All facts — Page 13
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1196 facts
There is a piece of land in Africa that no country in the world claims.
Bir Tawil is a two thousand square kilometre desert area between Egypt and Sudan. Due to discrepancies in borders…
Heroin was originally marketed as a children's cough syrup.
In the late nineteenth century, the pharmaceutical company Bayer sold the drug as a non-addictive cough suppressant…
Ancient Egyptians slept with pillows made of stone or wood.
These "pillows" were rigid supports with a neck groove, designed to keep the head elevated, protect elaborate…
The Great Wall of China was built using sticky rice mortar.
Builders mixed slaked lime with a sticky rice porridge, creating an organic-inorganic binder so strong and…
Abraham Lincoln is in the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.
Before being president, Lincoln was known for his exceptional strength and wrestling skill, having lost only one of…
The CIA spent millions training cats to spy on the Soviet Union.
In the "Acoustic Kitty" project, agents implanted microphones and transmitters in cats, but the project was cancelled…
There are beaches in Hawaii where the sand is naturally green.
The sand at Papakolea Beach owes its unusual colour to the high concentration of olivine, a dense green mineral from…
Some bamboo species flower only once every hundred years and then die.
This phenomenon, called gregarious flowering, occurs simultaneously in plants of the same species worldwide…
There is a mushroom that glows in the dark to attract insects.
The bioluminescence of the "ghost green" mushroom attracts nocturnal insects that, when landing on it, pick up the…
Trees can recognise their "children" and send them more nutrients.
Through the underground fungal network, mother trees identify the roots of their own offspring and redirect more…
The rhinoceros horn is made of the same protein as human hair.
Unlike the horns of other animals that have a bony core, the rhinoceros horn is composed entirely of compacted…
If you fold a piece of paper forty-two times, it reaches the Moon.
The thickness of the paper doubles with each fold. Due to exponential growth, after forty-two theoretical folds, the…
Water can form at least fifteen different phases of ice.
Under different extreme combinations of pressure and temperature, water molecules organise into distinct crystalline…
The Sun does not rotate like a solid body and spins faster at the equator.
Being a ball of plasma, the Sun undergoes differential rotation, taking about twenty-five days to complete a rotation…
On Jupiter and Saturn, it rains diamonds from the sky.
Lightning turns methane into soot that, as it falls, is hardened by extreme pressure until it turns into graphite and…
A year on Pluto is equivalent to two hundred and forty-eight Earth years.
Due to its enormous distance from the Sun and its elliptical orbit, the dwarf planet moves very slowly, taking over…
The first mobile phone call was made to the company's biggest rival.
In nineteen seventy-three, Martin Cooper of Motorola used the first mobile phone prototype to call Joel Engel, the…
The game Pong was not the first video game in history.
Although it popularised the industry in nineteen seventy-two, games like "Tennis for Two" from nineteen fifty-eight…
Sloths cultivate algae in their fur for camouflage and nutrients.
The green algae help hide sloths in the tree canopy, and when they groom themselves, they ingest this algae which…
Certain lizards can squirt blood from their eyes to deter predators.
When threatened by canines like coyotes or foxes, horned lizards increase blood pressure in their head and rupture…
Pigeons can distinguish between paintings by Monet and Picasso.
After training with food rewards, these birds demonstrate an advanced visual ability to categorise artistic styles…
Male cats tend to use their left paw as dominant, while females prefer the right.
Researchers found that paw laterality in cats is strongly linked to the animal's sex, likely due to the influence of…
The type of earwax in humans is determined by a single gene.
A mutation in the ABCC11 gene determines whether the wax will be wet and sticky or dry and flaky, with the dry…
The storage capacity of the human brain is equivalent to two point five petabytes.
Estimates based on the number of synapses suggest the brain could store the equivalent of three million hours of…
