp.
#49
Abraham Lincoln and The Samurai Shogunate *Could* have sent each other a Fax.
BeesEelsAndPups 1 week ago (edited)
Not only "could" they, but they DID!! Lincoln was known to fax Yoshinobu pictures of his b*m. To which the Shogun would would respond with a crude drawing of a phallus and the letters "OMFG ROFL".
#50
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.
Janissary35680 1 week ago
When Kanyak (GSDxDobe who hated getting wet) was a puppy he went to the back door one day to be let out. "It's raining " I said as I opened the door, knowing he wouldn't go out. He backed away into the house, paused a second, then ran to the *front* door and gave it a scratch with his paw. Laughing, I opened the door. The look on his face was "Oh shıt, you mean it's raining here too?"🐕🌧️🌧️
#51
The oldest ever U.S. secretary of defense and the youngest ever secretary of defense… were the same person.
Geoffrey Scott 1 week ago
And both were involved in splendid little conflicts, Vietnam and Iraq war. And threw honorable man under a bus(Colin Powell).
#52
Everyone has kicked a pregnant woman.
#53
1 million seconds is 11.5 days. 1 billion is over 31 years. A trillion seconds…..over 31,000 years.
#55
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.
#56
The interference patterns in the wifi signals inside your home can be used to track your movements in the room.
#57
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.
Ian Webling 1 week ago
The distance from the equator to the North Pole is exactly 10,002,000 meters. The French made a tiny miscalculation when measuring the distance.
#58
Remember John Tyler, the 10th president of the United States? Served 1841 to 1845? His grandson passed away earlier this year.
Barbara Hill 1 week ago
The last one, two lived to this century. The other died in 2020 at 95 this one was 96. there are still the great grands.
#59
* Strawberry: Not a berry.
* Raspberry: Not a berry.
* Pumpkin: A berry.
* Starfish: Not a fish.
* Jellyfish: Not a fish.
* Seahorse: A fish.
Multa Nocte 1 week ago
Or you could watch No Such Thing As A Fish: "The title for No Such Thing as a Fish comes from a fact in the QI TV series. In the third episode of the eighth series, also known as "Series H", an episode on the theme of "Hoaxes" reported that after a lifetime studying fish, the biologist Stephen Jay Gould concluded that there was no such thing as a fish. He reasoned that although there are many sea creatures, most of them are not closely related to each other. For example, a salmon is more closely related to a camel than it is to a hagfish."
#60
Lake Superior contains enough water to cover all of the continents of North and South America to a depth of 1 foot.
#62
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.
#63
The fact that record players work by tracing sound waves translated on the record sounds like cartoon logic.
Zig Zag Wanderer 1 week ago
Organising bits of metal on a plastic tape with a magnet sounds less cartoonish? I'm not even going to talk about digital recording ....
#64
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.
Zig Zag Wanderer 1 week ago
Sheesh! New Zealand still doesn't make it onto all maps. And I'm not going to mention the missing Tasmanias....
#65
Hawaii is tied with Alaska as being the coldest state. Neither has ever recorded a temperature above 100°.
SleepyVampire 1 week ago
Yes but also no. They've both reached 100F, but it was before they were officially states.
#66
On a geological timescale, all coal was basically formed at the same time (give or take a couple million years).
Spidercat 1 week ago
Yep. Because the bacteria required to rot down trees didn't exist until way after trees existed. So for a period of time, tree wood was just building up on the surface and not being broken down...it just fossilised itself. This is why we will never replace the coal we consume for power. Once it's gone... it's gone for good.
#67
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.
#68
Statistically speaking no one is likely to replicate a random card shuffle of a deck of 52 cards in their lifetime.
Zig Zag Wanderer 1 week ago
Statistically, no single shuffle will.be repeated in human history.
#69
Coelacanths are more closely related to humans than they are to sharks.
#70
The Shoe Crab has been around long enough for our solar system to make 2 galactic cycles!
#71
The entire world's human population could fit in Texas and every man woman and child would have ~1000 square feet to themselves.
#72
That you drive on a parkway and park on a driveway.
#73
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”.
LakotaWolf (she/her) 1 week ago
lol, false on the last sentence. A form of Brazilian currency called the "real" (pronounced more like "hhhe-ahl" or "hey-awl", not "reel") was around in the 1700s. It's from the Portuguese word "real", meaning "royal" or "regal", not "real" like "it's real, dude".
#74
There’s orders of magnitude more molecules of water in a glass than glasses of water on earth.
Stardust she/her 1 week ago
250ml of water —> 0.01moles—> 6.022*10^21 molecules of water. Someone else can please calculate the number of glasses of water on earth
#75
Maine is the closest US state to Africa 🌍.
#77
Joe Biden was born closer to Abraham Lincoln's inauguration than Biden was to his own.
#78
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.
#79
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.
Zig Zag Wanderer 1 week ago (edited)
Hmmmm.... Needs a bit of clarification. The electrons move at a few cm per hour? But move back and forth really fast? At only 50 Hz or so? At nearly the speed of light? This is confused. (ignore the fact that the speed of light in a wire is essentially zero. You mean the universal speed limit, that light cannot exceed.)
#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.
Zig Zag Wanderer 1 week ago (edited)
Not a chance. If the earth was the size of a billiard ball, it would be smoother. I can't feel any indentations on a billiard ball.
#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.
Lola Rocksmith 1 week ago
It's not the Earth spinning around, it's actually just the magnetic north and south poles swapping
What do you think ?
Tucker Cahooter 1 week ago (edited)
What we really need is a time comparison linking Cleopatra, woolly mammoths, sharks, pyramids, cell phones, Oxford University, Aztec Empire, first flight and moon landing, so we can knock it over all in one go
Apatheist Account2 1 week ago
Someone had a sense of humour failure reading all of these. Why the downvotes on what are clearly jokes? Have a bad weekend? Tottenham Hotspur fan, perhaps...?
Tucker Cahooter 1 week ago (edited)
What we really need is a time comparison linking Cleopatra, woolly mammoths, sharks, pyramids, cell phones, Oxford University, Aztec Empire, first flight and moon landing, so we can knock it over all in one go
Apatheist Account2 1 week ago
Someone had a sense of humour failure reading all of these. Why the downvotes on what are clearly jokes? Have a bad weekend? Tottenham Hotspur fan, perhaps...?
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