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Someone Asked Folks To Share The Best Fact They’ve Ever Heard, Here Are The 35 Most Interesting
Easy access to information has somewhat caused people to forget that the world we live in is a lot weirder than we tend to think. From hippo sweat being pink to the vast amount of hydrogen being burnt by a star every single second, the universe still has surprises around every single corner.
Someone asked, “What is the coolest [freaking] fact you know?” and people from across the internet shared their best bit of lesser-known information about the world. So get comfortable, scroll through, upvote your favorites, and comment your own examples below.
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#1
The difference between a cemetery and a graveyard is that a graveyard is either attached to a holy place like a church or monastery/Temple or on the same land owned by said place, while a cemetery is a secular or generic term for any and all other burial places that accommodate the dead.
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#2
Hippopotamus milk is pink. Hippopotamus sweat is pink.
Neither are strawberry flavour.
#3
**They turn Niagara Falls down at night.** There are hydroelectric dams around the waterfalls for power generation, and the authorities divert more of the river through them at night when there aren't tourists around. During the day (and especially in peak season) they let more of the water through so the waterfall looks more spectacular. At time this cuts the flow of water over the falls by 75%.
Despite the fact that many of us associate it with the idea of fun facts with the internet, perhaps a list like this or an X (formerly Twitter) page dedicated to them, this idea predates the internet by over one hundred years. In the 1850s, there was a newspaper column and, later, an entire book dedicated to what the people of the time would call “Fun, Fact, and Fancy,” but we would just see them as fun facts.
Of course, “fun” is in the eye of the beholder, so to speak, but from trivia games to just loving to learn, we humans do have a fascination for better understanding the world around us. After all, these facts serve as a great reminder that the universe is so much more mysterious and surprising than we might expect it to be.
#4
The earliest evidence for fried chicken is from 1500 BCE. It comes from Luzon in the Philippines. The bones that documented some 50k of them from a midden heap show two things. First, they are from Green Jungle Fowl, the wild ancestor of modern chickens, that were kept penned their entire lives based on wing development . This happens when you clip the wing feathers to keep them from flying. Secondly we know the earliest layers was cooked in coconut oil due to the residue worked into the heated bone tips. This also leads local archaeologists to believe the locals were fermenting coconut milk to make a local drink called tuba. This is still one of the methods used today. All in all 3500 years ago my fellow Filipinos were getting drunk and eating fried chicken. Not much has changed.
Kirsten Kerkhof 11 months ago
It is all about priorities. They could have invented something boring, but they settled for liquor and fried chicken. Can't say I blame them ...
#5
We live in an explosion so violent that dust woke up and started thinking about it. We are the universe observing and considering itself.
#6
Female lions have uteruses that are basically little hammocks! So as the kittens are developing, they ride along in these things that turn and stabilize as the mother is running and hunting. I thought that was pretty cool.
carlo custodio 11 months ago
I think this is not only true for lions. The fetuses of mammals are suspended (or "swim") in amniotic fluid thus protecting them from being jarred and from being thrown about while the mother is in motion.
#7
For me it’s that sharks predate trees and Saturn’s rings. Our little blue marble is older and holding more secrets than we can begin to imagine.
Ace 11 months ago
"Pre-date", not predate. I can just about imagine a gang of sharks surrounding a tree and closing in for the kill, but of the 18 species of shark found in the waters near the Kennedy Space Center there's not a single documented case of any of them successfully stowing away on board a rocket.
#8
Bees have tiny hairs all over their compound eyes. These microscopic hairs are called setae, and they help bees to sense wind direction and velocity. The setae allow bees to detect air movements within a few centimeters per second. This helps them navigate back to the hive on windy days. I think it's amazing that bees have built-in anemometers on their eyes!
#9
What you see, is only what your brain interprets. You don't see everything, and sometimes you see things that aren't there.
For instance, you can always see your nose (unless you're Voldemort).
Your brain just blocks it out, but it's there, in your field of vision always. Imagine, what other s**t your brain gets up to you without you knowing.
