Someone Asked, ‘What’s A Cool Fun Fact That You Know?’, 40 People Delivered
As of January 2021, there were 4.66 billion active internet users worldwide, which makes 59.5% of the global population. Of this total, 92.6% (4.32 billion) accessed the internet via mobile devices, Statista estimates. So just imagine how much information there is online. In fact, it’s probably impossible to wrap your head around it.
Part of the appeal in going online is that you get to share things with others. From what you’ve been up to, to what’s on your mind. Quite literally. Like this recent thread on Reddit, where the user Mistik06 asked everyone “What’s a cool fun fact that you know?” and got people posting the craziest facts they know. 24k upvotes and 10.7k comments later, we have an amazing collection of trivia facts you probably haven't heard of before, so enjoy!
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Pufferfish contain a toxin in their spikes that kills predators. It has a slightly different effect on dolphins though, in that it gets them high. So teenage dolphins will pass around pufferfish and impale themselves off of them to get stoned.
Someone better let the pufferfish know. They could build a successful drug empire off it. Puff Cartel.
Apparently, studies show that Crows, Ravens and other Corvids are self aware and are able to ponder the content of their own minds.
Dragonflies are the predator with the highest success rate (over 90%), and are one of the few animals that are capable of plotting intercept courses rather than chasing their prey. They're basically mosquito murder drones.
Elephants think humans are cute in the same way we think puppies and kittens are cute.
Scientists speculated there are other planets orbiting distant stars, but haven't had a clear evidence of this fact up until the 1990's. And the majority of currently known exoplanets (almost 5000, as of now!) have been discovered well into 2000's, which means that humanity is at the very beginning of its discovery journey regarding other planetary systems.
With James Webb telescope being extremely close to finalizing its calibrations as we speak, we will be able to not only discover hundreds, if not thousands of new planets (and stars and galaxies), but also detect whether there are traces of alien civilizations on them. We should all be very excited about this, as this is unprecedented, and a HUGE deal for science and our species as a whole.
This is amazing. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be born 100 years from now, how advanced would we be.
Ok, this fact has connected facts:
In late 1800s girl killed herself by jumping from bridge on Sienna river and she was known as The Unknown Woman of the Seine.
When the guy who worked in morgue saw her, he thought she was beautiful and ordered a plaster cast of her face.
Fast foward to 1960s, CPR was invented and they needed a doll to train people. So they partnered with Norwegian producer of medical devices. That guy decided to use the plaster cast of Unknown Woman of the Seine and named the doll Anne(Annie) because his doughter was named Anne(Annie).
While performing CPR, people were trained to talk to a doll(person) so there is that common phrase:"Annie! Annie are you ok?"
Fast foward to when Michael Jackson decided to put that phrase in his classic "Smooth Criminal".
When Thomas Edison was bound to a wheelchair, Henry Ford bought a wheelchair for himself so that he and Edison could race.
Steven Seagal once told Gene LeBell that he was immune to being choked out from doing so much martial arts training, so Gene choked him out and he sh*t his pants.
When sea otters find a rock they like to bust open clams, they will tuck it under a fold of skin in their armpit. They also hold each other’s paws while they’re sleeping so they don’t float away from each other. Baby otters aren’t buoyant enough to stay afloat so they will sleep on their mom’s tummies until they’re older.
The creator of the pop-up ad made a formal apology for his creation.
Dinosaurs existed for so long that there were still dinosaur fossils from previous eras while other dinosaurs from future eras were alive.
So basically, when T-Rex was still alive and well, Stegosaurs was nothing more than fossilized bones under their feet even back then.
You can fit the entire population of the human race inside the Grand Canyon. Not just the 7 billion alive now - the entire lot. From the very start. And still have plenty of room for those who are yet to be born.
If every person on earth fought 1v1 until there was only 1 winner, that person would only have to win 33 times.
The sound of an ATM drawing cash is a manufactured sound. It's just to let you know that the ATM is indeed working and that your money is coming up.
That if sound could be transmitted through space, the sun would be so loud on earth it would be the equivalent of standing next to a jet engine, even though it's 94 million miles away.
Sound in space travels along gravitational waves and can also be picked up via vibrations. Space agencies have been listening to the sun and planets for years (Jupiter and Saturn sound particularly scary).
Your nose is impacting your vision 100% of the time.
However, since your "picture" you see is just an interpretation by your brain, your brain erases your nose as useless information. You'll only see it, if you really concentrate on it, if you close one eye, or if you put your finger on the very tip of your nose.
It seems like a harmless fact until this thought enters your head...
