Not everything that you read on the internet is true. In a similar vein, far from everything that sounds made up is fake. Fact is often stranger than fiction, and some truly bizarre things about life on Planet Earth are closer to reality than myth.
Reddit user u/Mmemyo sparked an interesting discussion on r/AskReddit. They invited everyone to share the “stupid facts” they knew which might sound suspicious and weird but are actually correct. We’ve collected the most intriguing ones to share with you, Pandas. Scroll down to check them out! Hopefully, you'll learn something new.
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The vikings, who came from Scandinavia, used iron as their main ingredient for forging weaponry, but it was also common practice to add the bones of dead animals to the mix. The belief was that it would infuse the weapon with the spirit of the creature, making it stronger, but they ended up making a primitive version of steel because of the carbon in the bones mixing with the iron making the weapon stronger, just as they thought it would.
Cows have best friends and can become stressed when they're separated from them.
Misinformation can spread just as quickly as—if not faster than!—legitimate info. So before you go sharing any random factoids or news snippets that you found in a dimly-lit corner of the digital realm, slow down and think about the claims. Double-checking every tiny little piece of info would be exhausting, so you need to consider the (un)reliability of the source.
Legitimate news sources that employ fact-checkers and editors, and have high journalistic standards are far more trustworthy than those that don’t. So you’re better off relying on sources like AP, the BBC, Reuters, and The New York Times, rather than random tabloids that survive on gossip and manufactured drama. You should consider what the goal of an outlet is, whether it’s to report on the news or to generate outrage (and clicks!).
In the meantime, you can consult fact-checking websites like Snopes which do most of the heavy lifting for you when it comes to outlandish claims.
When basketball was first invented, at every game, they would have a man who would go up a ladder to retrieve the ball after every basket. It took them around 20 years to figure out maybe it would be a good idea to cut the bottom of the basket out to make retrieving the ball a lot easier. 20 years!!!
I believe they first cut a down hole in the bottom so it could be poked out with a stick, the full hole only came later.
For every single human being on Earth, there are 2.5 MILLION ants.
Yes, this means that there are about 20 QUADRILLION ants on this planet.
If the ants decide to take over, are you strong enough to handle the 2.5 million that you'll be responsible for killing? If you've got kids, you might have to kill more because a 2 year old isn't going to accomplish a god damn thing if millions of ants are marching towards them.
The core idea is that nobody should blindly accept anything as “fact” without a pinch of salt. According to the Macdonald-Kelce Library at the University of Tampa, readers should also check the author’s credentials. Not only should the author be well-versed in the topic they’re writing about but they should also have a history of legitimate reporting.
Of course, everyone makes factual mistakes from time to time. The best journalists admit theirs and correct them. The worst of the bunch, however, report on semi-legitimate hearsay with impunity and don’t bother to provide a broader context for their news stories.
Bald eagles are not actually bald. Balde is old english for white.
Honey never spoils
Honey has anti-oxidant, anti-bacterial and anti-inflammatory properties as well. Ancient Egyptians used to put on wounds.
The more dramatic and emotionally charged a fact, claim, or topic, the more careful you should be. If the author leans heavily toward a particular point of view, it’s likely that they’re biased and ignoring some of the nuances. Life is rarely black and white, and most stories have at least two sides.
A good rule of thumb is that you should be very skeptical about sensational news. Try to build a broader picture of what’s going on by reading a wide range of sources from outlets with different leanings. And if your gut tells you that something is far too good or bad to be true, then it probably is.
Male rhesus macaques will pay to see pictures of female monkey butts. Payment is in the form of trading their juice rewards.
A man named Wilmer McLean owned a farm in Manassas, Virginia USA where the very first battle of the US Civil War was fought. After the battle he's like "I'm outta here" and bought a farm way out in the country at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia...where Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Gen. Ulysses Grant in McLeans living room four years later.
The original name for the color orange was "geoluhread," which means "yellow-red" in Old English
If you open your eyes in a completely dark room, the name of the color you will see is eigengrau, a kind of dark grey shade
A lot of averages.
Example: The average number of legs humans have is less than 2.
Some invader (don't remember specifics) sent a letter to sparta saying that "If I invade Lakonia you will be destroyed, never to rise again" and the Spartans sent a letter back with a single word in it. "If"
It was Philip II of Macedon. And Spartans were known for their laconic answers (Laconia is the region that Sparta is in)
Bananas are berries, but strawberries are not true berries (in botanical terms berries are defined by their structure, and bananas fit the bill while strawberries don't)
Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
The Eiffel Tower can be 15 centimeters taller during the summer due to thermal expansion.
