Ignorance is bliss, whether we are talking about the heat-death of the universe or the amount of worm-like creatures happily living in your eyebrows, some things are better left alone. But like staring at a car crash or a house on fire, we do have a strange, somewhat morbid fascination with things that don’t seem real.
So, naturally, one netizen wanted the internet to share all the strange, unusual, and even creepy facts that do not seem real. So if you enjoy sleeping peacefully, consider another article, as the answers were deeply interesting but somewhat unsettling. If you do stay, be sure to upvote your favorites and comment your own facts.
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Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
You are more likely to be bitten by a New Yorker than a shark.
Bitten by a New Yorker OUTSIDE New York must be less likely than bitten by a shark, right?
Humans are pretty slow runners compared to other races, but we are the best throwers on the planet. No other specie can throw stuff like we do. This is why in case of danger, throwing things in the direction of an hostile animal may scare the s**t out of it.
"Hey hooman you can run but you can't hi-- WTF IS THAT A STONE?!"
If bees were paid minimum wage for their labor, a jar of honey would cost $182,000.
Maybe we should just make them rely on tips to keep the costs down
Over 500,000 people go bankrupt annually from medical bills in the US.
In many countries in the world, cannibalism is actually legal, the only illegal thing is the way you obtain it.
It's made that way so that plane crash survivors won't be prosecuted for, you know, surviving.
The ford pinto was a flaming death trap that ford knew how to fix, and decided not to. The gas tank was fixed right behind an idiotically thin bumper, making puncturing the tank an almost absolute in the case of a rear end collision. If such a collision were to occur, the light frame would also most likely bend around the doors, trapping the driver inside. Ford knew of these defects, but instead of recalling the cars, they decided that on average, they would mostly like only have to pay out around $230,000 per death, which was much cheaper than the recall, which would of cost millions.
TL;DR: ford estimated the cash value of a human life instead of fixing their cars
I remember watching a documentary about this and what other big car manufacturers have done. It's frightening but no longer surprising what big business will do to protect themselves and their profits.
During World War 2, Japan bombed China with fleas infected with the bubonic plague.
No jokes on this one, wars are messed up, what are we even fighting for?
54% of adults in the USA read below a 6th grade level. Bonus, 1 in every 30 children in the USA is homeless.
The Vatican Archives are something like 50 miles of information that almost nobody can see unless they know it's there and put in a formal request to see a specific thing. My understanding is that nobody can enter just to browse.
France executed their last person by guillotine the same year Star Wars: A New Hope came out.
The Taylor oil spill. So far it’s leaked over a million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It started leaking in 2004, before Deepwater Horizon, and is still leaking oil into the gulf today. Next to nothing being done about it.
Something is being done about it. The USCG hired a company to collect the oil as it leaks. They collect about 1000 barrels a day. Apparently this is effective enough that the surface sheen from the leak is almost imperceptible. Taylor, I believe, has been ordered to address the leak or face fines of something like $40K or $50K a day.
In the 1980s the Bayer corporation sold a hemophilia drug that was made from processed donated human blood. In the early days of the AIDS epidemic it was discovered that the product was contaminated with HIV. They were forced to take it off the shelves in America and Europe. Bayer decided there had been too much financial investment in the product and rather than destroy the inventory they sold it in Latin American and Asian countries instead. They even continued to produce it for a few months until their supplies ran out.
There's no way to know how many people were infected with HIV as a result but at a bare minimum it had to have been in the thousands, plus however many those people may have unknowingly infected in turn and so on. In the 1980s when AIDS was pretty much a guaranteed death sentence.
Bayer knowingly killed probably tens of thousands of people and no one went to jail. $600 million settlement.
EDIT: Just a clarification, this treatment was not a dry pill that you swallow. That would be pretty unlikely to transmit HIV as some people have said. It was basically taking blood and removing the rejectable parts and concentrating clotting factors and injecting that into hemophiliacs. In terms of HIV risk it was basically a blood transfusion.
Isn't Bayer part of the same consortium that sold Zyklon B to the nazi death camps?
During the Cuban Missile Crisis the world was the closest to nuclear fallout in history. A communist submarine spotted something suspicious and 2/3 of the commanding people agreed to launch a nuke. But because the third person voted no they couldn’t. Basically humanity rested on that one person and they didn’t even know it.
His name was Vasily Aleksandrovich Arkhipov. From Wikipedia: Arkhipov refused to authorize the captain and the political officer's use of nuclear torpedoes against the United States Navy, a decision which required the agreement of all three officers. In 2002, Thomas S. Blanton, then director of the U.S. National Security Archive, credited Arkhipov as "the man who saved the world".
I grew up Africa (Zambia) When we were 5 we were told not to swim in dirty water because of Bilharzia (schistosomiasis)
Microscopic worms that burrow into your skin or enter up your urinary tract and then lays eggs inside your body.
Yep. My father wouldn't even let us use the swimming pool until it had rained "to clear the bilharzia". Never mind that a pool using chlorine wouldn't have any... (Grew up in and still live in Jozi, Mzansi - or Johannesburg, South Africa.)
Chainsaws were invented to cut through the pelvic bone to help women give birth.
... but men swear they feel more pain when they get kicked in their Richard's nicknames
There are more slaves in the world today than there has ever been, ever.
