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79 Short And Sweet Facts That Might Get You Questioning Everything You Know
There are more bits of interesting trivia out there than any of us have time to learn, so we make do with what we have. But, being human, we all have that one that we find so much neater than all the rest.
Someone asked “What’s your favorite trivia fact you share any chance you get?” and people flocked to the comments to write out their answers. So get comfortable as you scroll through, upvote your favorites and if you have your own example, be sure to add it to the comments section down below.
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#1
Janus was the God of portals and new beginnings. A person who has all the keys controls the portals in a building. That's why we call them janitors.
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#2
To make nacho cheese, an emulsifier is used to stop the proteins and the fats from separating as the cheese cools down, which keeps the cheese creamy and dippapable. The emulsifier used is Sodium Citrate, which has a chemical formula of... NaCHO.
#3
Did you know that Viggo Mortensen wasn't going to take the role of Aragorn initially, but his son, who was a fan of The Lord of the Rings, insisted he did?
Did you know that dagger thrown at Aragorn was unintentional and Viggo Mortensen deflected it by reflex and they kept the shot in?
Did you know Viggo Mortensen actually broke his toe when he kicked that helmet?
Did you know that Viggo Mortensen developed such a close bond with his horse during filming that after it was done he bought both his horse and helped pay for the horse that Liv Tyler rode?
Did you know that I'm a huge fan of Viggo Mortensen and Aragorn?
#4
In the English language, two syllable words that are spelled the same but can be used as nouns or verbs are distinguished verbally in conversation by which syllable you emphasize. The first syllable emphasis is always the noun form, the second is always the verb. Examples: present, consult, project, produce, contract, etc.
We all do this constantly without realizing the rule exists.
#5
Baby turtles communicate with each other inside their shells so they can coordinate their hatching.
#6
The Appalachian Mountains, Scottish Highlands, and Atlas Mountains are the same mountain range, torn asunder by plate tectonics. The ancient Central Pangaea Mountains are older than the Rings of Saturn, trees, sharks, and bones.
#7
The Romans built a massive network of roads to link their empire. Inevitably, smaller towns built their own access roads and connect to the main thoroughfares. So the entire empire was a collection of these meetings of three roads. These became gathering places where locals and travellers would exchange information. A lot of the mundane day-to-day stuff came to be known as “tri” (three) “via” (roads). Trivia.
#8
Pine trees can change the weather. In large enough groups, when pine trees sense a long drought, they release pinene (the terpenes that make up the classic smell of pine) which evaporates into the atmosphere. The lightweight molecules attach onto ozone, which in turn latches onto water vapour molecules, making it the aerosol base of what will be a future raindrop.
#10
A million seconds is about 11.5 days. A billion seconds is about 32 years. Helps to understand the vast difference between a million and a billion.
#12
Porcupines can climb trees. But not only can they climb trees, they’re really good at it and especially in winter they spend a ton of time up there.
As someone who is not US/Canada based, that blew my mind. They do not look like the sort of creature that has anything to do with being higher than ground level.
#13
Neil Armstrong had some woodchips from the 1903 Wright brothers propeller in his pocket when he stepped on the moon.
also some of the fabric from the wing.
#14
Stephen King threw the first few pages of "Carrie" in the trash and his wife, Tabitha, saved the manuscript and insisted he finish it.
#15
If you placed mount Everest in the deepest part of the Marianas Trench, and stood on the summit, you'd still be too deep underwater to see the sun.
That's not meant to be terrifying, but it always makes people uncomfortable
Edit: to add to this, Everest isn't exactly the tallest mountain, it's just standing on a plateau that makes it reach the highest point. Imagine standing on a chair and saying you're taller than someone standing on the floor.
#16
James Bond 007 author, Ian Fleming, also wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which is a spy adventure with a beautiful woman, a car that has many hidden features and gadgets, and an evil villian and henchman ....in the movies, Gert Frobe plays the villian in both CCBB and Goldfinger.
