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Don't believe everything you read on the internet. By now, we can all agree that it's full of fake stuff and AI isn't helping the situation. Misinformation spreads like wildfire and often, it's disguised so well that you might be none the wiser. But sometimes, fact is indeed stranger than fiction and the things that sound like complete and utter rubbish turn out to be true.
Humans glow. The universe is beige. Per capita, the Vatican has the highest crime rate in the world. Those were just some of the statements that popped up when someone recently asked, "What sounds like complete nonsense, but has been proven to be true?"
Bored Panda has put together a captivating and surprising list of the best answers. From biology to geography, psychology to history, and everything under the sun, there's enough here for anyone looking to sound a little more clued up at that next social gathering. Don't forget to upvote your favorites and feel free to share your own "nonsense-sounding" gems in the comments section below.
This post may include affiliate links.
#1
Tall people are more likely to get cancer than short people because having more cells increases the chance that any one of them will mutate.
They're basically just bigger targets.
Ace 4 hours ago (edited)
If it's just a function of cell numbers then would it not be more significant to relate it to body weight rather than height? Edit: So it would seem from the research that the first part of te statement is broadly true - there is a slight increased risk with height, but the second part, about it being due to the number of cells, is complete invention. They dont know why there is a link.
Some of the statements on this list are so wild that we did a double-take... and then a deep dive into a world of fascinating but fake-sounding facts.
Many of us have heard of auras, but who knew that humans actually glow? The light we emit apparently fades when we take our last breath. The fact that we glow was already discovered back in 2009. But a new study conducted by scientists from the University of Calgary and published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, looked into what happens to that light at the end of the tunnel we call life.
RELATED:
#2
One aspect that makes memory unreliable in detail is that you only remember an event one time. After that, each time you recall it, you're only remembering the last time you remembered it, not the event itself. Memory is a game of telephone we play with ourselves.
#3
Placebos show positive effect even when you know you're being given a placebo.
Child of the Stars 3 hours ago
Because mental health is linked to physical. How you view a terrible thing has a real effect on how effective physical medical care is.
The phenomenon of glowing comes down to the emission of something called biophotons, and it doesn't only occur in humans. The researchers studied mice and revealed that all living things, including plants, emit a faint light up until their last minutes.
“The fact that ultraweak photon emission is a real thing is undeniable at this point,” said the study’s senior author, Dan Oblak. “This really shows that this is not just an imperfection or caused by other biological processes. It’s really something that comes from all living things.”
As the New Scientist reported, monitoring this signal could one day help track forest health or even detect diseases in people.
#4
Per capita, the Vatican City has the highest crime rate in the world.
#5
There are more stars in the observable universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world.
Stardust she/her 5 minutes ago
There are more trees on earth than stars in our galaxy (~2-3 Trillion trees vs 100-500 billion stars). There are more hydrogen atoms in a molecule of water than there are stars in our solar system :P
#6
If you take a tiny bit of weakened virus, or just the part of it that says "hey I'm such and such virus," and put it in your body it will later protect you (and those around you) from said virus.
Lukas (he/him, it/its) 6 hours ago
But!!! But it also gives you autism!!! And we never had vaccines before!!! We did just fine!!! And this person on Facebook said these expensive essential oils will work so much better!!!
Another mind-blowing and potentially unbelievable fact on the list was the one about shuffling a deck of cards. Specifically that there are more ways to shuffle a deck of cards than there are atoms in the solar system.
It sounds wild but this has been backed up by experts at McGill University who report that "there are somewhere in the range of 8x1067 ways to sort a deck of cards. That’s an 8 followed by 67 zeros."
According to the university's site, "even if someone could rearrange a deck of cards every second of the universe’s total existence, the universe would end before they would get even one billionth of the way to finding a repeat."
It adds that no matter how many card games you've played, even if you're a professional blackjack dealer, there are too many ways to arrange 52 cards for any randomly organized set of cards to repeat itself in your lifetime.
#7
Most of the cells in your body don't belong to you. We are a superorganism. We evolved a symbiotic relationship with good gut bacteria.
You literally need and depend on bacteria inside your body to perform functions your body cannot perform on its own. .
Rick Murray 1 hour ago
My gut bacteria is chaotic good. They do their job until they decide not to. 🤷🏻♀️
#8
That time literally runs at different speeds depending on where you are. Because of gravity and relativity a clock on the floor ticks a tiny bit slower than a clock on a shelf and scientists have actually measured the difference with insanely precise atomic clocks.