"Your nose is real. Your brain removes it from your vision as useless, but it is very much there, and very much real. What other things is your brain removing from your vision?"
It's wild to think that your entire life experience is just your brain doing it's best to interpret your senses. And that it's definitely not a "perfect" system. It could be interpreting everything incorrectly, and we collectively wouldn't have any idea.
Moose are really good swimmer's and even swim from island to island to feed on the underwater vegetation
But orcas will occasionally stumble across then and hunt them down and moose haven't evolved far enough for them to know that orcas are predators
The difference between Million and Billion is more than we think.
To put it in perspective, 1 million seconds is about 12 days while 1 billion seconds is equivalent to 31.7 years.
Birds are classified as extant dinosaurs, not just descended from them. They are actual living, breathing dinosaurs.
Ah yes I love feeding the screeching dinosaurs in my yard every morning. It brings such tranquility.
I heard all birds are just Drones and recharge by sitting on power lines. :D
Sorry, I find it hard to think of penguins as dinosaurs. Ostriches, emus, even chickens yeah, but not penguins 🐧
You may enjoy this! I can honestly say that I never realized there were prehistoric penguins! https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/kids-discover-fossil-of-new-giant-penguin-species-180978707/
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While technically correct from one cladistic view point, in that same viewpoint humans are synapsid or going further fish, so while cool sounding not very useful. And a side effect of taxonomy being invented for living species and once you start bring extinct species into it it gets weird.
So, are they dinosaurs or not? I'm very confused with this hahaha
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Except that dodos apparently tasted horrible. What got them were pigs & rat's.
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How is this even possible given the etymology of the word dinosaur. It means terrible lizard. Birds are not terrible lizards given modern-day biological classifications.
Ancient dinosaurs are also not lizards though...
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Is dinosaur an appropriate classification for birds since dinosaur means terrible lizard in Greek?
Just because dinosaurs resembled giant lizards (which is where the name came from) does not mean they were actually lizards.
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Yeah. I read a summer course at university about dinosaurs (for fun, I'm a social worker so not related at all) and it's pretty interesting. You would think reptiles are more like dinosaurs, or so I thought.
Manatees regulate buoyancy by farting. They eat a ton of plants and accumulate a lot of methane. They then release gas when they want to sink and hold it in when they want to go to the surface or are being polite.
A single gram of DNA contains about 700 terabytes of information.
When they first measured the height of Mt. Everest it was exactly 29.000 feet, but as that sounds like a made-up number they declared it to be 29.002 feet.
Sharks like and get attracted to Heavy Metal music played underwater.
If you made $10,000 per day, every day since the pyramids were built around 4,500 years ago, you'd have 6% of Elon Musk's wealth.
You don't use shock paddles on a stopped heart.
Shock paddles simply put a heart back in to a natural rhythm, they will not restart a heart if it has stopped. That's what chest compressions are for.
And you actually have a very high mortality rate if you need chest compressions or a heart shock. The 5 year survival rate for both is very low.
Grass evolved 66 million years ago.
Dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago.
The vast majority of dinosaurs never existed at the same time as grass.
Cuttlefish can accurately match the color and texture of their environment despite the fact that they’re colorblind.
Koalas are literally smooth-brained, so much so that if you put a plate of eucalyptus leaves in front of them that have been taken off the branch, they won’t recognize them as food.
The Nazis planned to assassinate Winston Churchill with an explosive chocolate bar.
16⁰C and 28⁰C reversed are equal to their Fahrenheit value. So - 16 is 61f and 28 is 82f
Marlon Brando popularised wearing a T-shirt casually.
There are more plastic flamingo lawn ornaments in the US than there are wild flamingoes on the entire planet.
There is a plant called the California Corn Lilly that contains a drug called Cyclopamine. When animals eat it while pregnant, it can cause cyclopia (one eye). It inhibits a signaling pathway called the Sonic Hedgehog Pathway (yes, this pathway was actually named after the video game).
The sonic gene is a gene which determines how many digits/fingers a being has
The only artist to ever have five albums in the US Top 20 at the same time is Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass.
If you fold a regular piece of paper in half 104 (from memory) times, the paper will be as thick as the entire observable universe.
And if you fold a piece of paper more than 300 times you end up with a book that has more pages than atoms in the observable universe
When working for the Australian shooting team heading for Tokyo. Found out that alcohol is a banned substance not because guns and alcohol are bad (as my feeble brain suspected ) but because it's a performance enhancing drug due to slowing the heart rate.....they get breath tested before comp
KFC's Twitter profile follows exactly 11 accounts: 6 random people named Herb and the 5 members of the British pop band Spice Girls.
