“Unbelievable But True”: 40 Random Facts And Curiosities About The World Shared On This IG Page
The national animal of Scotland is a unicorn and pigeons can tell different art styles apart. Little bits of information like this are like candy, stimulating our brains like a single m&m we just popped into our mouths. By the way, m&m’s were named after Forrest Mars and Bruce Murrie, a bite-sized fact for a bite-sized snack.
The “Dazzling Facts” Instagram page will likely do more than just dazzle you with new information, so get comfortable as you scroll through and be sure to upvote the facts that you found the most interesting. Make sure to memorize a few to bring up at a dinner party to mildly entertain the other guests.
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On 13th December 2022, New Zealand, MÄÂ ori Aotearoa, passed a law banning smoking for the lifetime of its future generations. New Zealanders born on and after 1st January 2009 cannot buy cigarettes as a part of a package of anti-smoking laws.
Good. I'm a smoker and it's a terrible addiction that comes with heavy prices. I wish this were a law when I started at 15 years old.
I'm in complete agreement with you. I just recently asked my doctor for some nicotine patches, and she gave me step 2 instead of step 1. Meaning that they had less nicotine in them from day one. I didn't make it two days. It just wasn't strong enough to help me quit. I still don't understand her logic but figured I'd discuss it with her the next time I go in. I see her often.
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Will this really work? Or will it just drive a underground market of illegal cigarettes which have no control on their quality, meaning they could be smoking any old s**t?
Absolutely! Just like prohibition people experimented with dangerous chemicals to make alcohol.
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9 years tobacco-free! Last cigarette was 03/25/14. Best decision I ever made!
Yet, knowing underage smokers,. they'll find a way. Sorry for being so pessimistic so early on pandas
I find it weird how teenagers still smoke and vape when we learn about the dangers and side effects every year at school
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sadly the americans tried prohibition and it didn't work all that well.
Yeah - bans has this way of not working within a democracy. It’s a shame of course, but there it is.
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While smoking isn't the smartest thing to do, I'm concerned when laws like this are passed. What bothers me is the idea that people who make these laws are not always thinking them through. Prohibition laws did nothing but prove if people want something bad enough they will find ways to get it and other will provide it. Also, I'm not in favor of other people creating laws which restrict a person's right to do something within reasonable limits.
Exactly. Give up this freedom and it will be easier to take the rest? Very dangerous ground allowing the gov't to decide what's good for you.
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Imports of cigs will get higher then. Just like other drugs. Won't know what's it them.
Mixed feelings on this one. Yes I know smoking is bad, but it's also a personal choice, there are plenty of laws in place to keep smokers from doing it around non smokers. And I'm glad that they implemented it on a timeline instead of forcing those who do smoke to quit cold turkey. I still have a feeling underage smokers will find a way to get cigarettes, just like they do already
we used to steal our parents cigarettes. back in a time when smoking inside public places was okay
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I know it's bad for you, but the USA tried to ban alcohol and look how well that worked. Plus I just don't believe any government should have that much say over almost anything. Really if they start with something like this who knows we're it could end.
I smoke. Bloody awful habit. I started around 13 year old. I cannot stop smoking no matter how hard I try. The only 3 times I quit for long periods of time was when I was pregnant. Each time I said I was not going to start again. Each time life threw something at me that made me start again. I am so weak. I sincerely wish I had not started
The saying means that government often does bad things “for your safety,” and one should not rely on government.
Load More Replies... Nicotine is a Neuro ENHANCER. It's the tar created by smoking that's bad. Look it up. Nicotine doesn't cause cancer.
Those things big tobacco sells aren't natural and they should be put out of business. But I want to say, ppl have been smoking plants since the beginning. Seems a bit much.
10 yrs nic free. I quit when I got the flu. I was too sick to smoke for 3 days... and I knew the really hard part? was over. I wish every one luck and strength
Smoking isn't like drinking, so the prohibition analogy doesn't fit. If I sit in a restaurant having a drink, the person at the table next to me isn't getting drunk or having their liver affected. My old boss got stage four cancer in his throat from secondhand smoke. Of course there will be some who find a way to do it, but making it less prevalent will save lives.
In all fairness though, alcohol does cause quite a staggering amount of second hand deaths too - except is says things like “blunt force trauma” on the death certificate and “domestic abuse” in the local newspaper, or you’re one of the staggering number of people mowed down by drunk drivers, there’s that, then there is the massive brain and liver damage alcohol causes when used long term in a bit too extensively - you don’t have to be a full on alcoholic for this to happen - and of course women who drinks during pregnancy is taking a massive chance. There are so many ways in which alcohol is lethal and where people die as an effect of alcohol. Alcohol is a toxin, we’re not built to ingest it as we do. My whole entire point is actually just that the comparison isn’t all that far fetched, really, I think it’s fairly reasonable.
