Facts that sound false but are true — Page 41
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
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…
Ancient Romans used crushed mouse brains as toothpaste.
The writer Pliny the Elder documented this bizarre practice, believing that the ashes and tissues of rodents helped…
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…
If you remove the empty space from atoms, the entire human race would fit inside an apple.
Atoms are composed of ninety-nine point nine nine percent empty space. If you compressed all the solid matter of the…
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 mantis shrimp punches so fast it boils the surrounding water.
The impact of its claws creates cavitation bubbles that collapse instantly, generating a tiny flash of light and…
The wood frog freezes almost solid in winter and thaws in spring.
Its heart stops and breathing ceases while the body produces large amounts of glucose, which acts as a natural…
In the Norwegian town of Longyearbyen, it is illegal to die.
Due to the permafrost, bodies buried in the local cemetery do not decompose and can preserve dangerous viruses…
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…
There is a fungus that mind-controls ants and forces them to climb plants.
The Ophiocordyceps fungus infects the ant's nervous system, forcing it to climb to an ideal height. There, it kills…
An average-sized cloud can weigh over 500,000 kilograms.
Despite looking light and fluffy, clouds are made of millions of tiny water droplets. Their density is very low and…
Under certain conditions, hot water freezes faster than cold water.
This paradox is known as the Mpemba effect. Although the physics behind the phenomenon is still debated, factors like…
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 is a giant cloud of alcohol at the center of the Milky Way.
The Sagittarius B2 molecular cloud contains massive amounts of ethyl alcohol. It spans thousands of light-years and…
Koalas have fingerprints almost identical to humans.
Koala fingerprints are so similar to ours that they have sometimes confused forensic investigators at crime scenes in…
Ketchup was originally sold in the 1830s as a medicine to treat diarrhoea.
American doctor John Cook Bennett declared that tomatoes could cure diarrhoea and indigestion, and sold the recipe as…
Carrots were originally purple or yellow before the orange variety was cultivated.
The orange carrot was developed by Dutch farmers in the 17th century, supposedly to honour the House of Orange and…
Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid.
The Great Pyramid of Giza was built around 2560 BC. Cleopatra lived around 30 BC, and the Apollo 11 mission landed on…
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…
The oceans contain about twenty million tons of dissolved gold.
Gold is present in seawater in very low concentrations, about parts per trillion. Although the total amount is…
The atom is mostly empty space, if we removed that space all of humanity would fit in a sugar cube.
The nucleus of an atom is incredibly dense, but tiny compared to the electron cloud. If we compressed all the empty…