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47 Completely Useless Yet Interesting Facts That Live Rent-Free In People’s Heads
Our mind is a peculiar thing. We might forget where we parked our car or what we walked into a room to get, but a random story from the Medieval ages? Or a detail about the cremation process? Those can live in our heads forever.
So when Reddit user OkAdministration1387 asked everyone on the platform to share the useless yet interesting facts permanently stuck in their brains, people jumped in with all sorts of oddly specific answers. Trivia nerds, unite!
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#2
Otters hold hands while sleeping so they don't drift apart. it's called a raft.
#3
Watermelons are berries, strawberries aren't, technically you can categorize bananas as grass
You can fit every planet in the solar system between the Earth and the Moon side by side and still have some space left
Saturn is slowly absorbing its own rings
There's an "Earth-like" exoplanet that rains glass. SIDEWAYS.
There's a nebula that's full of the chemical that tastes like raspberry and smells like rum. The only catch is that it's also full of cyanide...
Jupiter is as much protecting the Earth from asteroids as it is slinging them directly at it
Our solar system has one of if not the single rarest planet layouts which might've contributed to the fact that there's life on Earth
We're either alone or not alone and both options are equally terrifying
... I'm gonna stop now because no one's gonna read this anyway.
#4
Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire. That one still doesnt feel real to me.
Michael Largey 7 hours ago (edited)
And the University of al-Qarawiyyin, still in operation, is more that two centuries older than Oxford. Keith Richard's grandson was in the first graduating class.
#5
Bees can recognize human faces.
#6
The Scottish Highlands and the Appalachians are the same mountain range.
Earonn - 8 hours ago
My favourite fact about Scottish geology. ♥ And that the Highlands used to be about as high as the Himalayans today, they're just way older and eroded. And that they came to be because England crashed into us (no really, the political border is at about the same place as the geological suture).
#7
A 'factoid' is a small piece of incorrect information, but so ubiquitously believed that it is treated as truth.
Most people think that a factoid is a little fun fact.
So, the widely believed definition of factoid is, in itself, a factoid.
Tim Douglass 15 hours ago
Interesting that Merriam-Webster has both definitions. With the incorrect fact listed as the original. The Cambridge Dictionary, however, only lists the second definition "an interesting piece of information". I think that this tends to indicate that the colloquial usage is becoming the standard, and the original meaning is diminishing. Language does that.
#8
When Vikings would forge their iron they would forge in bones of an animal like bears or wolves they had hunted thinking the power of its soul would be in the blade making it stronger like the animal, it would actually make it stronger because the bones would create carbon during the process creating a crude version of steel.
#9
A group of flamingos is called a flamboyance. Been stuck in my head since 4th grade.
#10
The air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow is approximately 24mph.
#11
A pigeon will only eat a Starburst if you chew it up a little bit first. Just to clarify chew the Starburst not the pigeon.
#12
Helicopter isn't heli + copter, it's helico + pter
Pter is wing, like pterodactyl. Helico is like helix, spiral.
#14
Biologically, vegetables aren't a thing
"Vegetables" are a culinary category, not a biological one.
#15
Chicken is a dinosaur.
#16
Tigers are king of the jungle, not Lions.
Tigers are also much larger and more capable than lions.
Elladine DesIsles 14 hours ago
Also, lions don't actually live in jungles. Since modern lion and tiger territory doesn't overlap, each species could be monarch of their respective habitats, but lions would be kings and queens of the savannah, grassland and scrubland.
#17
The word bed looks like a bed.
12 hours ago
The word B**b: bird's eye view (so to speak), viewed from the front, and viewed from the side.
#18
Killer whales are dolphins. Cougar, mountain lion, & puma are all the same animal.
David Paterson 10 hours ago
Want another one? A black panther isn't a single species. It can be any of five different big cat species species, including jaguar, leopard, snow leopard, lion or tiger.
#19
A horse could fit inside the bubble made by a blue whale fart.