Load More Replies... The whole world is always "what shall we do?" "But can we do it?" " But how can we justify it?" for everything. And then there are the Kiwis. Guns? Nope - the police might just as well use dogs. Cigaretts? Nope - unhealthy! Bourned out? Resign from job and just tell the truth!
Our cops have guns in the car, in a special lock box. Of course there are tactical armed units if needed and they are quick (and use dogs, safely), but the average patrol will not have holstered guns unless going to something where there is a known/high risk or known offender/gang present. I saw a cop with a gun once, when there was a computer error resulting in them dispatching to my home instead of across the country. So eerie, when you never see guns. They did not draw weapons: the situation was managed (because I stayed calm, I had to prove they were wrong it took over an hour)
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So a precedent that government can dictate what you do with your life. Next up, outlawing drinking, sugar, calorie count.
As a long time smoker, I applaud this move. One question though - how will this be enforced, because we never bought cigarettes, we lifted them from our parents.
Never trying cigarettes is one of the very few things I'm very proud of about myself.
I think the next "Bad for you" law is no more short sleeve shirts. Skin cancer kills too many people. Outlawing short sleeve shirts will save lives.
But there won't be all the peer pressure to smoke because most teens won't be doing it and influencing others.
Yay! No more cancer sticks for children! This feels like a law that every country should have.
Hope the EU brings this in too; unfortunately the governments make so much from the taxes they can't see how much they'd save longer term on reduced medical expenses
Tobacco smoke free for 2 years... I live in Michigan so not ALL smoke free LOL!
duck i was born that year does anyone have some " smoke machines" they can sell me
Yes, like the ban on sale of heroin or meth, and nobody is using those anymore!
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Museum glass is a clarity, reflection control glass (often referred to as non-reflection glass or art glass). Where normal sheet glass is just that, normal glass, Museum Glass controls reflection from surrounding light sources, as well as being super clear so you can see more detail on your piece.
The human love of trivia is partially a response to the requirement that we retain certain specialist knowledge. Most jobs force you to learn and maintain the information required to do certain tasks. Often after spending four or six years studying it. So our brains just like learning something for the sake of learning, with no professional or economic pressure attached. Knowing the precise height of the Eiffel Tower (1083 feet or 330 meters at the tip) is pretty unimportant unless you are a Parisian tour guide, but that frees us to not stress about it.
More often than not, trivia knowledge is attached to a topic we are actually interested in, be it a film series, architecture, the history of ancient China, or baking techniques. Or maybe all of them. There is something comforting about just having some bits or pieces of random data about our world to whip out at a moment's notice. Perhaps we like to imagine a scenario where these facts will suddenly become useful, helping us save the world through the knowledge, that, for example, the Vatican is the smallest country in the world.
In the U.K., McDonalds has used biodiesel to power its delivery lorries since the past decade, which has helped in curbing 7,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year. Using 2015 as a base year, McDonald's intends to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 36 per cent by 2030.
The actual act of knowing a piece of trivia at the right moment actually releases a burst of dopamine similar to what we experience when playing a video game we enjoy. Simply put, knowing something relatively obscure makes one feel special and there is the added bonus of being helpful in some situations. Trivia knowledge makes you feel like an expert on some obscure subject, which can feel romantic in a way. You might imagine people wondering just how did you learn the Latin origin of ‘library,’ for example.
The Bajau people of Southeast Asia spend their whole lives at sea, working eight-hour diving shifts with traditional equipment and short breaks to catch fish and shellfish for their families.
Bajau takes free diving to the extreme, staying underwater for as long as 13 minutes at depths of around 200 feet.
The term "Bajau" is applied to a variety of seafaring peoples whose scattered settlements extend across the South China Sea. Known variously as Badjaw, Bajau, Sama di Laut, or Bajo, they are one of three major groups of nomadic, or formerly nomadic, maritime foraging societies native to Insular Southeast Asia.
It’s important not to mix up knowledge of a lot of trivia for real intelligence. Not to say that trivia knowledge is bad in any way, but there is no actual correlation between education levels, general intellect, and enjoyment of trivia. Some people just have the capacity to absorb large amounts of unrelated data. This ability is pretty useful in a lot of professions, as any medical student can attest, but it’s not a requirement to have good problem-solving skills.
To add some trivia to trivia, most people can probably connect the shared roots of trivial to the word trivia. Counterintuitively, the origin of trivial is the Latin triviālis, meaning common or vulgar. It’s perhaps a sign of how much information we have available to us, that trivia now is normally less common information. Instead, the emphasis is more on the idea that this information isn’t, in the grand scheme of things, that important. If you want an alternative to this word, consider the slightly more pejorative factoid or, to sound more exotic, factlet, which is so uncommon most spellchecks register it as a mistake. It is not a mistake.