Pink is really just a light shade of red, but we think of it as a distinct color because we have a word for it that stuck. Not all languages have that. In Italian, they have a similar word for light blue, called “azzurro,” and it’s so common they actually think of it as a separate color from blue. We have the word “azure” in English, but it isn’t nearly as common, so we tend to think of that color as just a shade of blue.
Coffee is not a bean it is the pit of the coffee plant which is a fruit.
Fruit, vegetable, aardvark . . . I don't really care, as long as I have a cup or two of it a day we're all good.
A man named John Young brought a corned beef sandwich to space illegally and shared it with his colleague on board and he would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for the recording of them talking about the sandwich.
Our planet will exist long after humans go extinct
as Agent Smith said "Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet"
- [ ] Of the few people who have top secret clearance at the White House one of them is the person who writes all of the party invitations.
Pirates wear eye patches to see better in the dark (covered eye doesn't get used to sunlight and is more sensitive after uncovering).
6X9+6+9=69
Someone named the fear of long words hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia.
Less than 40% of great white sharks have filed their 2022 tax returns
There are 5.87 Popes per square mile in the Vatican City.
Thought I'd ask ChatGTP what the population density of Popes is. Bit disappointed in the answer: "Since the number of popes is limited to one at any given time (as of my last update, Pope Francis), the concept of "population density of popes" in Vatican City doesn't really apply in a meaningful way."
A year ago it was 11.74 per sq mile if you include pope's emeritus.
in living, corporeal form. (Vatican City = 0.17 mi². So ... 0.17 x 5.87 = 1 Pope).
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Read after pope John Paul 2 died there was a panic at Vatican City. There are a fixed number of slots for internment in the Vatican crypts. At that time there were less than 8 I believe. The story goes that when they are filled, Gabriel gets his trumpet
The previous popes are buried in Vatican City. Well in the grottoes under St. Peter's Basilica. And they all died while in the office so they are still popes.
We thought to put wheels on luggage after we got to the moon.
The lighter the Roast the more caffeine coffee has.
A new car costs less than it's equal weight in Hamburgers.
You have to kill about 400 people to get enough iron from their blood to make a sword
The longest place name in the world is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu
Im always seeing my nose ..its just that my brain ignores it
There are clouds of alcohol floating around in space.
Time to launch the shipload of cocktail onions and olives on sticks. The crew will be a band specialising in light jazz.
There are more Hydrogen atoms in a single molecule of water than there are stars in the entire Solar System.
Cleopatra is closer to the invention of the iPhone than the building of the Giza pyramids.
That's not Cleopatra though, that's Nefertiti. (edit: they changed the picture and now I look like a fool 🤣)
The Atari 2600's release date and the last execution by guillotine happened less than 24 hours apart.
The average number of skeletons in a human body is more than 1.
For those who wonder: because of pregnancy, when a human has two skeletons for nine months.
18% of adult Americans claim they have seen or been in the presence of a ghost.
A friend of mine died suddenly and I saw his ghost several times - in dreams and the odd occasion when I saw a guy vaguely resembling him and briefly thought it was him. Ghosts are your mind processing the trauma of losing someone you loved.
The plural of cul-de-sac is culs-de-sac
Even in French, we often wonder what's the plural for such expressions. :)
Sloths are most vulnerable to predators when pooping. They have to climb down to the trees to the floors floor, and it is a bit of a process for them to actually poop leaving them at risk of predators.
A species of frog, the African clawed frog, was the most reliable pregnancy test for a few decades before at-home tests were widely affordable and accessible.
"The experimental zoologist found that injecting the urine of a pregnant human into the frog's hind leg worked as an effective pregnancy test. If the woman who supplied the urine was pregnant, the frog would ovulate and produce eggs."
New Mexico (the state) got its name before Mexico (the country)
Yes and no. New Spain was unofficially called Mexico since before its independence from Spain in 1821, and the name itself was given to the Mexica capital: Mexico-Tenochtitlán by the Mexicas themselves, calling it sometimes just Mexico (obviously not the country which did not exist back then).
You are constantly clapping, but the claps are just spaced differently.
Chip Wilson, the founder of Lululemon
created the name (Lululemon) to have many L's so that it would sound western to Japanese buyers, who often have difficulty pronouncing the letter. He later remarked that he found it "funny to watch (Japanese speakers) try and say it" and that "it was the only reason behind the name"
A bone “break” is the same as a “fracture.” Fracture is just the medical term. It does not have any correlation with the severity.
