Facts that sound false but are true — Page 37
Our highest surprise rating: the facts people most often refuse to believe until they read the explanation. Every one of them is documented.
1017 facts
Cashews are never sold in their shells due to a corrosive toxin.
The shell contains anacardic acid, which causes severe skin burns and is toxic if ingested. Therefore, cashews are…
The Diomede Islands are less than four kilometers apart but have a twenty-one hour time difference.
The International Date Line passes exactly between the two islands. Big Diomede belongs to Russia and Little Diomede…
Napoleon Bonaparte was once attacked by a horde of domestic rabbits.
To celebrate the Treaties of Tilsit, his chief of staff organized a hunt. Instead of wild hares, they bought domestic…
Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramids.
The Great Pyramid of Giza was completed around twenty-five sixty BC. Cleopatra lived around thirty BC, placing her…
A single average-sized cloud can weigh more than four hundred and fifty thousand kilograms.
The weight comes from liquid water suspended in the atmosphere. Despite this huge mass, the cloud floats because the…
There are only about twenty to thirty grams of francium in the Earth's crust at any given time.
Francium is extremely unstable and decays rapidly into other elements. It is continuously produced by the decay of…
A teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh about a billion tons on Earth.
Neutron stars are the collapsed cores of massive stars. Gravity crushes the matter so hard that atoms lose their…
There is a giant cloud of alcohol near the center of the Milky Way.
The Sagittarius B2 molecular cloud contains massive amounts of vinyl alcohol and ethanol. Although the concentration…
Wombat poop is shaped like perfect cubes.
Wombat intestines have walls with varying elasticity, which molds the waste into cubes. This shape prevents the poop…
The immortal jellyfish can revert its life cycle to the polyp stage.
When facing physical stress or starvation, Turritopsis dohrnii transforms its adult cells back into stem cells…
Carrots were originally purple and only became orange in the sixteenth century.
The wild carrot was purple or yellow. Dutch farmers crossbred mutant varieties to create the orange carrot in honor…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…