The More You Know!
If knowledge really is power, then this will probably be the most powerful thing you read today.
Snails are responsible for at least 100 times as many deaths each year as sharks.
Turns out being small and poisonous is WAY worse than being big and scary.
A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus.
The length of a day is how long it takes for a planet to rotate around its axis. For a year, how long to orbit the sun once. Venus takes 225 days to orbit the sun, but 243 day to rotate around its axis once.
Bluetooth is named after a Viking king named Harald Bluetooth.
Even more, the bluetooth symbol we all see every day is actually a combination of the Viking runes for Harald Bluetooth's initials, H and B.
There are more viruses on earth than stars in the universe.
This gives me anxiety.
Humans and chimps have roughly the same number of hairs on their bodies.
We didn't lose our hair—it just got very, very light.
Your screen can't make the color orange.
Virtually all modern screens can only make three kinds of light: red, green, and blue. If you zoom in on an orange screen, you'll just see red and green dots lit up. Thankfully, when you zoom out, our brain get's fully tricked into thinking it's just regular orange light.
You can sail the entire 12,000 mile journey from Great Britain to New Zealand in a perfectly straight line.
Go try it Google Earth right now, it's true.
The blob of toothpaste on a toothbrush is called a "nurdle."
Now you know!
Sharks have been on earth longer than trees.
Paleontologists estimate that trees evolved between 350 and 420 million years ago, while there is clear evidence of sharks going back 450 million years.
Broccoli is a flower.
Even crazier, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, and many more are all actually the same species of plant. They're just different breeds, similar to how Pugs and German Shepherds are both dogs.
The "Ye" in "Ye Olde Pub" is pronounced "The."
Old English had a letter called a "thorn" for the "th" sound. It was finally phased out around the time of the printing press. But printers still had to print plenty of words with the "th" sound, so they just used a letter they thought looked like a thorn: Y.
Godzilla was originally an insult.
Employees at the movie studio Toho in Japan had one coworker who was so large, they made up a name for him by combining the Japanese words for "gorilla" and "whale": Gojira.
An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
The literal definition of a "bird brain".
Human beings nearly went extinct a million years ago.
Genetic analysis shows that at one point, the entire world's population of human beings might have fallen to as low as 1,000 individuals before rebounding.
Counting every second, it would take 12 days to count to a million and 31 YEARS to count to a billion.
Billionaires and millionaires are not even close to the same.
Peanuts aren't nuts.
Neither are coconuts, walnuts, pine nuts, or macadamia nuts.
A square is also a rectangle, a parallelogram, a trapezoid, and a rhombus.
Don't blame me, I don't make the rules.
The DNA in one of your cells would stretch about five feet. The DNA in ALL of your cells would stretch to Pluto and back. Eight times.
That is a lot of genes.
PublicDomainPictures, Wikimedia Commons
Giraffes and humans have the same number of neck vertebrae.
It makes sense but...it just doesn't make any sense.
A single square inch of sea otter fur has 10 times as many hairs as you have on your entire head.
Lots of marine mammals use blubber to keep warm, but instead, sea otters use the thickest fur in the animal kingdom.
Ants have been farming for millions of years longer than humans.
Humans learned how to farm around 12,000 years ago. Ants figured it out 60 million years ago. We were late to the party.
Water is not just a good solvent, it's the BEST solvent.
Regular H20 can actually dissolve more substances than any other liquid.
The name Pakistan is an acronym.
P for Punjab, A for Afghania, K for Kashmir, I for Indus-Sind, and stan from Balochistan, the different regions of the country.
Usama Akram Photographer, CC-BY-SA-4.0, Wikimedia Commons
Spandex is an anagram of the word "Expands."
It makes so much sense...
Mortgage comes from the Old French for "Death Pledge."
Sounds about right to me.
Johnny Appleseed only spread crab apples.
He mostly wanted people to use his apples to make his favorite drink: Hard cider.
Irregardless and Funnest are both words.
Look them up in pretty much any modern dictionary. They're there.
If a human urinated as much as a hummingbird, they'd produce 25 gallons a day.
Who's got the time?
Macaulay Culkin's legal name is "Macauley Macauley Culkin Culkin."
Macauley Culkin let people vote to decide his new middle name on his website. The winner? "Macauley Culkin". His name since 2019 is legally Macauley Macauley Culkin Culkin.
Featureflash Photo Agency, Shutterstock
One tablespoon of a neutron star would weigh as much as Mount Everest.
The only thing denser than a neutron star is a black hole.
An elephant's trunk Has 66x as many muscles as the entire human body.
The human body? Around 600 muscles. An elephant trunk? 40,000.
According to E = mc2, a 10-pound puppy contains as much energy as 100,000,000 of TNT.
