All facts — Page 24
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2056 facts
Mount Thor in Canada has the highest and steepest vertical drop on Earth.
The west face of this mountain on Baffin Island has a purely vertical drop of one thousand two hundred and fifty…
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…
The characteristic smell of rain is caused by a soil bacteria.
Bacteria of the genus Streptomyces produce a chemical compound called geosmin. When raindrops hit dry soil, they…
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…
Space has a distinct smell of seared steak and hot metal.
Astronauts returning from spacewalks report that their suits retain the smell of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons…
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 Sun contains ninety-nine point eight six percent of the Solar System's mass.
The mass of all the planets, moons, asteroids, and comets combined represents only a tiny fraction of zero point one…
There is a water cloud in space with one hundred and forty trillion times the water of Earth's oceans.
Astronomers detected a gigantic reservoir of water vapour surrounding a quasar twelve billion light-years away…
Some neutron stars spin seven hundred times per second.
Known as millisecond pulsars, these collapsed stars rotate at extreme speeds due to the conservation of angular…
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 GPS system would not work without Einstein's theory of relativity.
Because GPS satellites move fast and are in weaker gravity, their atomic clocks gain about thirty-eight microseconds…
The "Save" icon on computers is a floppy disk that held one point four megabytes.
Younger generations use this icon without knowing what it is, but the three-and-a-half-inch floppy disk, which was…