You're statistically more likely to randomly die during a USA Powerball lottery drawing than win it.
You're statistically more likely to die than to live eternally
That you are literally just data being interpreted by your brain. And we know for a fact your brain is not perfect, and might not be good at doing that.
A cool fact that illustrates it, is that your nose is obstructing your face 100% of the time. Your brain just removes it, and fills in the blanks. You can see your nose sometimes when you think about it, close one eye, or put the tip of your finger right on the tip of your nose.
If your brain is removing that kind of data as just a "default" setting, what other "default" settings do we have that are literally making so we can't see, feel, smell, or hear the things around us?
It's just wild to think that everything I see, hear, feel, smell, and taste, might just be my brain messing up interpreting the data. And the scariest part, is it could be consistent across the entire species.
What we perceive as "real" might not be real at all. Just an incorrect interrpertation.
Everyone at work says my sense of smell is super sensitive to the point I seem to smell things much stronger than others, and that makes it so frustrating because they don't smell the perfume and mildew on the secondhand clothes that are being put out on the floor. Now, my sense of touch, on the other hand, is s**t. Sure I can feel textures, but I don't have a good grip and everything just feels too smooth and slick, or like nothing. But others can feel very well.
The X Ray machine is largely responsible for the Child Protective Movement. In the 40’s and 50’s cases for Shaken Baby Syndrome were noticed causing a large push in child protection.
The shear size of the nuclear contamination zone thats in the middle of Washington state, called the Hanford reserve.
No one speaks of how the middle of our state is unlivable due to the polluted groundwater from all the improperly stored nuclear waste.
Over 50 percent of Americans do not have access to $1,000 in case of emergency.
As recently as 1980s, many researchers and doctors believed newborns and fetuses couldn't feel pain, so some were operated on without anesthesia.
I don't like how this fact always sound. They didn't believe, they did research and can't measure and confirm that baby is feeling pain as their neural system is underdeveloped. And there was also concern about negatives of anesthesia and dosages. New research with new posibilities confirmed it, that babies feel pain.
There are more unsolved murder cases than there are solved and that's just the ones we know about.
There a lot of bodies at the bottom of most large bodies of water. Be it from accidents or suicides water seems to attract them.
Micro plastics are finding it way into absolutely everything. I don't recommend googling it.
Medical progress has a dark history of testing on the unknown masses.
Only 66% of the murder cases in the USA get solved ( 90 - 95% in Europe for comparison)
A lot of people probably buried their hamsters alive because they didn’t know hamsters hibernate.
That bees kill wasps by sitting on them and then flapping their wings so hard. This creates a high heat that burns the wasp.
That’s a bit overdramatic and inaccurate. How could the bees flap their wings in that ball? First of all, this behaviour is only seen in the Japanese Honey bee. Secondly they vibrate theor flight muscles and woth that the temperature within that ball rises above 45C and in addition to that the CO2 levels as well. So the hornet dies of heat and lack of oxygen. It most certainly doesn’t „burn“
Doctors actually used to do autopsies and get into a surgery or aid with childbirth without washing their hands. This of course resulted in a lot of deaths and I read somewhere that the first doctor to suggest washing hands was ridiculed, put in an asylum by his colleagues and there he was beaten by the guards and later died. (Probably because of the wounds he suffered from the beatings)
Oh and there is a surgery with a 300% mortality rate.
Ok I have more info on the second point for anyone interested: A surgeon named Robert Liston once performed an amputation in around 2 minutes (first red flag). This had a 300% mortality rate, i.e. three people died as a result of this one surgery, and happened in 1847 I think. 1) The patient died of infection (sepsis). 2) Liston's young assistant had some of his fingers accidentally amputated by Liston and also died of infection (also sepsis). 3) A witness apparently died of shock (possibly from being accidentally slashed or just from fright).
Note: this post originally had 62 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
Did you know that in a few billion years, earth is going to become just like Venus? All the water will evaporate and surface temperatures will rise and make life as we know it impossible on the surface. Here’s another fact: the universe can theoretically end right now if a glitch occurs in the Higgs field.
Elaborating on the last fact: The Higgs field creates the Higgs boson which gives mass to other particles. The Higgs field is set at a particular value which is at the lowest energy level. If it turns out that the Higgs field is not at its lowest energy level, it can be what we call “metastable “. If it is metastable then there’s a chance that an event like a black hole evaporating can cause the Higgs field to crash down into a lower value which would release a lot of energy. It can create a sort of bubble of destruction that expands forever and consumes and destroys everything in its path
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you knew what you were getting into, why be so negitive?
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Did you know that in a few billion years, earth is going to become just like Venus? All the water will evaporate and surface temperatures will rise and make life as we know it impossible on the surface. Here’s another fact: the universe can theoretically end right now if a glitch occurs in the Higgs field.
Elaborating on the last fact: The Higgs field creates the Higgs boson which gives mass to other particles. The Higgs field is set at a particular value which is at the lowest energy level. If it turns out that the Higgs field is not at its lowest energy level, it can be what we call “metastable “. If it is metastable then there’s a chance that an event like a black hole evaporating can cause the Higgs field to crash down into a lower value which would release a lot of energy. It can create a sort of bubble of destruction that expands forever and consumes and destroys everything in its path
Load More Replies... you knew what you were getting into, why be so negitive?
Load More Replies...