The beautiful thing about life is that we all have completely unique experiences. Sure, it may not feel that way when you open a birthday card and pretend not to see the money inside or realize you’re not the only one to end searches with “Reddit” to find the most honest results online. But when it comes to the knowledge we acquire throughout our lives, we all have some niche fun facts floating around our brains that the average person has no need to know.
Below, you’ll find some of these interesting and bizarre facts that people have been sharing on Reddit, so even more of us can be aware of this information. Have fun scrolling through and learning something new, and don’t bother wondering how people know these facts… Just enjoy the ride!
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Manatees control their buoyancy by farting. Toot toot floaty sea cow.
Opossums are immune to rabies. Immune in the sense that their core body temperature is too low for the virus to live and multiply in their nervous system. They can be bitten and "infected" with the virus, but it won't survive in the animal long enough for it to take hold and make them rabid. They also love to eat ticks, mosquitoes(especially mosquito larvae), and even garden slugs and snails. All the general bugs that we consider pests, they happily eat. They may be ugly as sin, but having one regularly visit your yard at night keeps away the real pests. If you live in a more metropolitan area, then their mere presence at night will generally also keep raccoons away, since it would be easier for a racoon to simply walk across the street or a few houses down instead of worrying about dealing with another nocturnal scavenger. Opossums are a mutant rat looking blessing in disguise. They're also not hostile to humans at all, unlike raccoons.
The national animal of Scotland is a Unicorn.
Do you know the backstory? Mythologically, the only creature that can defeat a Lion is a Unicorn. The national animal of England is the Lion.
No person born blind has ever developed schizophrenia.
you’ve got short term memory tho, do you just forget that they’re driving you nuts or am i just missing a brain cell?
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Conversely, profoundly deaf people with the condition have reported seeing hands signing paranoid messages to them instead of hearing voices.
The very idea of that particular hallucination really freaks me out for some reason.
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I'll check it out. It's true, from a medical research paper in 2013 "Several authors have noted that there are no reported cases of people with schizophrenia who were born blind or who developed blindness shortly after birth, suggesting that congenital or early (C/E) blindness may serve as a protective factor against schizophrenia."
Or something else entirely? It what way would blindness be a productive factor? Like nature or nurture? Just curious.
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What would happen if you were already schizophrenic and then went blind? Would it go away or be worse in that case?
That is so cool! One study was done in Australia in 2018. They think it has to do with the reorganization of the cortex that takes place when someone is born blind or becomes blind early in life. A real clue to the origins of psychosis! For a long time the only causal factors we knew about where a family history, being abused as a child, and the mom getting the flu while pregnant. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3037097/#:~:text=Epidemiological%20studies%20indicate%20that%20maternal,of%20action%20of%20antipsychotic%20drugs.
This is interesting, but I need a source for this information! I did recently read that blind people also get motion sickness, which I had always associated with visual input and balance sensations not tallying, as it were. I found that interesting.
"Because motion sickness does not involve only the eyes, research has shown that people who are blind can still experience "classic" motion sicknes." -American Psychological Society. I'm guessing it's because they still feel themselves moving and it's still affecting their inner ear. I'm positive that if you put someone that is prone to motion sickness on a crazy roller-coaster with a blindfold on, they'd still get sick.
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Maybe its true, but psychosis (schizophrenia is only diagnosed after long term issues with psychosis) does not only involve visual hallusinations, but also auditory and sensory hallusinations. Etc. It's a bit rash to say it's never happened, just because it hasn't been documented.
This sounded unbelievable to me too, but after googling, it seems legit. There has been some (very few) cases of psychosis in blind persons, but not even one properly reported case of schizophrenia. Which is btw very much about auditory hallucinations, except in deaf persons there are cases of floating hands signing or lips forming speech. It is thought that schizophrenia is a disorder of a person's "inner speech" not getting properly filtered in the brain so it is recognized as coming from outside the brain. There's also a connection between schizophrenia, blindness and linguistics; blind persons tend to have speaking patterns that are more focused and less rambling, less associative than people with sight, according to research. And in psychosis, associations REALLY get out of hand. It's all connected, and extremely interesting!
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https://www.spektrum.de/magazin/wie-psychose-und-blindheit-zusammenhaengen/1791278
Interessanter Artikel, aber dadurch, dass er auf deutsch ist können den leider viele hier nicht verstehen.
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Wow, you must have interviewed millions of people ! And checked on millions and millions more around the whole world going back centuries !
Timbob, you are correct. I struggled with writing a comment like yours and couldn't make it sound not snarky so I just upvoted yours. :)
Load More Replies... Probably born with enough on their plate as it is, nature feels they deserve a pass on that one.
how can this be a proper fact, has someone happened to ask all blind born people? I think in a thread like this you should at post references, too
Rather the other way round: No person diagnosed with schizophrenia had been blind from birth.
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I find this fact quite fascinating considering the other senses become stronger with the loss of their sight.
