All facts — Page 12
The complete ONAURE library, newest first. Every fact has an explanation and a source you can check.
2056 facts
The deepest point in the ocean is deeper than Mount Everest is tall.
The Challenger Deep, in the Mariana Trench, reaches about 11,000 metres deep. Mount Everest is 8,849 metres high. If…
The Caspian Sea is the largest lake in the world and is bigger than many countries.
With about 371,000 square kilometres, the Caspian Sea is larger than Germany or Japan. Despite its name, it is a…
The Sahara Desert is almost the size of the United States.
The Sahara covers about 9.2 million square kilometres, while the United States has approximately 9.8 million. Despite…
Cleopatra lived closer in time to the invention of the iPhone than to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
The Great Pyramid was built around 2560 BC. Cleopatra lived between 69 and 30 BC, about 2,500 years later. The first…
Lightning strikes the Earth about 100 times per second.
It is estimated that between 50 and 100 electrical discharges occur per second worldwide, adding up to about 8…
Giant sequoias have bark so resistant to fire that they survive forest fires.
Sequoia bark can be up to 60 centimetres thick and is poor in resin, which makes it hard to burn. In addition, the…
Mount Everest grows a few millimetres per year due to the movement of tectonic plates.
The collision between the Indian plate and the Eurasian plate continues to push the Himalayas upwards. Satellite…
The Moon is moving away from the Earth by about 4 centimetres per year.
The Moons gravity causes tides in the Earths oceans. This movement creates friction that transfers energy from the…
A teaspoon of material from a neutron star would weigh a billion tonnes on Earth.
Neutron stars are the ultra-dense remnants of stars that exploded. Their matter is so compressed that a teaspoon…
The first documented computer bug was a moth trapped inside a computer in 1947.
Engineers at Harvard University found a moth stuck between the relays of the Mark II computer. They taped the insect…
The first mobile phone weighed almost a kilogram and cost the equivalent of several thousand euros.
The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, launched in 1983, weighed about 790 grams and measured 25 centimetres without the…
The wood frog can survive frozen for weeks.
During winter, up to 65 percent of the wood frogs body freezes. Its heart stops beating, breathing ceases and blood…
Sharks have no bones, their skeleton is made of cartilage.
Unlike most fish, sharks and rays have a skeleton entirely made of cartilage. Cartilage is lighter and more flexible…
Dung beetles use the Milky Way to navigate at night.
When rolling a ball of dung, dung beetles need to travel in a straight line so they do not return to the starting…
The human nose can distinguish more than one trillion different odours.
For decades it was thought that the human nose could only distinguish about 10,000 odours. A 2014 study published in…
The cornea of the human eye has no blood vessels, which is why it is transparent.
The cornea is the transparent layer at the front of the eye. To maintain transparency, it cannot have blood vessels…
The human body contains enough iron to make a small nail.
Most of the bodys iron is in haemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen. In total, an adult has…
Chillies do not contain heat, they only activate the pain receptors on the tongue.
Capsaicin, the molecule that makes chillies hot, binds to TRPV1 receptors, the same ones that detect heat. The brain…
Pistachios are seeds, not nuts.
Botanically, the pistachio is the seed of a drupe, the fruit of the Pistacia vera tree. What we eat is the seed…
Canada has more lakes than the rest of the world combined.
Canada holds about 62 percent of the worlds lakes, estimated at more than 3 million. Most are in the Canadian Shield…
The Dead Sea is a lake, not a sea.
Despite its name, the Dead Sea is a saltwater lake with no connection to the ocean. It is located in the Jordan…
Africa is the only continent that lies in all four hemispheres.
The African continent is crossed by the Equator and the Prime Meridian. This means that parts of Africa lie in the…
There are more than 80,000 edible plants, but we only consume about 150.
Humanity knows and uses only a small fraction of edible plant diversity. Of the roughly 80,000 edible plant species…
The largest living organism in the world is an underground fungus in Oregon.
Known as Armillaria ostoyae, this fungus covers about 9.6 square kilometres in the Malheur National Forest, Oregon…