#10
Bananas contain potassium, and since potassium decays, that makes the yellow fruit radioactive,you’d need to eat ten million bananas in one sitting to die of banana-induced radiation poisoning.
#11
Dogs noses are way more sensitive than ours at differentiating smells. Whereas we can smell a stew warming up on the stove top, a dog can actually smell all its components (meat, potato, carrots, onions, etc) separately.
Roxy222uk 11 months ago
I"m currently reading a book about taste and food, and this isn't true. Humans have an astonishing ability to distinguish a vast number of different tastes, which is linked to smell of course, far more than most animals. This is down to our omnivorous and very varied diet. Where dogs beat us hands down is their ability to pick up very dilute scent.
#12
There is a type of jellyfish that is basically immortal. After it reaches sexual maturity it can just decide to revert and become immature again, making it theoretically live forever. Though in practice they do die.
#15
Star ⭐ died for you....
Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. The stars died so that you could be here today.
~ Lawrence M. Krauss
#16
The moon looks different from the southern hemisphere than it does in the north. As an Argentine I always find this fascinating when I travel.
#17
Tighten rusted bolt before loosen. Much smart.
#18
Dolphins have two brains. Each brain is equal to the size of a human brain.
Pink dolphins exist & theyre so smart they brought drowing humans to the shore.
Dolphins in captivity were rewarded with treats for each piece of paper theyd surrender to their trainer (helps clean the pool). The dolphins then tore a paper into pieces to get more treats.
#19
the sheer fact of existing.
it is so utterly astounding and incomprehensible and wondrous and awesome, yet we appreciate it so seldom in all its depth and meaning, let alone contemplate that we and the universe exist.
everybody, get more goosebumps every day from the depth and transcendence and ubiquitousness of us and the universe existing and being inexplicable intricably interwoven with the fabric of existence itself. we are in the most profound way always in contact with the everchanging yet constant substrate of existence iteslf.
#20
The sun will actually not explode. It will instead gradually get bigger and hotter until it swallows mercury and Venus and absolutely fries the Earth and then slowly shrink down into a white dwarf and fade away. Our sun is too small to go supernova even though many people think it can still for some reason and nobody corrects them.
Nike Pancakes 11 months ago
It won't completely explode like a supernova, and this statement is true. It will blow off trillions of tons of matter in its final phases, however.
#21
Also, in an experiment, it was proved that observing something changes how it acts. Scientists passed rays through a sheet of gold foil. When they were not in the room watching, it left the same pattern every time. When they observed the experiment, the pattern changed every time. Therefor, the is no such thing as observing without changing things.
David Paterson 11 months ago
Another connected weird fact is that the mathematics that allows this, quantum mechanics, relies on the cancellation of infinities (renormalization) that mathematicians tell us can't be done. But it works.
#22
Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia are relatively close to one another in a global scale and often conflated in the minds of most of us in the Northern Hemisphere.
Despite that, Australia has been continuously inhabited for almost 70,000 years and Aotearoa/New Zealand is the last major landmass to have experienced human settlement, less than 850 years ago.
And no, that's not colonial settlement, that's when the Maori got there.
Colin Matthews 11 months ago
Stop calling NZ Aotearoa. It’s a made up name that was never used by Māori.
#23
There’s a type of octopus that has three hearts, reproduces once’s in their life, then decides to f**k off and die. These kind of animals are called semelparous.
#24
I just recently learned that your immune system does not know your eyes exist. If they did, they'd attack the eyes and destroy your vision. I believe it's a foreign object for them.
80 Van 11 months ago
This fact is kind of confusing to me. How do we know this? Our immune systems don’t usually attack our eyes, but they don’t usually attack other parts of our body either. Does this bean or immune system didn’t know that the other parts of our bodies exist either? Also, you can get infections in your eye that your body heals (like pinkeye), so your immune system misses have something to do with it, right? Can someone explain this fact a bit better?