You seem to have missed the part about it being congenital blindness
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So are you saying all the Korean shamans are schizophrenic?
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Some tribes of ancient people used to tie up a goat, whisper their sins to it, then allow it to "accidentally" escape so it would carry their sins away and thus resolve them of guilt.
It was, literally, their "escape goat" and that's where the term scapegoat comes from.
Uhhhhh... no. That doesn't seem consistent with the biblical usage of "scapegoat." RESEARCH: Not entirely wrong, but not accurate. The biblical sacrifice of a pair of goats directs one to be slaughtered, and the other to be sent away into the wilderness. A scapegoat was called "azazal" meaning "appeaser." In the Latin bible, "azazel" was translated as "caper emissarius," or "ambassador goat." Tyndale's bible apparently mistook the meaning of "caper" (goat) and referred to a "capegoat," later extrapolated into "(e)scapegoat." But such a name is merely the product of several translations between cultures, and would be entirely alien to the culture that actually had scapegoats.
A Buttload is an actual unit of measurement for about 126 gallons of wine.
More Iraq veterans have died by their own hand than that of the enemy. This is America.
Dragonflies are the most efficient killers on the planet with a 98% kill rate.
They are also the only insect that can fly backwards and can even fly upside down, they are truly fascinating.
That dead ants produce a pheromone that alerts the other ants that they need to move them to the ant graveyard. If a drop of this pheromone is placed on a live ant, it will take itself to the graveyard and stay there until the pheromone dissipates.
Ohh,so that's why when I put an ant killer dispenser,I observed after about a week that they started to bring out small black "balls". I followed their path and found that they were bringing their dead out from the nest in the wall and gathered them outside in one of the corners nearby. I also saw them bringing out their eggs and moving them to another hole in the wall... couldn't get rid of them yet, but it is fascinating.
If you have a d*ck and you take a pregnancy test and it comes out positive, you might have testicular cancer.
You can duplicate your liver.
JetScreamerBaby:
A liver consists of two distinct lobes. When doctors perform a transplant from living patient, they remove half the donor’s liver and give it to the recipient. Eventually, both patients regrow their missing half of a liver.
When you get a tattoo laser removal, you pee out the ink particles.
I peed radioactive dye for a week and wasn't allowed to use public toilets after a cardiac test to check what damage chemo was doing to my heart. Fun being injected with something it a metal biohazard container by a tech in a hazmat suit. Fun times.
The island of Java has more people than the entirety of Russia. Despite being 170 times smaller in size.
Java population 151.6 million people. Russia population 143.4 million people. Amazing but true.
Elephant penises are prehensile and can move on their own like trunks (I.e. to scratch their belly or as an extra support leg on uneven terrain).
That drain hole at the inside top of a sink is called a porcelator.
Won $1000 on a radio show back in the day for knowing that.
By the time the Aztec empire was founded, Oxford University was as old as the United States is today.
Horny toads can squirt blood from their eyes up to 30 feet.
Just a quick clarification, the photo is correct and the "horny toad" is a lizard not a toad.
Cockroaches will be able to smell when another cockroach dies. If you ever see one in your home, 1) obviously there’s more, but 2) they will come out in droves to look for the dead roach. They don’t “starve out” like mice or weevils, they cannibalize.
We had a roach problem for a bit, we couldn’t afford pest control so I had to handle this s**t myself LMAO certified roach annihilator here.
'Cockroach died in my kitchen' 'So - that's a good thing!' 'Yeah, except for the 500,000 who came for the wake'.
The name of the shape of Pringles crisp/chip is “hyperbolic Paraboloid”
Good name for a heavy metal band. (Hyperbolic Paraboloid, not Pringles. That would be a boy band)
The sun is actually white not yellow/orange. It’s earth atmosphere that shifts the color of the light rays. It’s the same reason a sunset is so much more colorful than mid day. The angle at sunset means the light rays have to travel through more atmosphere before reaching your eye.
It is physically possible to be so constipated that your stool will back all the way up your digestive tract and you can vomit feces. Witnessed it first-hand when I was an EMT- it's quite a sight to behold...
Aww, that happened to my grandma years ago. It's a funny story, actually. She had an oncologist who was the biggest a**hole in the world. So my grandpa called and told him that my grandma had not pooped in like 3 weeks, and first he asked him which patient he was talking about, because he didn't know his patients' names, just their id numbers. He had been seeing her for YEARS. Then he said he was LEAVING ON VACATION the next day and to just give her a laxative. Well, my grandpa took her to the hospital anyway and the minute the doctor saunters over, she vomited sh*t all over his expensive shoes. My mom said it was priceless! She died not much longer after that. Stupid doctors who think they're god. Don't become a doctor if you won't even bother to think of your patients as human! Funny but not funny, he died just a few years later from a heart attack.
The fear of long words is called hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.
Ah, the English language, where all you have to do is make up a word, convince people it's a word, and BLAMMO! it's a word. See "thagomizer" or "anatidaephobia."