A guy on twitter pointed it out and got a custom painting from KFC which depicted him riding the colonel’s back
We developed eyebrows with arches as a way to keep sweat from running into our eyes, instead they catch the sweat from the forehead and let them cascade to the side of our faces.
Those little things like that purely for convenience just amaze me when it comes to our bodies and the natural world of evolution.
The word “set” has got 430 different meanings, making it the word with the most definitions in the English language.
It only takes 70 people to be in a room together for there to be a 99.99% chance that two people share the same birthday.
I was in a classroom with 19 people and I shared a birthday with someone I never met before.
Hippos though appearing cute, fat and cuddly can reach speeds of 48km/h and kill at least 500 people a year.
Humans are slightly bioluminescent and have stripes that can be seen under UV light!
Humans are slowly losing a muscle in our hands/forearms called the palmaris longus that doesn't [significantly] contribute functionally to grip strength or motion. If you push your pinky and thumb together (like showing the number 3) then flex your wrist in, the tendon will pop out in the middle of your wrist if you have it. About 10% of the general population doesn't.
It's basically a spare part for hand surgeons now. If you sever a tendon, they'll harvest the palmaris longus for grafting.
Yes, but us women need it to hold things, because of extreme pocket deficiency.
When Germany was bombing the UK Hitler avoided bombing the town hall of my local town because he liked the architecture and wanted the building for himself.
There are a lot of stories similar to this across the whole of the UK. The most famous is probably that of Senate House in London- the huge concrete HQ of the University of London (and such a towering mass of concrete that it was the inspiration for Orwell's Ministry of Truth). It was supposedly spared to serve as the Nazi party headquarters after the invasion. However, nice as these stories are, there is no evidence of any orders from Hitler to protect specific buildings. The reality is that high-level night bombing of the time just couldn't be that accurate anyway. Ironically, there is some evidence to the contrary- that specific buildings of cultural value (rather than economic or military value) WERE deliberately targeted in bombing campaigns.
I know far too many about McDonald's.
- McDonald's owns the lots that every McDonald's franchise sits on, and charges the franchise owner rent. This makes McDonald's the world's largest real estate developer.
- Thanks to Happy Meal toys, McDonald's is also the world's largest toy distributor.
- The Happy Meal was based on a box of cereal: put the food in a colourful box with a free toy inside
- McDonald's is the world's largest purchaser of Coca-Cola. They're so big, Coca-Cola has an entire corporate division dedicated to servicing McDonald's.
- A McDonald’s at a ski resort in Sweden is famous for having a "ski-thru." It's just a fancy outdoor window that skiers can ski up to and place their order.
- A McDonald's in Sedona, Arizona has become famous for have turquoise arches instead of the usual Golden Arches. This is because a local zoning bylaw says the golden arches would clash with the red rocks.
Since they now provide animal-free options, I rode to a McDrive on my bike recently ... only to discover that, a few cars in front of me, another cyclist already was waiting. And just behind me, another one came ... when I first did this 20 years+ ago, they tried to refuse to serve me, as "this isn't for bikes!", which I, succeedingly, doubted.
Apparently in the early 1960s, a lounge singer named Vaughn Meader suddenly found himself extremely lucky: he sort of looked like newly elected President John F. Kennedy and he could imitate him fairly well, too. He used this to perfect an impersonation comedy act of Kennedy, which got him a deal for a comedy album. He and a few others released "The First Family".
"The First Family" was a SMASH. Nearly everyone in America owned this album. It was part of nearly every home, like a fridge or a TV. People couldn't get enough. It wasn't edgy or even insulting; it was just comedians doing parody of the Kennedy family and people ate it up. Even Kennedy loved it. In a sense, it was groundbreaking in that no other U.S. President was lampooned in such a way before; in fact, Richard Nixon refused to buy it because he felt it crossed a line of respect towards presidents. Vaughn Meader became one of the most well-known celebrities in America in the blink of an eye. A second album was in the works.
Then Kennedy was shot, the second album scrapped, Meader couldn't find work, lost all of his money, became an addict, and I think he ended up owning a bar somewhere. A true rise and fall tale.
I'll c/p it from the internet but i like this:
"The samurai were officially abolished as a caste in Japanese society during the Meiji Restoration in 1867. The first ever fax machine, the "printing telegraph", was invented in 1843 and Abraham Lincoln was famously assassinated at Ford's Theater in 1865. Which means there was a 22 year window in which a samurai could have sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln."
