Facts that sound false but are true — Page 26
Our highest surprise rating: the facts people most often refuse to believe until they read the explanation. Every one of them is documented.
627 facts
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
France's longest land border is with Brazil.
Due to the overseas department of French Guiana, France shares a seven hundred and thirty kilometre border with…
Saudi Arabia imports sand and camels from Australia.
Despite having vast deserts, local sand is too smooth and rounded by wind to be used in concrete, and Australian…
There is a volcano in Antarctica that maintains a bubbling lava lake.
Mount Erebus is the southernmost active volcano in the world and manages to maintain a rare liquid lava lake in its…
In eighteen thirty-five, the US national debt was exactly zero.
President Andrew Jackson, who hated debt and central banks, managed to completely pay off the federal debt, the only…
Trees can hear water and grow towards it.
Studies show that the roots of certain plants can detect the sound vibrations of flowing water and actively grow…
On the exoplanet HD 189733b, it rains molten glass sideways.
The atmosphere of this giant planet is swept by winds of eight thousand kilometres per hour, pushing condensed…
The largest known structure in the universe is the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall.
This massive galactic filament is about ten billion light-years long and contains thousands of galaxy superclusters…
The Diomede Islands are less than 4 km apart but separated by 21 hours.
The International Date Line passes exactly between Big Diomede in Russia and Little Diomede in the US. This means…
The Romans used urine to whiten teeth and wash clothes.
Urine decomposes into ammonia, a very effective cleaning and bleaching agent. It was so valuable that Emperor…
Francium is so unstable that there is likely less than 30 grams of it in the Earth's crust at any given moment.
The most stable isotope of francium has a half-life of only 22 minutes. It rapidly decays into other elements…
A teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh about 6 billion tons.
Neutron stars are the collapsed cores of massive stars. Gravity crushes matter so forcefully that protons and…
There are fungi capable of breaking down and consuming polyurethane plastic.
Students at Yale University discovered a species of fungus in the Amazon rainforest that can survive by feeding…
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 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…
All the electrons circulating on the Internet together weigh approximately the same as a strawberry.
Physicist Russell Seitz calculated that the combined mass of the electrons moving in the global network is around 50…
Humans glow in the dark, but the light is invisible to the human eye.
The human body emits a small amount of visible light due to metabolic reactions that produce free radicals. However…