There's no maximum length to a train, you just add another engine.
The brain named itself.
The fastest man made object was essentially a large steel manhole cover. During nuclear testing decades ago in 1957 they capped a shaft for an underground nuclear test with it. By replaying the video frames and seeing its initial takeoff, it was calculated to have been going 125,000 miles per hour with the nuclear blast force behind it. They don’t know if it made it to space.
Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the exact same day (February 12th, 1809).
McDonald’s holds a specific contract to get their Coca Cola syrup in a metal vat vs plastic bags which makes McDonald’s taste better.
There are more Hydrogen atoms in a spoon of water than there are spoons of water on earth.
For every human being there are about 2.5 million ants in the world, so if the ants one day spontaneously decide to attack us humans about 90% or more of the world's population would die.
There are about 20 quadrillion ants in the world.
Frederick Bauer (the guy who invented Pringles) had his ashes buried in a Pringles can.
Some military helicopters on aircraft carriers are made of magnesium and should they catch fire it's literally impossible to put them out as the magnesium will take the oxygen from the water and use that to keep burning. So the only thing that can be done is to push them overboard and even as they sink they will continue to burn until the magnesium is completely burned up.
Raspberries are not berries but watermelons are. This was a life altering useless fact to me. Mind blown....
Supposedly, these fruits fit the more technical definition: bananas, avocados, citrus like oranges or lemons, cucumbers, kiwifruit, all squash including pumpkins, eggplants, coffee beans, and melons. I don't understand this claim, because part of the botanists' definition of "berry" is that it has a thin exocarp (peel or rind), and all of these have a tough or inedibly thick exocarp. (Yes, I'm including cucumber, you restaurant chefs! Get off your lazy asses and peel the damned cucumber!) However, cherries are drupes like apples and not berries. And raspberries and strawberries are composite fruits, which mean they're sort of like lots of tiny fruits which have grown together.
Cowbird females lay their eggs in other species nests. But she keeps watch. If her egg is removed or damaged she may attack the nest and destroy the other eggs that are not hers. But she'll never help feed or nurture her baby. When the young cowbird is able to fledge (fly), the mother will take the young bird and introduce them into the cowbird flock so it can live it's best cowbird life. Nature is weird and wonderful.
"Has fledged, is able to fly." No, has fledged means has its flight feathers and can start flight training. Hence the term fully fledged. Fledge is from old english flecgan or flicgan meaning to fly, pronounced flidge-an. A similar bird-related word is Callow. It means naked. The term callow youth means an inexperienced youth. This is because baby birds are born naked. The word Callow has cognates in other germanic langages eg Kaal in Afrikaans means naked.
A certain fish called koi tend to swim in groups of four. Ichthyologists usually label them A, B, C, and D.
If a threat is detected, the A, B, and C kois will scatter, leaving behind the D koi.
nice, but I wonder if the D-coy knows he's tanking for them. Get it ? Fish tank, tanking?
When Phillips designed the cd, the hole in the middle was designed to fit a dutch 10-cent piece. It is still used in dvd's, blurays etc.
...why ? edit : I laughed a lot but I still don't have a (real) answer :D
Note: this post originally had 71 images. It’s been shortened to the top 40 images based on user votes.
here's one: the definition of "north" is from planetary rotation. If you are in space and looking straight at a pole, if it's rotating counter-clockwise ("anti" for you Europeans) it's north. There is no up and down in space.
Or you could say rotating widdershins which is the pre-clock direction name, just to squish two facts into one!
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The deadliest gunfighters (fictional or real) were Matt Dillon (138 men and seven women) and Lucas McCain (120). John Wesley Hardin (25-40), Tom Horn (17-20), Jim Miller (12-15), Wild Bill Hickok, (8-10) [Also Chuck Connors was the first person in the NBA to break a backboard while dunking a basketball. During warm-ups while playing for Boston]
Moose antlers can grow up to an inch a day. My personal useless fact.
Thanks for these...learn something new every day ..or 30 new things Thanks to BP
So a few inaccurate posts and a couple of jokes. Pretty typical for this site.
here's one: the definition of "north" is from planetary rotation. If you are in space and looking straight at a pole, if it's rotating counter-clockwise ("anti" for you Europeans) it's north. There is no up and down in space.
Or you could say rotating widdershins which is the pre-clock direction name, just to squish two facts into one!
Load More Replies... The deadliest gunfighters (fictional or real) were Matt Dillon (138 men and seven women) and Lucas McCain (120). John Wesley Hardin (25-40), Tom Horn (17-20), Jim Miller (12-15), Wild Bill Hickok, (8-10) [Also Chuck Connors was the first person in the NBA to break a backboard while dunking a basketball. During warm-ups while playing for Boston]
Moose antlers can grow up to an inch a day. My personal useless fact.
Thanks for these...learn something new every day ..or 30 new things Thanks to BP
So a few inaccurate posts and a couple of jokes. Pretty typical for this site.