But DID a samurai send a fax to Abe? Did any samurai send any faxes? So curious
A blue whale has a heart the same size as a small car.
The human brain clock speeda are incredibly slow, about 200Hz... But it can do so many operations in parallel that to replicate such a level of parallelism with currently best parallel processing CPUs, we'd need so many that the number is unfathomable and to power such computer we'd almost need a full Dyson sphere worth of power.
Dyson Spheres, btw, are theoretical megastructures. Effecively a series of artificial rings orbiting a sun specifically to capture solar energy for a spacefaring species' energy needs. Sorry, something that I learned about recently as Dyson Rings are in our Stargate rp, very interesting.
Most of the world trees are planted by a squirrel who forgot where his nut was burried
The squirrel from ice age definately did not plant any tree then
Mario wears a hat because during the Donkey Kong days (when he was known as Jumpman) the animation was too primitive to animate hair while he was moving or jumping
-We put a man on the moon before we thought to put wheels on a suitcase. -the lighter was invented before matches were -Hippopotamus milk is pink -Saudi Arabia imports their camels from Austrailia -From the time it was discovered, to the time it was stripped of its status as a planet, Pluto had not yet made one trip around the sun. -Nintendo was founded in 1889!
A female cat can have kittens fathered by multiple males at once. That's part of the reason why a male cats "stuff" has spines on it that flip up when the male makes the pulling out motion. When up, the spines scrape the inside of the female so that the male cat can both dig deeper crevasses for sperm to settle in, and so he can pull out any other male cats sperm as a way for him to be sure that his kittens will be part of the litter.
Barcode Scanners scan the whites instead of the blacks
I mean, true, but that’s also kind of like saying that a computer operates by counting the 1’s and ignoring the 0’s, which would be inaccurate. The black absorbs the light and the white reflects it, so in that regard, it’s seeing the white, not the black. But it’s still counting that void as relevant information.
The human body is 99% empty space due to the space between atoms
If you took every car on this planet and removed the empty space you can fit all the particles in 1 foot by 1 foot box
The total number of ways you can shuffle a deck of cards is... a really big a number.
This big to be precise :80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 to be exact.
It's very very very very very (x about a bajillion) likely that any time you shuffle a deck of cards, that exact order has never existed before.
Someone else on Reddit said - Say that there exists 10 Billion people on every planet, 1 Billion planets in every solar system, 200 Billion solar systems in every galaxy, and 500 Billion galaxies in the universe. If every single person on every planet has been shuffling decks of cards completely at random at 1 Million shuffles per second since the BEGINNING OF TIME, every possible deck combination would still yet to have been shuffled.
Mike Patton, the lead singer of Faith No More did the vocals for the creatures in I Am Legend
As he has the second greatest vocal octave range of any professional singer…
Finally, I can use the space facts I’ve had in my notes on my phone for ages:
On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be almost ten thousand miles away. Even if you shrank everything down so that Jupiter was as small as the period at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 35 ft away.
Far from marking the outer edge of the solar system, as those schoolroom maps so cavalierly imply, Pluto is barely one-fifty-thousandth of the way.
Our nearest neighbour in the cosmos, Proxima Centauri, which is part of the three-star cluster known as Alpha Centauri, is 4.3 light years away, a sissy skip in galactic terms, but that is still a hundred million times farther than a trip to the moon. To reach it by spaceship would take at least 25,000 years.
The average distance between stars is 20 million million miles.
If we were randomly inserted into the universe, the chances that we would be on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion (1 with 33 zeroes).
The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh 200 billion pounds.
Neutron stars are like taking the sun and squishing it to the size of a small city. The only thing that prevents it all from becoming a blackhole is the repulsion of matter
The sky you see at night with all the stars isnt the realtime image. As these stars are lightyears away, light from them takes years to reach to earth. Some of the stars you see in the sky might not even be there now. Blows my mind everytime i think about it.
If aliens 5 billion light years away got our radio signals and could go faster than light, they would arrive at a burnt and empty lifeless planet if they chose to visit us
The person least related to you on the planet is your 50th cousin.
Statistically speaking, you have over 1 million 8th cousins.
In a sense the fact that we are descended from Eve is true. Millions of years ago Mitochondrial Eve lived along with members of her species in Africa. All of us are descended from her lineage. The other female lineages died out. We know this by tracing the DNA of our mitochondria which comes from our mothers
The T.Rex existed closer in history to humans than to the Stegosaurus.
Sharks are older than trees.
Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire.
Cleopatra lived closer in time to the first Lunar Landing than The Great Pyramids
Sorry, not just 1.