#25
Think about the universe, and you might imagine stars, planets, and galaxies. But all that stuff we can see and touch only makes up about 4% of the universe. The rest is mostly hidden from us, made up of mysterious dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter, which is about 26% of the universe, doesn't give off light, but we know it's there because it has a gravitational grip on galaxies. Dark energy is even stranger, making up around 70% of the universe, and it's pushing everything in the universe apart, faster and faster. So, the universe is mostly made of stuff we can't see or understand, which is pretty mind-blowing when you think about it.
David Paterson 11 months ago (edited)
Just a minor correction. Dark matter is stranger than Dark energy. We know what Dark energy is, it was even known to Einstein more than 100 years ago, although he had the size of it wrong. On the other hand, nobody has even the slightest clue as to what Dark Matter is, all we can do so far is tell you what Dark Matter isn't.
#26
The entire time period in which humans developed until now, would fit about 120x between the era of stegosaurus and the era in which Tyrannosaurus Rex lived. The time period is so huge in fact, that we are closer to some dinosaurs time wise, than some dinosaurs are to eachother.
David Paterson 11 months ago
Even more fascinating is that our direct ancestors, the early primates, were exact contemporaries of T rex. The first true mammals (and the first true birds) were already around closer to the time of Stegosaurus than to the time of T rex. The earliest known true mammal was around 205 million years ago, a full 135 million years before T rex existed.
#27
If you are currently eating a pear in the southern hemisphere it was likely picked in late February 2023.
Annik Perrot 11 months ago
And if you eat an apple in May in the northern hemisphere, it's either spent 6+ months in a fridge, or come from the southern hemisphere.
#28
Pirates wear a patch over one eye so when they go below deck they can switch that patch off the dark eye and not be "sunblind" in the new, darker, below deck setting.
Phil 11 months ago
No. We have many images (prints, paintings, sketches, etc.) of many of the pirates from the 'Golden Age of Piracy' and not one of them has an eye patch. Contemporary descriptions of pirates (newspapers, pamphlets, warrants, etc.) tell us that they looked like every other European sailor.
#29
The Sun fuses 660 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second. This has been happening for 4.5 billion years, and will continue for another 5 billion.
#30
The universe expands 73 kilometers per second.
Will Cable 11 months ago
This is why the TV remote on the coffee table seems to always be just out of reach and that a trip to the toilet at night seems so far away
#31
There is a species of jelly (not jellyfish, they're different) that grows a new a**s everytime it defecates.
Kira Okah 11 months ago
Mnemiopsis leidyi, a type of comb jelly. They have a transient a**s, so effectively the gut and rear of the body have no permanent connection. Whe waste builds up, the gut swells until it touches the skin, fuses with it to create an a**s, and after pooping, the gut uncouples and the hole seals again.
#32
Equador has a rare species of horned frog that is a marsupial. The female lays eggs, the male fertilizes them then puts them in a pouch on the mother’s back.
Yettichild 11 months ago
This is incredibly not true. Marsupials are mammals. Mammals are defined by having mammary glands that produce milk for their young. No amphibian is also a mammal. Mammals also have hearts with 4 chambers. Reptiles and amphibians have hearts with only 2 chambers.
#33
Somewhere in south America. You have like a mountain plateau and under it a valley/jungle. The animals on the plateau have more in common with animals from Africa then the Animals down in the valley/jungle because of tectonic plate shifting.
#34
Hydrogen is a colourless, odourless gas, which if left alone in large enough quantities, for long enough, will begin to think about itself.
#35
The planets in our solar system can fit between earth and the moon.
Paul K. Johnson 11 months ago
Earth also has the best gift shops of all the planets. The gift shops on Venus are particularly horrible.
What do you think ?
marianne eliza 11 months ago
If a bear has been eating human flesh, its scat will be white. From a former Search and Rescue K9 handler. Don't know why, but we need to know it if we see it. Biologist out there?
marianne eliza 11 months ago
If a bear has been eating human flesh, its scat will be white. From a former Search and Rescue K9 handler. Don't know why, but we need to know it if we see it. Biologist out there?
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