Excavation work uncovered an incredible marvel of engineering, a network of tunnels and shelters 18 levels deep that went down 280ft (85 metres) which could keep up to 20,000 people and their livestock safe from harm for a time.
A factlet tends to indicate something that is often quoted but is false or misleading. For example, some people still claim that Santa Clause was invented to sell Coca-Cola. Now, the soft drink companies Christmas ads are still pretty well known, but originally, they were just drawing from a general folklore character that exists in a number of cultures, be it, Saint Nicolas or Ded Moroz. Similarly, Pepsi did not at one point have the world’s sixth-largest navy, though such an acquisition would probably allow them to run Coca-Cola out of business.
Scientists found a single crystal of a new phosphate mineral while analyzing lunar basalt particles, which were collected from the moon two years ago by the Chang'e-5 mission.
The stethoscope was invented in France in 1816 by René Laennec at the Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital in Paris. It consisted of a wooden tube and was monaural. Laennec invented the stethoscope because he was not comfortable placing his ear directly onto a woman's chest in order to listen to her heart.
" Laennec had discovered that the new stethoscope was superior to the normally used method of placing the ear over the chest, particularly if the patient was overweight. A stethoscope also avoided the embarrassment of placing the ear against the chest of a woman."
A team of US scientists has created the Smart Patch, a stretchable, wireless, wearable bioelectronic system for multiplexed monitoring and combined therapy of infected chronic wounds. Those with burns, diabetic ulcers, and non-healing surgical wounds may benefit from this tiny gadget
There are numerous tribes in the Amazon Rainforest that have been living and thriving off the land for centuries. These tribes have unique cultures, traditions, and languages that they are proud of preserving. Although there have been some attempts to integrate these communities into modern society, many choose to remain isolated and maintain their traditional way of lives. The Yanomami tribe is one such example which practices hunting and gathering techniques, builds homes from natural materials, and holds deep spiritual beliefs about the forest's importance to their lives. However, a major challenge facing indigenous people is deforestation caused by logging companies encroaching on their ancestral lands, which leads to a loss of habitat for wildlife and human suffering. Nonetheless, initiatives aimed at protecting these tribes' rights continue to spring up globally.
The rare wave-shaped clouds, known as Kelvin-Helmholtz instability waves were spotted and photographed by Rachel Gordon, who later shared the picture on Facebook. Ms Gordon who clicked pictures from her parent's home told the BBC, "This was special and I immediately knew I needed to capture it.
The rare phenomenon results from air moving in the same direction at two different altitudes, but the higher layer of air moves much faster.
The developers were confident that trucking the waste out every day would be cheaper than making the improvements to the sewer system in the short tonne. However, with a possible residency of 35,000 people, the building is capable of producing a staggering 15 tonnes of sewage a day.
Still better off than Danish 16th century astronomer Tycho Brahe. After losing his noise in a duel (over a mathematical formula, no less), he had to resort to wear a nose made of silver. And that was the guy who got famous by dying from a bladder rupture because he was to polite to go to the bathrorom during a banquett (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tycho_Brahe).
A one-year-old child in China had an unborn parasitic twin removed from her brain, in a rare case of fetus-in-fetu, according to a paper published in the peer-reviewed Neurology journal. Fetus-in-fetu is a congenital abnormality in which a "parasitic fetus" is situated in the body of its twin.
In similar news, a recently arrested American politician was found to have the brain of a baby.
Ever dreamed of a cinema in your bedroom? Us too. Well, one cinema in Switzerland got as close to your dream as possible by opening a ‘VIP bedroom’ screen with double beds instead of traditional (read: boring) seats. The ‘VIP bedroom’ can be found in Switzerland inside Cinema Pathé in the northwesterly municipality of Spreitenbach near the Swiss-German border.
An ancient Italian village has been photographed from above, revealing its shape that bears an uncanny resemblance to a person.
Centuripe, a small town on the island of Sicily, was photographed from the air by a drone, revealing its five-pointed shape.
A team of international astronomers have reclassified a galaxy after finding that a supermassive black hole in its centre has changed direction and is now aiming towards the Earth. The galaxy in question is found 657 million light-years away from us and goes by the name of PBC J2333.9-2343.
"We started to study this galaxy as it showed peculiar properties. Our hypothesis was that the relativistic jet of its supermassive black hole had changed its direction, and to confirm that idea we had to carry out a lot of observations," said Dr Lorena Hernandez-Garcia, according to the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS).
Note: this post originally had 46 images. It’s been shortened to the top 40 images based on user votes.
Tried fact checking a few that seemed a little out there. Yeah this is not a reliable source.
Tried fact checking a few that seemed a little out there. Yeah this is not a reliable source.