In a game of chess after you played your first 5 moves and your opponent played his first 5 moves, there are already like 70 trillion possible chess games that could have been played.
Actually it’s 169,518,829,100,544,000,000,000,000,000 (or one hundred sixty-nine thousand septillion, five hundred eighteen thousand sextillion, eight hundred twenty-nine thousand quintillion, one hundred thousand quadrillion, five hundred forty-four thousand trillion).
Every four years we have a leap year, unless you can divide the year by 100.. however, if a year can be divided by both 100 and 400, it still will be a leap year.
So the year 1900 wasn't a leap year, 2000 was and 2100 won't be.
You can fit 1.3 million earths inside the Sun.
And you can fit all the planets in our solar system lined up pole to pole between the earth and the moon.
Tumors can grow miniature organs, hair and teeth, and are referred to as "teratomas".
Babies are not born with kneecaps! Instead a small peice of cartilage that later goes through ossification (turning to bone) becoming the patella (kneecap). Usually develops during the 2-6 year old range.
This is why I find it difficult to believe parents; when they say their child was walking at 6mo.
Elmer's glue has a bull on the label because he is the boyfriend of the cow on Borden dairy products.
A marketing trick from when Borden made the glue.
Wait, so the white substance comes from him, like the milk comes from her...
The letterbox on the famous black door of No. 10 Downing Street does absolutely nothing. There's no hole on the other side.
if you lined up all of the other planets in the solar system, they would fit almost perfectly between Earth and the Moon.
Most eyes in the natural world including yours are wired the stupid way around, with the wiring pointing inwards meaning you have to have a blind spot where the optic nerve leaves. Yet there are eyes that have evolved without this problem just by being oriented sensibly, proving eyes have not only evolved many times, but also evolution isn't perfect it's just guesswork
Fuzzy caterpillars turn to moths. Smooth ones turn to butterflies. (There are some exceptions to this rule)
I still haven't heard a satisfactory distinction between moth and butterfly. I get that one's day and one's night, but what else? Eating nectar vs not-eating?
In the earlier stages of the universe, the sky used to be orange, but it has slowly redshifted into infrared which we can’t see.
Babys are able to survive longer under water than adults/kids. It‘s f*cking insane how long they survive. That‘s because babys have a reflex to not breath under water. Drowning isn‘t oxygen-deprivation, it‘s water filling up the lungs.
Van Gogh killed himself one year after Nintendo was founded.
Just learned that barnacles have the largest penises in the animal kingdom if you compare it to its size.
Atmosphere of Mars is more than 95 percent carbon dioxide and less than 1 percent oxygen. Inhabiting mars permanently other than research for humans is not an easy task.
The speed of sound through mayonnaise is approximately 2613 ms-1
The Apollo astronauts' footprints on the moon will probably stay there for at least 100 million years. Since the moon doesn't have an atmosphere, there's no wind or water to erode or wash away the Apollo astronauts' mark on the moon. That means their footprints, roverprints, spaceship prints, and discarded materials will stay preserved on the moon for a very long time
All house flies are the same species and the size of the flies depends on how much food they had when they where larvae.
Otters are necrophilic rapists, even worse than dolphins.
111 111 1112 = 12345678987654321
Sorry I thought you said useless
The McLaren F1, which set a top speed record in the '90s, has tail lights from a bus.
There are more units of Planck time in 1 second than there have been seconds since the Big Bang.
The Planck time is the time it takes for light to travel a distance equal to the Planck length. So yes, it's small. The shocker is the Planck mass, which isn't small at all, it's as heavy as 750 thousand human red blood cells. The Planck mass is 20 times as heavy as the worm C. elegans.
Warren G is Dr. Dre's cousin. Dre first heard Snoop Dogg on a demo that Warren G had made for him.
Also, Hall of Fame NFL wide receiver Art Monk is related to legendary jazz musician Thelonious Monk.
There are so many apple varieties around the world, that if you were to eat a different apple variety every day, it would take you over 20 years to get through them.
Hooray for so many apples that are not red delicious!
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More things happened in the first second of the universe’s existance than the rest of the history and the future of the universe
Fun fact: Many people don't know that some plants are male plants and some are female plants.
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There are so many apple varieties around the world, that if you were to eat a different apple variety every day, it would take you over 20 years to get through them.
Hooray for so many apples that are not red delicious!
Load More Replies... More things happened in the first second of the universe’s existance than the rest of the history and the future of the universe
Fun fact: Many people don't know that some plants are male plants and some are female plants.
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