#19
Martin Van Buren is the only US president who didn't speak English as a first language. He spoke Dutch.
#20
Carrots don't improve your eyesight (or at least no more than any other vegetable) it was English WWII propaganda to explain how their soldiers were getting so good at "spotting " German airplanes. Really it was radar.
#21
Dumpsters are called that because they were invented by the Dempster brothers, and “dumpster” is a genericized trademark like Kleenex or Aspirin.
#24
The moon is farther away than you think.
You could take every single planet in our solar system, yes including Jupiter and Saturn, line them up end to end, and they would all fit in between earth and the moon in a big conga line with about 1000 miles of space left over.
#25
There exists a planet named Gliese 436 b that is covered in burning ice. (Intense heat and atmospheric pressure leads to high temperatures but strong gravity does not let water change from its solid form.).
#27
Jumping spiders are extremely intelligent and some scientists say they have roughly the equivalent intellect of a cat.
#28
A huge part of the reason the American movie industry is centered on the west coast is because Thomas Edison was on the east coast. He owned most of the film technology patents and was quite litigious about it, so studios moved physically as far away from him as they could.
#32
The time span between Stegosarus and the Tyrannosaurus Rex is approximately 80 million years.
The asteroid that wiped out the bulk of the dinosaurs was approximately 64 million years ago. Which means the T. Rex is closer to our timeline than that of the Stegosarus.
#33
Figs are terminally pollinated by wasps. The wasps crawl inside the fig fruit, in the process losing their wings and maybe a limb or two, and take the pollen in. The wasp does not leave and is digested into the fig fruit that we eat.
#34
Australia does in fact have active volcanoes. Granted they aren't on the mainland and are part of our Sub Antarctic islands. Heard and McDonald islands to be specific. I learnt it from a beer bottle cap.
#36
Lake Baikal is so deep that it has a greater volume than all the Great Lakes combined while having about 20% the surface area.
#38
The only word in the english langauge with. three sets of consecutive double letters is “bookkeeper”
the longest single syllable word in English is “Strenghts”
And Oppenheimer is now the highest grossing movie of all time that was never at the box office . before that it was Sing 2.
#40
If one was to look at the chart of the most populated countries on earth, the two top players would obviously be China and India. The crazy thing is that if you take a billion people off each of the two country's population they will remain at the very same spots, 1 & 2. USA is 300 million, while both India and China are over 1,4 billion.
#42
Ants know the length of their legs and use it to calculate the number of steps they need to take to get to what they see in the distance. We know because people put little stilts on their legs and they would overshoot where they were trying to go.
#45
The first and last photos of the Beatles together - John, Paul, George and Ringo - were taken seven years apart, *to the day.* All of that in exactly seven years.
#47
The Siberians that crossed the Bering Strait land bridge that would go on to colonise north and south America was a group of only about ~50 people.
#48
Actress Catherine Hickland divorced her husband David Hasselhoff (then best known for his role of Michael Knight in Knight Rider) for a soap opera actor named Michael Knight.
#49
While we have extensive records of the origins of thousands and thousands of words from the everyday to the extremely obscure, no one knows where the word "dog" comes from. It just appeared in the written record in Middle English and eventually replaced "hound" as the common term. Weirdly, this is nearly identical to what happened with the Spanish word for dog, "perro", which replaced the Latin-derived "can" in a similarly mysterious fashion.
#52
Because of the difference in gravity and the speed that GPS satellites travel at, time runs slower for them than on earth. We use time that signals travel from the satelite to you, to calculate where you are on earth, so you have to take the different speed of time into account.
So your phone does math to compensate for time travel.
#53
The stem of wine glasses are meant to keep the wine away from your hands, so as to avoid your body heat warming up the wine.
#54
- All our gas/ice giant planets have rings.
- Pluto is a binary planet system with Charon. The systems center of gravity (barycenter) is between them.
- Our closest star Proxima Centauri is actually three stars orbiting each other.
