People love to share what they consider fun facts.
They’re all over the place, and yes, they’re often quite fun indeed.
What about facts that are NOT fun, though? Facts that make you uncomfortable, or make you think about stuff you’d rather not, et al?
We’ve got a bunch of them right here so hang on tight…
1. So, so sad.
There is a whale called 52 Blue that only sings at their frequency meaning it can’t communicate with other whales.
It is nicknamed the loneliest whale on the planet.
2. Horses are so fragile.
Horses can’t throw up.
So if they eat something bad or get a bad gas bubble, they just lay down and die.
One of the most expensive horses (10 Mil Euros) died because of a colic last December.
3. I do not like this.
your skeleton is w e t .
4. We just…lost them.
There are 8 unaccounted for American nukes and literally an unknown quantity of missing soviet nukes that range all the way from warheads to suitcase bombs.
theres a few lost in the oceans, theres a megaton yield bomb buried somewhere off the coast of georgia (state). and a couple in the Mediterranean
5. As someone who has gestated a human, this does not surprise me.
Your intestines will “wriggle” themselves back into the correct position.
Doctors who do any type of intestinal surgery don’t have to worry (too much) about how they put the intestines back in.
6. Just ignore it.
Valentine’s day is a holiday with one of the highest suicide rates.
More reason to convert it to cupcake and panty day. Anyone can enjoy those things, attached or not.
7. Biology is weird.
A certain type of angler fish reproduce via the male burrowing into the side of the female, eventually fusing.
The Male life is lost in the process.
8. Not the best way to go.
People who commit suicide by jumping off a bridge, those who don’t die from the impact, drown because the impact breaks enough bones that prevents them from swimming.
Poor bastard in my area died like this, took a bunch of pills slit his wrists, sat for a while in his bathroom and i guess decided it wasn’t fast enough so he walked down the road and jumped from a fairly tall bridge, the water below is pretty shallow but apparently he still drowned.
9. I couldn’t hate this more.
People who survived the Holocaust and get Alzheimer’s often think they are back in the camps.
So they escape one of humanity’s greatest horrors only to die in it 50 years latter.
10. Never go into the woods alone.
The FBI estimates there are between 25-50 active serial killers in the US at any given time.
11. Does it matter, though?
If you are an identical twin it is possible that you and your siblings identity’s were swapped and your parents never caught it.
12. Pretty metal.
When you get a sunburn, it’s actually your cells dying so they don’t get tumorous.
That is actually a fun fact, and pretty metal.
Cell gets DNA damage so it commits suicide so they don’t start overproducing and kill you.
13. How often do they clean the inside of a bus?
Bus seats are designed so that you cannot tell how dirty they really are.
14. Try not to worry.
The reason you’re supposed to contact a doctor if you have an erection lasting longer than four hours is because prolonged priapism can lead to gangrene of the dick. Blood goes in, deoxygenates, but can’t leave, so there’s no way for fresh oxygenated blood to come in, causing the tissue to turn black and die.
Don’t worry, though! This can be treated by using a big syringe to suck the trapped blood out.
15. The Japanese did some heinous crap.
During WW2, the Japanese built a human testing facility in China, which has come to be known as Unit 731. This was worse than a lot of concentration camps, but the people involved were never punished because the US granted them immunity and attempted to cover it up in exchange for access to their research. The Soviet Union attempted to try the people involved, and the US called it communist propaganda.
The test subjects involved prisoners, but also the homeless, the mentally disabled, and random Chinese civilians kidnapped from nearby towns, including pregnant women and infants.
Vivisections (cutting a person open with a T-shaped cut) were regularly performed, usually without anesthesia. Patients’ limbs were randomly removed and improperly reattached to see what would happen, and internal organs were also randomly taken. All without anesthesia, of course.
Prisoners were also injected with STDs (mainly syphilis) and then forced at gunpoint to rape other prisoners to spread the disease. Some of these prisoners included pregnant women, in which case they would either be vivisected live and have their fetuses removed, or the syphilis riddled babies would be born and eventually killed.
They also participated in biological warfare in several cities, usually by infecting fleas with paratyphoid and releasing them.
They tested any and all sorts of weapons on the prisoners, notably grenades and chemical bombs.
They also stuck people in pressure chambers until their eyeballs popped, spun people in centrifuges until they died, burned them alive, stuck people in gas chambers, injected them with random substances, and froze their limbs before breaking them off.
Most of the experiments had no practical application, and were done purely out of sadism. The Japanese government didn’t officially admit to this until 2003, and the US still actively denies it.
So yeah, have fun thinking about this. For more horrific war crimes committed by the Japanese, consider reading about The Rape of Nanking.
