All facts — Page 2
The complete ONAURE library, newest first. Every fact has an explanation and a source you can check.
2056 facts
The narwhal's tusk is actually a sensory organ with millions of nerve endings.
The long spiral tusk of the male narwhal contains up to 10 million nerve endings that detect changes in water…
The human liver can regenerate even after losing three quarters of its tissue.
Liver cells have a unique ability to multiply and replace lost tissue. Within a few weeks, the organ can return to…
The lining of the human stomach renews itself completely every three or four days.
If it did not renew so quickly, the stomach would digest itself due to its strong acids. The epithelial cells of the…
About half of human DNA comes from ancient viruses that infected our ancestors.
Human endogenous retroviruses are remnants of viral infections that occurred millions of years ago and became…
In the 1830s, ketchup was sold in the United States as a medicine to treat diarrhoea.
American doctor John Cook Bennett argued that tomatoes cured various digestive ailments and published recipes for…
Outside Mexico, all vanilla pods must be pollinated by hand, one by one.
The vanilla orchid is only naturally pollinated by a specific bee that lives in Mexico. In other producing countries…
Cheese is the most stolen food in the world, with about 4 percent of global production going missing.
An international study revealed that cheese tops the list of the most shoplifted foods, followed by fresh meat and…
Iceland is one of the few inhabited places in the world where there are no mosquitoes.
Iceland's oceanic climate, with rapid temperature variations and mild winters followed by sudden cold, prevents…
There is a region of Antarctica that has not seen rain or snow for about two million years.
The McMurdo Dry Valleys are considered the most extreme desert on Earth. Katabatic winds evaporate all moisture and…
Sudan has more pyramids than Egypt, with more than two hundred structures discovered.
The kings of ancient Nubia built about 255 pyramids in places like Meroe, many of them smaller and steeper than the…
There is not a single bridge crossing the Amazon River along its entire course.
Despite being more than six thousand kilometres long and passing through several major cities, the Amazon has never…
The Romans used human urine as a whitening mouthwash for their teeth.
The ammonia present in decomposed urine had effective bleaching properties. The Romans even imported urine from the…
The shortest war in history lasted only 38 minutes, between the United Kingdom and Zanzibar.
On 27 August 1896, when the new sultan of Zanzibar took power without British approval, the Royal Navy bombarded the…
From a genetic point of view, fungi are closer to animals than to plants.
Fungi share with animals characteristics such as chitin in their cell walls and glycogen as an energy reserve…
The largest known living organism is a fungus that covers nearly nine square kilometres in Oregon.
The fungus Armillaria ostoyae, known as the honey mushroom, spreads through the Malheur National Forest via an…
There is a species of jellyfish that can reverse its life cycle and become biologically immortal.
Turritopsis dohrnii can transform its adult cells into young cells when sick or injured, returning to the polyp…
A lightning bolt can be five times hotter than the surface of the Sun.
The temperature in a lightning channel can reach about 30000 degrees Celsius, while the surface of the Sun is around…
In the laboratory, scientists have managed to slow light to just 17 metres per second.
Using a Bose-Einstein condensate made of ultra-cooled sodium atoms, researchers at Harvard drastically reduced the…
If the Earth were compressed to become a black hole, it would be the size of a golf ball.
For an object to become a black hole, its mass must be compressed within the so-called Schwarzschild radius. In the…
Diamonds can burn like coal when exposed to high temperatures and oxygen.
Diamond is made of pure carbon, just like coal, and combusts at about 800 degrees Celsius in the presence of oxygen…
The Sun accounts for about 99.86 percent of the total mass of the solar system.
Jupiter and Saturn are the largest planets and hold most of the remaining mass, but even combined they represent only…
The Moon is moving away from the Earth at a rate of about 3.8 centimetres per year.
The gravitational interaction between the Earth and the Moon causes the Earth to lose rotational energy through…
There is a molecular cloud at the centre of the Milky Way that contains billions of litres of alcohol.
The Sagittarius B2 cloud, near the galactic centre, contains large quantities of ethanol and ethyl alcohol. It is…
The first webcam in history was created to monitor a coffee pot at the University of Cambridge.
In 1991, researchers at the Cambridge computing laboratory installed a camera that took three pictures per minute of…