All facts — Page 28
The complete ONAURE library, newest first. Every fact has an explanation and a source you can check.
1196 facts
The Great Fire of London started in a bakery.
The Great Fire of London in 1666 started in a bakery on Pudding Lane, owned by Thomas Farriner. The fire destroyed…
Tungsten has the highest melting point of all metals.
Tungsten melts at 3,422 degrees Celsius, the highest melting point of any metal. This property makes it ideal for…
Ants can lift 50 times their own weight.
Ants are capable of lifting up to 50 times their own weight and pulling up to 30 times. This extraordinary strength…
The Scoville scale measures the heat of chilli peppers.
The Scoville scale, created by chemist Wilbur Scoville in 1912, measures the concentration of capsaicin in peppers…
Dust storms on Mars can cover the entire planet.
Dust storms on Mars can grow to cover the entire planet, lasting weeks or even months. In 2018, one such storm ended…
Greenland is the largest island in the world, but it is not a continent.
Greenland is the largest island in the world, with about 2.2 million square kilometres. Despite its size, it is…
Astatine is the rarest element in the Earth's crust.
Astatine is the rarest naturally occurring element in the Earth's crust, with less than 30 grams present on the…
The goblin shark can project its jaw out of its mouth to catch prey.
The goblin shark's jaw is held by elastic ligaments that allow it to be launched forward at very high speed. This…
The platypus has hollow melanosomes, a unique feature among mammals.
Melanosomes are structures that contain melanin and give color to hair and feathers. In the platypus, they are…
Genuine wasabi is grown in flowing mountain water and is very hard to produce on a large scale.
The plant needs shade, cool temperatures and clean moving water. As a result, most wasabi sold is a mixture of…
Lake Vostok is located under two kilometers of ice in Antarctica.
Lake Vostok is located under about four kilometers of ice, not two. It is one of the largest subglacial lakes in the…
Piltdown Man was one of the greatest scientific frauds in history.
In 1912, skull and jaw fragments were presented as a missing link between humans and apes. In 1953, it was discovered…
A vacuum can change the way light travels when subjected to extreme magnetic fields.
An international team used observations of a magnetar, a neutron star with a magnetic field billions of times…
A modern atomic clock would lose less than a second in 15 billion years.
Atomic clocks use transitions between energy levels of atoms, such as caesium, to measure time with enormous…
The Wow signal was a radio signal detected in 1977 that has never been explained.
The Wow signal was a narrow-band radio signal detected on August 15, 1977, by the Big Ear radio telescope. It lasted…
Trans-Neptunian objects can contain carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide ices.
Observations with the James Webb Space Telescope detected carbon dioxide in 56 trans-Neptunian objects and carbon…
Venus has a day longer than its year.
Venus takes about 243 Earth days to complete one rotation on its axis, but only about 225 Earth days to orbit the…
Physicists created the world's smallest QR code, measuring just 50 by 50 nanometers.
Using a scanning tunneling microscope, researchers positioned silver atoms one by one to form a QR code that is more…
Leafcutter ants do not eat the leaves they cut.
They carry pieces of leaves to the nest and use them to grow a fungus, which feeds the colony. The leaves are the…
The African lungfish can spend months inside a mucus cocoon in the soil.
When water disappears, it burrows into the ground and secretes a mucus layer that hardens, keeping it moist. In this…
Tardigrades were the first known animals to survive in space.
In 2007, tardigrades were sent to space and exposed to vacuum and solar radiation. Many survived and reproduced…
Tardigrades can survive decades without water by entering a state called cryptobiosis.
When water is scarce, the tardigrade curls into a dry ball called a tun. In this state, its metabolism slows…
The axolotl can regenerate limbs, parts of the heart, spinal cord and even the brain.
The axolotl is an amphibian that keeps juvenile features throughout its life. When it loses a limb, cells at the…
The mesentery was reclassified as an organ in 2016.
The mesentery is a fold of tissue that connects the intestines to the abdominal wall. For centuries it was considered…