16. I don’t like this at all.
In the United States roughly 1/3 of all food is thrown away each year.
17. People will do anything for white teeth.
Urine was used for teeth whitening and bleaching of clothes in Ancient Rome. Yes, they rinsed their mouth with human AND animal urine.
They definitely wash it out with water but there’s gotta be that remaining sour smell.
18. I guess that’s helpful to know? In the apocalypse?
If you eat a polar bear liver, you will die. Humans can’t handle that much vitamin A.
19. That would be…something.
Spider – Rain (you read that right) is a real and naturally occurring phenomenon.
As Adele once said, “set fire to the rain”
20. I’m sure it will emerge again, like all of the worst diseases do.
There is a mysterious illness called the ‘sweating sickness’ that hit in multiple small epidemics in the early modern era. It was incredibly contagious and massively deadly, with about a 50% average death rate, but it could be higher. It began with an ominous sense of apprehension, followed by severe pains in the neck and giddiness.
They then abruptly stopped and switched to heavy sweating, headaches and delirium. Finally, the person was hit with an extreme urge to sleep, and it was thought to be fatal if you fell to it.
We know almost nothing about it, nothing about how it spread, how it was caused, only that if you got it you were either surviving or dead within 24hrs. There are horror stories of people leaving town on hunting trips and returning the same day to find almost everybody in the village dead, with only a few scattered survivors.
The worst thing was, you did not gain immunity. You could live through the sweating sickness once, and then get it a few days later and die. Or live through it two or three times, and then get it and die. It was horrific, and we don’t know why it disappeared and we don’t know if it will ever return.
21. I think I can smell it behind my mask.
You can smell your own lungs. Your brain just filters out the smell.
22. It’s not really improving the response time.
Live Chat support agents can see what you type before you send it, so they can reply quicker.
23. I guess we…like it?
Some Perfumes, or more specifically, musks you use come from the anal and secretion glands of musk deers and civet cats.
And wait till you learn about ambergris.
24. Why are people?
The lemmings are not s**cidal and the documentary what filmed it was actually showing lemmings getting thrown down a cliff because they needed the scene but couldn’t make the animals do it.
It’s a Disney documentary called “White Wilderness” from the 50’s.
25. Those hooligan males.
Penguins r**e the hell out of anything that looks vaguely penguin like or doesn’t move. In fact it was so rampant, that the 1910-13 Scott Antarctic Expedition decided it was best not to bring it up so society wouldn’t have to deal with the issue it would bring up.
Scientists witnessed males having s*x with other males and also with dead females, including several that had died the previous year. He also saw them s*xually coerce females and chicks and occasionally kill them.
The scientists blamed this “astonishing depravity” on “hooligan males” and wrote down his observations in Greek so that only an educated gentleman would understand the *horrors* he had witnessed.
26. I wish this was harder to believe.
In 2017, 10,000 people died awaiting their disability decision.
27. Watch out for this guy.
A blue ringed octopus, found in the Pacific, is a tiny and cute little guy, but one painless bite gives enough venom to kill 25 male adults
Also note, as long as you are given medical attention within an hour of you receiving the bite, you’ll be fine.
These live everywhere on the coast where I live! I remember it being drilled into us really young not to stick our hand under rocks or into rock pools on the shore, because once you realised something had happened it would be too late.
…Australia. I live in Australia.
28. What happens to your brain, though?
There is a (genetic) disease called FOP where your muscles and tissue turn to bone. Often called “human statue disease”
Eventually people may have to decide whether they want to become “frozen” in a sitting or flat/standing position.
I have a good friend with this. He’s already past the usual life expectancy for the condition and still manages to live a (somewhat) normal life.
He has to have his second spine broken every year now, which doesn’t sound nice. Also any injury heals as bone for him, so as he gets older he’s covered in more and more lumps from the various shenanigans we’ve got up to over the years.
29. You have to give them living success.
The search and rescue dogs on 9/11 were getting so sad from finding only dead bodies, the human helpers buried themselves in the rubble so that the dogs could find them and be happy.
Same with bomb and drug sniffing dogs, they have to let them “find” something occasionally or they get discouraged.
The trainers will carry something the right shape and smell and hide it here or there.
30. Hope you led a cautious life.
People with extreme scurvy start to have ALL of their old wounds open up.
Everything with a scar is held together via an active process with collagen and without vitamin c just sort of…stop.
31. Horses are so dramatic.
In Australia there is a plant called the Gympie-Gympie which has such a severe sting that horses who brush against it throw themselves off cliffs because they’d rather die than continue to experience the pain.
I’m so uncomfortable, so I guess that was the point.
What’s your favorite awful fact? Share it with us in the comments!
