Facts that sound false but are true — Page 8
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
Tutankhamun was buried with a dagger made of meteoritic iron.
A 2016 analysis found about 11% nickel and traces of cobalt in the blade, a composition typical of iron meteorites…
The 1918 'Spanish flu' did not start in Spain.
During the First World War, the countries at war censored news about the disease. Spain was neutral and its press…
Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day: 12 February 1809.
Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England, into a wealthy family; Lincoln was born in a log cabin in Kentucky. One…
According to Herodotus, the Persian king Xerxes had the sea whipped 300 times after a storm destroyed his bridges.
In 480 BC, Xerxes had bridges of boats built across the Hellespont strait to invade Greece. When a storm broke them…
A Roman vomitorium was not a room for vomiting, but a passageway for crowds leaving the amphitheatre.
The word comes from the Latin 'vomere', 'to spew out', because these passages poured thousands of people onto the…
Ulaanbaatar, in Mongolia, is the coldest national capital in the world.
It sits about 1,350 metres above sea level, far from the sea and exposed to Siberian air. The average yearly…
Bhutan absorbs more carbon dioxide than it emits, and its Constitution requires 60% of the country to stay forested.
Forests now cover about 70% of the territory. Almost all its electricity comes from hydropower, much of which is sold…
Only two countries are doubly landlocked, surrounded solely by countries that also have no coast: Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan.
Liechtenstein borders Switzerland and Austria, while Uzbekistan borders Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan…
Kiribati is the only country in the world that lies in all four hemispheres.
Its 33 islands and atolls are spread over more than 3 million km² of the Pacific Ocean, on both sides of the equator…
The Danube flows through ten countries, more than any other river in the world.
It rises in Germany's Black Forest and runs through Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria…
Lake Natron in Tanzania is so alkaline that animals that die there end up looking as if they were turned to stone.
The water can have a pH above 10 and is rich in sodium carbonate, the same salt the Egyptians used for mummification…
In Supai, a village at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, mail is still delivered by mule.
The Havasupai tribe's village has no road: it can only be reached on foot, on horseback or by helicopter. Mule trains…
The summit of Everest is made of limestone containing fossils of sea creatures.
These rocks formed on the floor of a sea about 450 million years ago and contain remains of trilobites and other…
Pando, a grove of aspens in Utah, is a single organism with about 47,000 trunks joined by the same root system.
All the trunks are genetically identical clones that sprouted from one root system. Together they cover about 43…
Welwitschia mirabilis, from the Namib Desert, can live more than a thousand years with just two leaves.
The two leaves never fall off: they keep growing from the base for the plant's whole life and gradually split into…
The Tree of Ténéré, in Niger, was the most isolated tree in the world until it was knocked down by a lorry in 1973.
It was a lone acacia in the middle of the Sahara, about 400 km from any other tree, and served as a landmark for…
The Wollemi pine was known only from fossils until it was found alive in Australia in 1994.
A park ranger found it in a remote gorge near Sydney. Fewer than a hundred adult trees remain in the wild, at a…
The fruits of the sandbox tree, Hura crepitans, explode with a bang and fling their seeds more than 40 metres.
As they dry, the capsules build up tension until they suddenly split with a crack like a gunshot. The seeds shoot out…
The coco de mer, a palm from the Seychelles, produces the largest seed in the plant kingdom, which can weigh more than 15 kilograms.
The Lodoicea maldivica palm grows naturally on just two islands in the Seychelles. The fruit takes six to seven years…
Some ginkgo trees survived the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and are still alive.
In 1945 about 170 trees less than two kilometres from the blast sprouted again. Among them are several ginkgos, a…
The sting of the gympie-gympie, an Australian stinging tree, can cause pain for weeks or even months.
Its leaves and stems are covered with ultra-fine silica hairs that break off in the skin like needles and inject…
Sheltering from the rain under a manchineel tree can blister your skin.
The manchineel, from the Caribbean and Florida, has a milky sap so irritating that rainwater dripping from its leaves…
In the Bay of Fundy, in Canada, the difference between high and low tide can exceed 15 metres.
These are the highest tides in the world. The bay's shape and size make the water slosh at the same rhythm as the…
Neptune was discovered in 1846 thanks to mathematical calculations, before anyone saw it through a telescope.
Uranus was not following its predicted orbit exactly, as if something were pulling on it. The Frenchman Urbain Le…
