All facts
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2056 facts
Zebras have completely black skin under their striped fur.
The stripes of zebras are only pigmentation patterns in the fur. If you shave a zebra, the skin underneath is dark…
Koalas have fingerprints almost identical to humans.
Koala fingerprints are so similar to ours that they have sometimes confused forensic investigators at crime scenes in…
Adélie penguins offer a pebble to their partner as a mating proposal.
Males search for the smoothest and most perfect pebble they can find and offer it to the female. If she accepts it…
Sheep can recognize human and other sheep faces in photographs.
Cambridge researchers discovered that sheep can learn to recognize the faces of famous people and other sheep from…
The human liver can completely regenerate even after a large portion of the tissue is removed.
It is the only internal organ in the human body with this extraordinary ability. As long as at least 25 percent of…
Ketchup was originally sold in the 1830s as a medicine to treat diarrhoea.
American doctor John Cook Bennett declared that tomatoes could cure diarrhoea and indigestion, and sold the recipe as…
Carrots were originally purple or yellow before the orange variety was cultivated.
The orange carrot was developed by Dutch farmers in the 17th century, supposedly to honour the House of Orange and…
The Sahara desert is not mostly made of sand, but rather gravel and rock.
Only about 25 percent of the Sahara is covered by sand dunes. Most of its surface is made up of gravel plains, rocky…
Iceland is one of the few inhabited places in the world that has no mosquitoes.
Despite having a damp climate and cold temperatures similar to other Nordic regions where mosquitoes thrive, the…
Mount Everest grows about four millimetres a year due to the movement of tectonic plates.
The Indian plate continues to push against the Eurasian plate, forcing the Himalayan mountain range to rise slowly…
Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid.
The Great Pyramid of Giza was built around 2560 BC. Cleopatra lived around 30 BC, and the Apollo 11 mission landed on…
There are fungi capable of breaking down and consuming polyurethane plastic.
Students at Yale University discovered a species of fungus in the Amazon rainforest that can survive by feeding…
The oceans contain about twenty million tons of dissolved gold.
Gold is present in seawater in very low concentrations, about parts per trillion. Although the total amount is…
Window glass is not a very viscous liquid, it is an amorphous solid.
The myth that glass flows over the centuries comes from old windows that are thicker at the bottom. This happened…
The atom is mostly empty space, if we removed that space all of humanity would fit in a sugar cube.
The nucleus of an atom is incredibly dense, but tiny compared to the electron cloud. If we compressed all the empty…
An average cumulus cloud weighs about five hundred tons of water.
Although they seem light and fluffy, clouds contain millions of water droplets. The density of water is high, and the…
A year on Venus is shorter than a day on Venus.
Venus takes 225 Earth days to orbit the Sun, which constitutes its year. However, its rotation is extremely slow…
There are more stars in the observable universe than grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth.
Astronomers estimate that there are between 10^22 and 10^24 stars in the universe. Even counting every grain of sand…
The astronauts footprints on the Moon will last millions of years because there is no wind or water.
The lack of an atmosphere on the Moon means there is no weather, wind or water to erode the surface. The footprints…
The first computer mouse was made of wood and had two metal wheels.
It was invented by Douglas Engelbart in 1964. The wooden box contained the electronic components and the button, but…
The first digital camera was built by Kodak in 1975 and weighed over three kilos.
Engineer Steven Sasson created the prototype using parts from tape recorders and Fairchild's new digital sensor. The…
Sharks have existed on Earth longer than trees have.
The first sharks appeared around 400 million years ago, while the first trees only emerged about 350 million years…
Cats cannot taste sweetness in food.
Cats lack the TAS1R2 gene responsible for detecting sweet flavours. This genetic mutation occurred millions of years…
Some turtles can breathe through their rear end during hibernation.
The Mary River turtle in Australia has a specialized cloaca with vascularized papillae that absorb oxygen directly…