All facts — Page 15
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2056 facts
Figs are pollinated by wasps that die inside the fruit.
The female wasp enters the fig to lay eggs and pollinate the inner flowers. In the process, she loses her wings and…
Ketchup was sold as a medicine to purify the blood in the eighteen thirties.
An American doctor sold tomato extract as a cure for diarrhea, indigestion, and rheumatism. The addition of vinegar…
Saffron is often more expensive than gold by weight.
Saffron comes from the stigmas of the Crocus sativus flower. Each flower produces only three tiny stigmas that must…
The potato was the first vegetable to be grown in space.
In nineteen ninety-five, aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia, scientists successfully grew potatoes, testing the…
Mount Chimborazo is the point on Earth closest to the Sun due to the equatorial bulge.
The Earth is not a perfect sphere, being wider at the equator. Because Chimborazo is very close to the equator, its…
Istanbul is the only city in the world located on two different continents.
The Bosphorus Strait divides the city between the European side and the Asian side. This unique position has made it…
Lesotho is the only country in the world entirely above one thousand meters in elevation.
Also known as the Kingdom in the Sky, its lowest point is at one thousand four hundred meters. This makes it the…
The Dry Valleys in Antarctica have not seen rain for about two million years.
Despite being covered in ice elsewhere, this specific region is an extreme polar desert. Very strong katabatic winds…
Woolly mammoths were still alive when the Great Pyramids of Egypt were being built.
A small population of mammoths survived on Wrangel Island until sixteen fifty BC, long after most had died out and…
Ancient Romans used human urine to whiten their teeth and wash their clothes.
The urea in urine decomposes into ammonia, which is an excellent cleaning and bleaching agent. The Roman government…
Heroin was originally marketed as a cough syrup intended for children.
The Bayer company launched diacetylmorphine in the late nineteenth century as a non-addictive cough suppressant and…
The Australian military officially lost a war against a population of emus.
In nineteen thirty-two, soldiers armed with machine guns tried to control an emu migration that was destroying crops…
A strand of spider silk is stronger than steel of the same thickness.
The silk protein has a molecular structure that gives it extraordinary tensile strength. It is also very elastic…
Lightning strikes the Earth's surface about eight million times a day.
The difference in electrical charge between clouds and the ground continuously discharges. This results in about one…
The Son Doong cave in Vietnam is so large it has its own weather system.
Its volume is so immense that the air inside cools and condenses, creating underground clouds and localized rain. It…
Dust from the Sahara Desert fertilizes the Amazon Rainforest across the Atlantic Ocean.
Winds carry millions of tons of phosphorus-rich dust from the Bodele Depression to South America, replenishing the…
The eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in eighteen eighty-three produced the loudest sound ever recorded.
The explosion was heard nearly five thousand kilometers away and the shockwave circled the globe multiple times. It…
There is enough gold in the Earth's core to coat the surface of the planet.
Heavy and siderophile elements sank to the center during Earth's formation. It is estimated there is enough gold down…
About one million Earths could fit inside the volume of the Sun.
The Sun contains over ninety-nine percent of the solar system's mass. Its diameter is about one million four hundred…
The exoplanet 55 Cancri e is largely composed of diamond.
Its mass and radius suggest a composition very rich in carbon. Due to the extreme pressure and heat near its star…
Space is completely silent because there is no medium for sound to travel through.
Sound is a mechanical wave that needs molecules like air or water to propagate. In the vacuum of space, the lack of…
Olympus Mons on Mars is almost three times taller than Mount Everest.
This shield volcano reaches about twenty-two kilometers in height. The lack of moving tectonic plates on Mars allowed…
The first recorded computer bug was an actual moth stuck in a relay.
In nineteen forty-seven, Grace Hopper and her team found the insect in the Harvard Mark II. They taped it into the…
The world's first webcam was invented to monitor a coffee pot.
Scientists at Cambridge University were tired of walking to the breakroom only to find the coffee pot empty. They set…