Playing Tetris up to 6 hours after a trauma can help against PTSD
Bee keeper here. You can survive off of only Bee pollen and a roughage (provided you have water). You will literally never need to know that. Firstly because of how you collect pollen, and secondly and far more concerning, the amount of wild Honey Bees is quickly dropping.
Of all the mammals on earth, 36% are human, 60% are domesticated. That leaves only 4% wild.
There are 43 quintillion atoms in a grain of sand and there are more ways to shuffle a deck of cards than there are atoms in the Milky Way galaxy..
Statistically you are more likely to lease an apartment if the apartment smells like lavender and chamomile than any other scent.
lavender is a big nope for me, i don't wanna live in my grandma warbrode
Looking at the sun (not recommended) is looking 8 minutes into the past, as it takes eight minutes for sunlight to reach earth.
You can loosen a tight jar lid if you clasp and interlock both hands and fingers over the lid and give it a squeeze with both your palms. It should instantly do the pop sound your dad does when he smacked it on the bottom.
A pound of feathers, indeed, does weigh more than a pound of gold. Gold is measured in troy weight which is 12 ounces to a pound, whereas feathers would use 16 ounces to a pound.
The guy that invented dynamite also created the Nobel Peace Prize. What a bang up guy 😁
He created the Nobel Peace Prize because he saw what his invention of dynamite did.
Incorrect is spelled incorrectly in the Oxford English Dictionary and it’s funny yet annoying
No. Incorrectly is spelled incorrectly in the Oxford English Dictionary. Incorrect is spelled incorrect because it is spelled correctly.
Apparently not many people know that 3rd degree burns are the worst, most think it's the other way around
Don't know if it's stupid. But 1 ding on the elevator going up and 2 doing down
For all of human history every single dead human body has been in earth's atmosphere
Except for a few seconds on June 29, 1971.
Aren't most of them in the lithosphere as they were buried? Only those cremated would be in the atmosphere or am I reading this incorrectly?
There are no outlets of Five Guys on the moon
My favorite is that octopuses will sometimes randomly and arbitrarily punch passing fish...for no apparent reason other than to be a d*ck. Makes me laugh every time.
My fav fact about octopuses and squids is that the ink they produce and use to get dangers to go away, is actually poisonous to them. I learned this at an aquarium where a guest told one of the guys working there that the octopus just inked in the aquarium and the worker looked horrified and called for backup and ppl came running with equipment to catch the ink and get it out of the water. Never seen so much action at an aquarium before. Lol. In nature it's not a big deal because the animal just swims away. But in a closed fish tank they can't flea far.
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Wtf is the one from the cover photo on the main page? “Pirates are why the US isn’t on the metric system” ???
Scroll up from this post, before the 50th fact, and look for underlinex ohrase that says something lol me 67 more posts - click on that. You'll find it as #56. Sometimes BP only shows you the most popular posts by votes, and the rest are hidden. Spoiler alert; you might be disappointed by the post, I'm abt to read comments for more info
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All facts, stupid or otherwise, are correct. Otherwise, they wouldn't be facts.
But here and elsewhere on the internet, not every "fact" is factually correct.
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My favorite is that octopuses will sometimes randomly and arbitrarily punch passing fish...for no apparent reason other than to be a d*ck. Makes me laugh every time.
My fav fact about octopuses and squids is that the ink they produce and use to get dangers to go away, is actually poisonous to them. I learned this at an aquarium where a guest told one of the guys working there that the octopus just inked in the aquarium and the worker looked horrified and called for backup and ppl came running with equipment to catch the ink and get it out of the water. Never seen so much action at an aquarium before. Lol. In nature it's not a big deal because the animal just swims away. But in a closed fish tank they can't flea far.
Load More Replies... Wtf is the one from the cover photo on the main page? “Pirates are why the US isn’t on the metric system” ???
Scroll up from this post, before the 50th fact, and look for underlinex ohrase that says something lol me 67 more posts - click on that. You'll find it as #56. Sometimes BP only shows you the most popular posts by votes, and the rest are hidden. Spoiler alert; you might be disappointed by the post, I'm abt to read comments for more info
Load More Replies... All facts, stupid or otherwise, are correct. Otherwise, they wouldn't be facts.
But here and elsewhere on the internet, not every "fact" is factually correct.
Load More Replies... 