#20
A starfish has one cavity and uses it for eating and waste. According to my Marine biology teacher they are proctostomes (butt mouth). Sometimes I call people this and they don't know why so not totally useless. Idk remember the actual biology or the spelling but it is a word permanently stuck in my head.
#21
Bananas are berries but strawberries aren’t.
Science was clearly just making stuff up that day.
#22
Barilla has a series of official Spotify playlists with running times that perfectly match the cooking time of different pasta shapes.
I have never made authentic pasta so never used it.
#23
An ostrich's eyes are about the size of tennis balls.
Bonus fact: ostrichs' eyes are bigger than their brain.
#24
Vultures have such good eyesight they could read a standard newspaper at a distance of 1 to 2 miles.
#25
Wombats poo is cubic.
David Paterson 10 hours ago
Square prism rather than cubic. The shortest dimension is about half the longest two dimensions.
#27
That your tongue rests on the upper side in your mouth.
#29
Woodpeckers' tongues wrap around and protect their brains when they're woodpecking.
NightOwlPanda 10 hours ago (edited)
In addition to his cricket friend, Pinocchio had a woodpecker.
#31
Ohio is the only US state name that shares no letters with the word “Mackerel”.
#32
The silent “p” in pterodactyl has added absolutely nothing to my life, and yet I still think about it every single time I see the word.
#33
You can get a castle for darn near free if you want to restore it in Italy.
Roman Arendt 13 hours ago
And Czechia, and Germany, and Austria, and Poland. Many places all over Europe. But you can't just buy it, with signing the contract you commit to restaurate it under the local architectural preservation rules. It can be a bargain, but it usually isn't. But it's an established model now for decades to preserve these buildings for the future.
#34
The plastic sleeve at the end of a shoelace is called an "aglet." Its true purpose is just to help the shoelace go through the eyelets.
I worked with shoes and this fact changed my view on the world.
#36
The original pilot for Powerpuff Girls was called Whoopass Stew, and instead of Chemical X the professor accidentally spilled a can of Whoopass when creating the girls.
#38
The original pink dye in FrankenBerry cereal would turn your poo bright pink.
Patrick Casavant 14 hours ago
There was a flavour of slush called "swamp" which was turning it a very disgusting green with the water around slowly turning bright green... First time I saw that I made the pikachu face. And then going to tell everyone and drink some more.
#40
Each “E” in “Mercedes” is pronounced differently.
Roman Arendt 14 hours ago (edited)
I'd say this is the case only for the english pronunciation. In Spanish (its origin) and German, the first and the third e are pronounced the same.
#42
The United Arab Emirates is the longest country name with alternating vowels and consonants.
#43
SCUBA stands for Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus.
Anyone else watch Family Ties?
#44
If you brake suddenly with a helium balloon floating about in your car, the balloon will go backwards.
Ace 11 hours ago
Actually it won't. It's still moving forward wrt the ground, just that the air in the cabin has a higher density than the helium, so is accelerated towards the front of the vehicle at a higher rate, causing the balloon to move towards the rear of the cabin, but that of course is still moving forward until it reaches a stop.
#45
A calorie is the amount of heat energy required to raise 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius
For some reason I read it one time and have remembered it verbatim for over a decade.
#46
The reduction gear ratio of the training ship belonging to the maritime academy I went to is 3.67:1.
#47
Despite the Tyrannosaurus Rex being one of the most, if not the most, studied dinosaur, we know basically nothing about it. We thought they lived to about 20 maybe 30,new info suggests they basically never stopped growing.
Also most of what we thought were juvenile T-Rex fossils turned out to be a completely different species.
David Paterson 10 hours ago
"most of what we thought were juvenile T-Rex fossils turned out to be a completely different species." This has been debunked, it's exactly the opposite. What was originally thought to be a different species, nanotyrannis, has now been confirmed to be a juvenile T. rex.
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Littlemiss 9 hours ago (edited)
When you can't remember the right word to say or write it is called lethologica.
Littlemiss 9 hours ago (edited)
When you can't remember the right word to say or write it is called lethologica.
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