45 Random Facts That May Not Add Value To Your Life, But Can Make Your Day More Interesting

Switzerland has made it illegal to own just one guinea pig or parrot, on the grounds that keeping a social animal without companionship counts as animal cruelty. You need at least two. Genuinely one of the more reasonable laws on the books anywhere.

Every clownfish is born male. They can switch to female, but only to become the dominant female of a group, and once they do, there's no going back. Finding Nemo leaves a lot out.

Before she was Queen, Elizabeth II was a teenage mechanic trained by the British Army during World War II. That range is impressive to say the least.

In the 1960s, the CIA spent millions implanting microphones in cats' ears and radio transmitters in their skulls, hoping to train them to sit near foreign officials and eavesdrop on private conversations. The program was scrapped when they arrived at the same conclusion any cat owner could have told them for free—cats do whatever they want.

The word "honeymoon" comes from the medieval tradition of giving newlyweds enough honey wine to last their first month of marriage. Romance has always had a practical side.

Elvis was one of the biggest superstars on the planet, but he never actually performed outside of North America.

Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is a real neurological condition in which objects appear closer or farther than they are, limbs seem to change size, and time moves at the wrong speed. Lewis Carroll may have been writing from experience.

Barbie has a full government name, Barbara Millicent Roberts, and she's been keeping it quiet since 1959.

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is the clinical term for a fear of long words. Whoever named it was not being kind.

Owls swallow small animals whole, let their stomach dissolve everything that it can, and then compact the bones and feathers into a neat little pellet and spit it back out. Efficient, if not exactly refined dining.

Fredric Baur invented the Pringles can and was so proud of it that he asked to be buried in one. His family honored the request by putting some of his ashes inside one. Once you pop, you really can't stop.

Babies are born with around 300 bones. By adulthood, that number drops to just over 200 as bones fuse together over time. You spend your whole childhood losing bones, and nobody warns you!

McDonald's once engineered bubblegum-flavored broccoli to try to get kids to eat more vegetables. It did not work. Shockingly.

The filling inside a KitKat is made from rejected KitKats that didn't pass quality control. They grind up the imperfect ones and put them inside the perfect ones. So you can probably feel like an eco-warrior when eating one now!

During medieval times in Europe, animals were regularly put on trial for crimes including crop destruction and unaliving people! Courts took these cases completely seriously because people genuinely believed animals were capable of sin and guilt, and therefore deserved the same legal accountability as humans.

Humans are only born with two fears: falling and loud noises. Every other thing you're afraid of, you picked up along the way.

Every year in Lopburi, Thailand, residents lay out 4.5 tons of fruit and vegetables for the 3,000 monkeys that live near the local temple. The monkeys have their own annual buffet, and honestly, that sounds more fun than most human festivals.

Polar bears are secretly wearing a black wetsuit under fur that isn't even white! It's translucent, just reflecting light back at you. The whole fluffy white bear thing is essentially an optical illusion.

Australia is wider than the Moon. East to west, the country stretches almost 4,000 kilometers compared to the Moon's 3,400-kilometer diameter. The Moon wins on total surface area since it's a sphere, but still.

As if chess wasn't hard enough to understand already! There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than there are atoms in the observable universe.

Nobody knows who invented the fire hydrant because the patent was destroyed in a fire at the U.S. Patent Office in 1836. The irony is immaculate.

Unbelievable as it might sound, Snoop Dogg's parents didn't give him that name at birth. His real name is Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. Much less gangster.

A blue whale's heart weighs 400 pounds, pumps 60 gallons of blood per beat, and its heartbeat can be heard from two miles away. The human heart pumps 2.4 ounces per beat. Why are humans running the world again?

Sloths can hold their breath for up to 40 minutes underwater, longer than dolphins. The laziest animal on the planet is secretly an elite diver. That's maybe why they always look so smug.

Moose can dive 18 feet underwater to get to their preferred food. Enormous, ungainly-looking creatures with a secret swimming career were not on our bingo cards.

Those fluffy white things drifting peacefully overhead aren't as light as they seem. A cloud can weigh upwards of 550 tons! That's not even talking about one shaped like an elephant...

You will produce somewhere between half a liter and a liter and a half of saliva today. That's roughly 17 to 50 ounces for Americans.

Woodpecker tongues are long enough to wrap around their own brain, acting as a built-in shock absorber against the impact of pecking wood all day. Nature's helmet.

A goldfish named Tish lived to 43 years old in the UK, which is several decades longer than anyone tells you when you win one at a fair.

Dogs are responsible for the 3rd most fatalities in the UK! They are only behind bees and cows.

The fastest hands on land might belong to Mike Tyson, but in the water, it belongs to the mantis shrimp. At only four inches long, it's capable of throwing a 50mph punch hard enough to shatter glass tanks. The mantis shrimp is the most terrifying thing in the ocean that you've never thought to be afraid of.

A grizzly bear can bite through a bowling ball (not sure who figured this out... or why...). Their bite force hits around 1,000 pounds per square inch, enough to crush bone like it's nothing. Good information to have, hopefully never useful.

Sharks have been around for at least 419 million years, which means they predate grass, dinosaurs, mammals, and Saturn's rings. This is their planet, and we're all just visiting.

If you sneeze when you step into bright sunlight, you might have something called Achoo Syndrome, which is a real medical condition and also the best-named condition in the history of medicine.

The fastest muscle in your body is the one that closes your eyelid, snapping shut in under 100 milliseconds when something gets too close to your eye. Blink, and you'll miss it, literally.

The world's most expensive pizza costs $2,700 and is topped with foie gras, two types of caviar, truffles, Stilton cheese, and 24-karat gold leaves on squid-ink dough. A pizza that costs $2,700 should, at a minimum, come with a free parking spot in Manhattan.

Honey never expires! Archaeologists have found 3,000-year-old honey in Egyptian tombs that was still perfectly edible. A combination of low water content, high acidity, and antibacterial properties means sealed honey will essentially last forever, which is more than can be said for most things the Egyptians left behind.

Redheads require about 20% more anesthesia than everyone else due to their genetics. So it might be worth mentioning before going under that you aren't a "natural redhead."

A lightning bolt heats the air around it to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is five times hotter than the surface of the sun. Something to think about next time you're waiting out a storm.

Human tongues have unique prints just like fingers, and no two are alike, even in identical twins. Fortunately, nobody has to press their tongue to a scanner to unlock their phone. Yet.

California experiences over 100,000 earthquakes a year. Most are too small to feel, which is the only reason anyone still lives there.

Every time you shuffle a deck of cards, the specific order those 52 cards land in has almost certainly never existed before and will never exist again. There are more possible arrangements than atoms on Earth.

You're about a centimeter taller when you wake up than when you go to bed. Your spine decompresses overnight and then gets squashed back down throughout the day. So, technically, everyone is lying on their driver's license.

You can technically make a diamond out of peanut butter. The carbon in the spread can be crystallized into a diamond under the right heat and pressure. The catch is that it takes three weeks to produce a stone roughly the size of a match head, so Skippy is not going to put De Beers out of business anytime soon.