- platypus are mammals that lay eggs and have venom.
Edit: guys I’m clearly talking about the solar system of which we are a part of - talking about the giants and Pluto. Our closest star (to our solar system which I’m calling “our” as we belong to it) is Proxima Centauri.
#56
Originally the past tense of "go" was "goed", and the past tense of "wend" was "went". Somehow, "goed" was replaced by "went", and the past tense of "wend" is now "wended".
#58
Any fact about corn snakes. If anyone asks about my pet snake they get a lot of facts for funzies.
I esp. love to tell people snakes indeed do have inner ears and while they dont hear the same as humans they hear muffled sounds and feel the voice and sound if strong enough. They mostly feel the shaking of the ground, but many people believe snakes are completely deaf so you can yell and blast music near them.
#59
According to Billboard: Creedence Clearwater Revival has the most top 20 hits without ever reaching #1.
#61
There are more trees on earth than there are stars in our galaxy. MANY more trees. Also, sharks appeared on earth about 50 million years before trees did. Thank you for subscribing to tree facts.
#62
That if you could fold a piece of paper on half 125 times, it would be thicker than the observable universe.
#64
The history of how "Bless You" became a thing to say after someone sneezes.
TLDR - It was believed that when you sneeze, your soul briefly escaped your body and that was a chance that the Devil has to grab it. It was believed that if you blessed someone fast enough, it would force your soul back into your body, thus making it safe again from his capture.
Crazy that we have turned that into an almost social expectation with such archaic thinking.
#65
Observational studies link moderate, long-term cheese consumption to a lower risk of all-cause mortality.
#66
American English is closer to Old English than Oxford English.
I hate this fact because I am an Oxford snob.
#68
Joe Biden’s birth date is closer to Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration than to Joe Biden’s (first) inauguration.
#69
Michael Jackson’s life ended up being split evenly in half, down to the day (yes, including accounting for leap years), by the time his hair caught on fire due to a pyrotechnic malfunction while he was filming a Pepsi commercial.
#70
It’s very UK-coded, but my favourite music trivia relates to the sample that Eminem used in My Name Is, specifically that it’s from “I Got The” by Labi Siffre. The musicians involved in the Labi Siffri tune were Chas Hodges and Dave Peacock who played guitar and bass on this track, specifically the Eminem sample part - anyone from the UK (myself included) would almost immediately recognise this names as “Chas n’ Dave” who were a semi-comedy Cockney-London novelty-act - “Rabbit” being a good example of their style
So, yeah - there’s a UK context here, but I just LOVE the fact that Chas n’ Dave played a huge part in Eminem’s explosion and d********n.
#71
There is a point somewhere in space where you stop going "up" and start simply moving "away".
#72
What is the only word in the English language with all the vowels in order?
Answer: Facetious.
#74
The universe has a quadrillion year timeline (until it ends). If you compress that into a year and then look at our 14 billion years that we’ve had so far with our universe, that would only be the first seven minutes of the first day of the year.
#75
Blue whales are so big that you could swim through their largest arteries
Those squiggly lines you see in your vision sometimes are the remnants of veins that supplied your eyes with nutrients while you were in the womb...after you're born they break into pieces and are permanently sealed inside your eyeballs.
#76
Today I found out that if you subtract the sum of the digits of a number from the number itself always produces a multiple of 9. Also,
Mono = One
Rail = Rail.
#77
An American team has won the Canadian football Grey Cup since the last time a Canadian team won the Stanley Cup.
Jim Harbaugh has more career NFL rushing yards than Bo Jackson.
#78
"Saved by the Bell: The New Class" had more episodes than "Good Morning, Ms. Bliss", "Saved by the Bell" and "The College Years" COMBINED.
#79
The L in Samuel L Jackson isn’t actually an initial. There was already another Samuel Jackson registered with the SAG when he joined, and because he is the 50th Samuel Jackson in his bloodline he chose the Roman numeral for 50 as his middle initial.
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