Child of the Stars 3 hours ago
And what you're doing. The length of a minute is also dependent on which side of the bathroom door you're standing!
#9
Oxford University is older than Machu Picchu in Peru.
What about someone saying we should google "cosmic latte"? Well, okay then. Challenge accepted.
One of the articles that came up was published on the BBC's Science Focus. The title, The Universe has an average colour – and it’s called cosmic latte, says it all. What might have been dismissed as nonsense, is in fact, fact.
#10
The platypus.
#11
Quantum entanglement. Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance”.
Rick Murray 1 hour ago
Quantum anything. It's like a system designed to take a big fat dump on the rules of how the universe is supposed to work.
#12
Carrots make you see better in the dark.
A lie created by the British in WWII so the Germans didn't realise the radar the British pilots had.
Later it was discovered the keratin in carrots actually *does* help you see at night.
According to the site, a 2002 study found that "the light coming from galaxies (and the stars within them) – alongside all the visible clouds of gas and dust in the Universe – when averaged, would produce an ivory color very close to white." And this color is called... you guessed it: ‘cosmic latte’.
Apparently the Universe's ‘beigeness’ is due to the fact that there are a few more regions that produce red, yellow and green light than those that produce blue.
"Averaged over the entire sky, however, this beige colour is diluted and appears almost, but not entirely, black," explains Science Focus.
#13
In an experiment where ground-breeding bird nests where observed, deer raided more of the nests than foxes and wildcats.
#14
Sometimes when you move your eyes to look at a clock the second hand appears stuck for a moment because your brain retroactively edits your memory of the time your eyes were moving so you believe you've been looking at the clock longer than you have.
#15
We have little crystals in our inner ear. If they get out of place, it can upset your sense of balance. It’s sometimes possible to get them back into place by moving your head a certain way. I’m a speech pathologist. I studied audiology and the anatomy of the speech and hearing mechanisms, but that was over 25 years ago and I never heard about these crystals. Apparently they were discovered before that time so I don’t know why we were never taught about them. My mom told me the doctor had her move her head to get her crystals back in place and I thought it was a total hoax until I looked it up. .
Stephanie Did It 4 hours ago
Yes! It's called BPPV. Mine were disrupted by a fall when my head hit the pavement. The ENT taught me the Epley maneuver to realign the crystals in my ear and relieve vertigo. And it works. So yeah, we really do have rocks in our heads, sort of.
#16
HUMANS GLOW! We glow an infrared light from biochemical reactions. it's just too weak for your eyes.
#17
There are more castles in Germany than McDonald's in USA.
Ace 4 hours ago
Maybe. The European Castle Institute quotes an estimate of 25000, But this number includes ruined castles including those with only ground-level traces left, so what it really means is that in the course of history there _have_been_ more castles. Less than 20% of the 5000 currently listed castles are still standing
#18
You can survive without a significant portion of your brain.
Roman Arendt 3 hours ago (edited)
With almost no brain at all. The Orange T**d and his Redhat Cult remind us every effing day.
#20
Dragonflies experience up to 9Gs when cornering, they are the most efficient preditor catching up to 95% of the prey they go after, they breath through their bums and most varieties (not sure if that's the correct word) can't walk.
Chich the witch 3 hours ago
Those are Damselflies. Related to, but not Dragonflies. Yeah I know, one in every crowd.
#21
You are mostly made of empty space between atomic particles.
#22
The French Secret Service placed a limpet mine on a Greenpeace ship and sunk it to stop it protesting French Nuclear Testing in the Pacific.
They were so incompetent 2 were caught in days and the others only just managed to escape via submarine after sinking their yacht.
Using trade, the French Govt then blackmailed the New Zealand Government into releasing the captives.
England (NZ’s founder) refused to support them and then the USA turned against NZ because of NZ’s no nuks stand. All this drove NZ to have an independent foreign policy so they no-longer automatically follow anybody else’s lead.
So much for relying your friends and allies and history now repeating with the US giving the finger to the whole world except former enemies!
#23
The closest planet to Earth is... *usually Mercury*.
Because Venus has a longer orbit and spends more time the other side of the Sun, while Mercury has far less of an orbit and does it quicker.
#24
Tumbleweeds are not native to North America. They are invasive.
#25
A full head of healthy Human hair has enough tensile strength to lift and support a full grown elephant.
#26
There are more ways to shuffle a standard deck of cards than there are atoms in the solar system. By a lot. It’s not even remotely close.