With a one-year-old puppy, I can attest to this.
7-Up's original name was "Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda."
I think they made a good choice changing it to 7-Up.
The First Vending Machine Was Invented 2,000 Years Ago.
It took coins and dispensed holy water.
McLeod, CC-BY-SA-3.0, Wikimedia Commons
The official term for what would happen to you if you fell in a black hole is "spaghettification."
Eventually, the gravity at your feet will be so much higher than the gravity at your head that your whole body will get stretched out like a big noodle.
It would take over 400 years to spend a night in every hotel room in Las Vegas.
I can barely handle Vegas for a weekend...
The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, Flickr
Experts estimate that the human brain has enough memory to store between 10 and 100 terabytes of information.
And yet I can't remember what I had for breakfast.
Astronauts in zero G have to use specially made liquid salt and pepper.
It's a lot of work, but it's still better than tasteless food.
Lake Baikal in Russia contains more water than all North America's Great Lakes combined.
Though Lake Superior is far larger in terms of surface area, none of the Great Lakes are very deep. Baikal, on the other hand, sits in a rift in the earth's surface and it's over 5,000 feet deep.
1 out of 10 species on earth live in Brazil.
Come to Brazil!
The human body has at least 50 different kinds of sphincter.
A sphincter is any "ring-shaped muscle that relaxes or tightens to open or close a passage or opening in the body". You have literally millions of them in your body—but I know what one you're thinking of.
Mosquitos are the only animal deadlier than humans.
Sharks, bears, snakes, tigers are all waaay down the list of deadliest animals. Humans are at a comfortable number 2, but mosquitos still take the top spot.
Platypuses don't have nipples, but they still lactate. The milk just oozes out of their skin.
If I know this, you have to know this.
Harvard is so old that Galileo could have taught there.
When Harvard was founded in 1636, they could have brought ol' Galileo Galilei over from Italy to teach there. He didn't die until 1642.
Popular Graphic Arts, Wikimedia Commons
Paradoxically, even though all the salt in the ocean comes from rivers, the average river is 300 times less salty than the ocean.
Rivers love to give salt, hate to keep it.
Your ancestors have survived at least five mass extinction events, each of which wiped out at least 70% of the species on earth.
The extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs was bad, but there have been four other events of that scale—some of them saw nearly 90% of all life on earth get wiped out. We're all descended from some real survivors!
Unknown Author, Wikimedia Commons
Raindrops aren't raindrop shaped.
Small raindrops are spherical, while bigger ones look like hamburger buns.
The word "Muscle" is derived from the Latin "musculus," which means "little mouse."
Some Romans thought that rippling muscles looked like mice scrambling under the skin. So next time you see a muscle man, say "Hi little mouse!"
The Mediterranean was once separate from the Atlantic, and they joined in a catastrophic flood.
Scientists believe the flood occurred over 5 million years ago. When the dam first burst and the Atlantic rushed into the Mediterranean, it would have created a 1km high waterfall at the Strait of Gibraltar, with 100 million cubic meters of water rushing over it every second.
Solomonn Levi, CC-BY-SA-4.0, Wikimedia Commons
Australia is wider than the moon.
Don't believe me? Get out a tape measure.
252 million years ago, the Earth's temperature rose by 10 degrees in a few thousand years. It nearly wiped out life on Earth.
Hmm, maybe the earth getting hotter is a...bad thing?
American and British shoe sizes are still based off of "barleycorns."
Barleycorns—literal grains of barley—were used for measurement for years. Though we've since moved to better ways of measuring things, shoe sizes in most of the English speaking world are still derived from barleycorns.
For millions of years, 95% of ALL vertebrates on land...were a single animal.
Lystrosaurus was one of the only large animals to survive the Permian-Triassic extinction event. It wasn't particularly fast, or large, or good at anything, but with all competition wiped out, it took over pretty much the entire world. Imagine an entire planet...with just one kind of animal. That was earth for a time.
Dmitry Bogdanov, CC-BY-SA-3.0, Wikimedia Commons
Every single "seed" on the surface of a strawberry is actually an entire fruit.
Turns out it's not so hard for me to get my "daily intake" of fruits...
Captcha is mostly about training AI
It's really easy to make a test to see if someone's a robot. The whole "choose every image that has a bicycle" or "type in the word that looks kinda blurry"—all of that is things that AI programs struggle with, and human responses can help train it to do better.
When an albatross learns to fly, it might not touch land again for 10 years.
Land—who needs it!
JJ Harrison, CC-BY-SA-3.0, Wikimedia Commons
There are more possible unique games of chess than there are atoms in the universe.
Numbers: they just keep getting bigger and bigger.
