Facts that sound false but are true — Page 40
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
The Diomede Islands are four kilometres apart but have a twenty-one hour time difference.
The International Date Line passes exactly between them, making the Russian island almost a full day ahead of the…
The Great Emu War was a real military operation in Australia.
In nineteen thirty-two, the Australian army sent soldiers armed with machine guns to control the emu population that…
Sand from the Sahara Desert fertilises the Amazon Rainforest.
Every year, strong winds carry millions of tons of phosphorus-rich dust across the Atlantic Ocean, depositing…
The largest living organism in the world is a fungus in Oregon.
The Armillaria ostoyae covers almost ten square kilometres of underground forest and is thousands of years old…
There is a planet covered in graphite and diamond.
The exoplanet 55 Cancri e is extremely hot and carbon-rich, which led scientists to conclude that a large part of its…
The first message sent over the internet was just the word "LO".
The original message was supposed to be "LOGIN", but the ARPANET system crashed after the transmission of the first…
A woodpecker's tongue wraps around its brain to protect it.
The tongue is extremely long and forks, wrapping around the skull and acting as a seatbelt and shock absorber to…
Sleep deprivation causes the brain to start consuming itself.
Chronic lack of sleep causes glial cells to go into overdrive, starting to devour unnecessary synapses and neural…
Point Nemo is the ocean location farthest from any landmass.
Located in the South Pacific, it is so isolated that the closest people to it at any given time are often the…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Axolotls can regenerate parts of their own brain and heart.
Unlike most vertebrates, these Mexican amphibians can rebuild complex brain and heart tissue without scarring…
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…