#29
In my area (linguistics), the idea that languages can't be correct or incorrect. We grow up in such policed language environments in school that we normalise this entirely.
"Correct" language is quite literally what people want it to be, same with "incorrect" or "bad" language.
Ace 3 hours ago
And in recent times many local 'dialects' which used to be thought of as 'bad' have been accepted as being distinct languages in their own right. Examples include Scots, about as similar to English as Swedish is to Norwegian, mostly mutually understandable but with its own distinct vocabulary and grammar. Also the variatins of German spoken across Switzerland.
#30
There used to be blue people in the US.
Seems like the sort of thing they should’ve taught us in history class.
Nils Skirnir 6 hours ago
The Blue Fugates of Kentucky. Genetic anomaly that affected how oxygen was processed and resulted in cyanosis. In this case it was due to inbreeding, but can also be caused by benzene exposure
#31
Humans have stripes, they're called blaschko lines, they only normally appear visible if you have specific skin conditions/syndromes.
There are theories though that some animals can see them visibily even without those presenting conditions, which would be funny, if our pets are just thinking we're goofy striped animals.
#32
Transmutation
It's what scientists do with supercolliders, basically. A substudy of nuclear chemistry.
#34
Today, I learned about left-handed anger!
If you have an angry impulse, act it out with your left hand instead cause you look so weak and stupid doing it, It's automatically funny and you deescalate yourself.
#35
You share 50% of your DNA with bananas.
Not 'similar genes.' Literally half your genetic code is the same as a banana's.
We're all fruit. Existence is a joke.
Rick Murray 1 hour ago
Flat out wrong. It isn't 50% or whatever. Our genetic expression is extremely complicated, billions of sequences, and roughly 2% of it is coding DNA (the majority 98% may or may not serve purposes, we don't really know yet). Of that 2%, a little over half have a correspondence with similar genes in a banana, making an exact match about 40% of the time. So, at best, about 1% of our DNA matches a little under half the time. We actually have more in common with fungi (but not by much, similar numbers) and it's because back when it was the early days of multicellular organisms floating in the ocean, one of them is basically the granddaddy of all life on earth.
#36
My personal favorite: you'll find more genetic diversity in a room full of 50 chimpanzees than in the entire human species.
#37
The Banach-Tarski Paradox. It's a mathematical theorem that essentially states, if you have a solid ball, you can break it up into five disjoint sets of points, move them and rotate them, and end up with two separate solid balls of the same size as the original. In effect, duplicating a ball by cutting it up and rearranging it.
I love me my weird math facts, but this is one that I have trouble accepting sometimes.
#38
Most people stop working due to declining health or death, not financial security or advanced age. Retirement is abnormal.
#40
If you push your tongue to the roof of your mouth and hold it there, you can substantially reduce the pain from sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia, and enjoy ice cream again.
#42
“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a grammatically correct English sentence.
Rick Murray 1 hour ago
If you're stuck: Buffalo buffalo that Buffalo buffalo buffalo, buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
#43
Light is both a particle and a wave, and one or the other when you look at it. Something like that .
Rick Murray 1 hour ago
It's not one of the other *when* you look at it, it's one or the other depending on *how* you look at it. Google "wave-particle duality".
#44
As a population, the people of the USA average less than 2 arms.
Rick Murray 1 hour ago
So THAT is why y'all insist on having the right to additional arms. Now it makes sense.
#45
If you were able to fold a piece of paper in half 103 times, it would be thicker than the known universe.
#46
That a woman's skin when wet has a higher coefficient of friction than a man's. And not by a small margin.
#47
The Sun accounts for 98% of the mass of the solar system. All the planets in the solar system can fit into the Sun 600 times.
#48
With our current classification methods, either: Birds are reptiles, or Crocodiles are not reptiles, as they share a common ancestor more recently than everything else we normally consider a reptile, also the whole birds are dinosaurs and dinosaurs were reptiles.
#49
"The old man the boat"
That is a perfectly grammatically correct and complete sentence. They're called garden path sentences and are plays on how we typically encounter words and our biases in how we interpret them.
If you want a crazy one: "The rat the cat the dog bit chased escaped."
That is a perfectly grammatically correct and complete sentence.
Ace 3 hours ago
Rubbish. They're examples where a case-inflected language like German could make sense, it would give a different ending for direct and indirect objects, for example, but in English we need the word order to give a grammatically correct meaning; the second one can be inferred from the particular verbs used, dog chased cat, cat but rat, rat escaped, but is in no way grammatically clear.
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