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We love our facts here and one of the best things about them is that there are always ones you haven’t heard coming down the pike. New ones, funny ones, shocking ones, and yes – weird ones – are just out there, waiting to come up in your presence for the first time.
If you’re up for some totally weird truths today, these 19 people have you covered – and trust me, you’re going to want to hear these.
1. Now that’s ironic.
We don’t really know who the inventor of the fire hydrant is, because the patent was destroyed…….in a fire.
Homer: Springfield’s never had a hurricane in recorded history.
Lisa: The records only go back to the ’70s when the hall of records was mysteriously blown away.
2. Those things freak me out.
Koalas have fingerprints that are very close to human fingerprints. There apparently have been several “break-in” in Australia by the same “person” based of off fingerprint evidence.
Turned out to be a koala that was responsible for all of these.
3. I bet that’s delicious.
Volkswagen makes a currywurst (a type of sausage) and it has its own Original Part number. #199 398 500 A
No word on whether or not it’s wrapped in a proper pretzel.
4. This does not surprise me about poodles.
There was a genetic bottle neck in standard poodles starting in the 1950s. A kennel called the Wycliffe kennel linebred exceptional show dogs which became highly sought after as studs.
Even today, many standard poodles carry a substantial percentage from this line which traces back to just five dogs.
5. Fungi are amazing.
A fungi grows next to the highly radioactive “Elephant’s Foot” in the Chernobyl reactor. It feeds off the gamma rays emitted by the nuclear fuel in a process known as “radiosynthesis.”
If you were exposed to similar levels of radiation, you would have a lethal dose in 3 minutes.
Radiotrophic fungus was first discovered at the Chernobyl site in 1991, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the start of internationally-aided cleanup/containment efforts. Not so sure about right next to the Elephant’s Foot, but it was definitely found growing in large, flourishing colonies all throughout the site’s cooling water supply.
This fungus appears to use melanin – the same dark-brown pigment that gives humans all their various normal skin tones, except in much, much higher concentrations – to power sugar-producing reactions by deriving energy from nuclear decay the same way plants and cyanobacteria use the green pigment chlorophyll to synthesize sugars by deriving energy from (sun)light.
Basically, this stuff is a mold colony that has the most extreme tan ever, and uses it to eat radiation.
Similar fungi have been found accumulated on the exterior hulls of low-orbit spacecraft, and experiments were recently (2018-2019) conducted to begin investigating if the stuff could be used as shielding to protect astronauts from solar/cosmic radiation. Apparently, results were promising!
5. This is very disconcerting.
The spinal cord has the consistency of a ripe banana.
Yeah our vertebrae are rings of interlocking armor for a reason.
6. Those are fun party tricks.
Sloths can hold their breath longer than dolphins can. They can also die of starvation with a full stomach.
Their gut bacteria is very temperature dependent. Due to Global Warming ™, the temp in the Caribbean can go below its more usual 23C down to about 20C at times, which will kill their digestive bacteria, so they can’t digest what they eat. Sloths can’t regulate their body temperature well, so they can’t maintain an internal temp to stop this happening.
7. Terrifying, if you’re a caterpillar.
When caterpillars make their chrysalises, the don’t just grow wings & change, they dissolve completely into goo which then reforms into the butterfly.
Better yet, if you “train” the caterpillars to dislike certain stimuli, the resulting butterflies retain that memory & will avoid the same stimuli.
I don’t have a source to hand but I asked a relative who works a lot around butterflies.
She said that it has actually been shown that they retain some structure during metamorphosis, including their nervous system which explains the memory retention.
8. Facts about camels.
Most of the camels of Saudi Arabia are imported from Australia.
The largest wild population of camels is also in Australia.
It is illegal to kill wild camels in Arizona.
Back in the day they imported camels to cross Southern Arizona, found horses more reliable so released the camels. There’s a thriving population of wild horses in Arizona but sadly no more camels. 🙁
Llamas and other camel species can thrive here though.
Lastly, I remember watching Planet Earth for the first time and seeing Bactrian camels on film, for the first time, in their natural habitat. One of my favorite tv memories.
9. Talk about dark.
Anglerfish mate by the male biting the female’s abdomen.
Over time, the male is absorbed and linked to the female’s circulatory system while the male basically melts into a parasite-looking growth that is actually nothing but testicles which the female will use when she’s ready.
Weird enough for you?
10. And they still didn’t see that iceberg coming.
Titanic was fitted with microphones for receiving underwater bell signals. With this system the sound of submarine bells was received through the hull of the vessel.
Submarine bells, used as fog signals, were located on lightships, at lighthouses, and even on some specially equipped buoys. They were actuated by electric signals, compressed air, or simply by wave motion.
Titanic had two submarine microphones on her hull, one on each side. These were the “ears” of the ship. By switching between the port and starboard microphones and comparing the volume of the bells, the navigation officer could determine the direction to the navigation aid. Sound travels much further through water than through air – these bells could be heard over 15 miles away through the headset.
A pretty cool way of navigating at a time when GPS and RADAR didn’t yet exist!
11. I’ll be listening for that this summer.
When male honey bees orgasm, their penises explode with a “pop!” audible to human ears.
And when winter comes the worker bees (which are all female) kick the male bees out to die in the cold because they do nothing other than mate with the queen and the queen can make more even if she is new and unmated. She needs to mate in order to make more female bees.
12. Consider my mind blown.
Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, Savoy cabbage, kohlrabi, and gai lan are all the same species of plant (Brassica oleracea), just bred to enhance different parts of the plant.
13. Well that’s unfortunate.
The man who invented the match.com website lost his wife to a man she met … On match.com
14. Cremated or just a really big can?
Fredric Baur, the inventor of the Pringles can, is buried in one.
15. This is definitely useful information.
Door knobs that are made out of brass can disinfect itself in about 8 hours.
Copper has the same effect. This early study published in April 2020 demonstrates the SARS-Cov-2 virus particles became non-viable after 4 hours on copper surfaces.
16. I mean there had to be some trick to it.
Woodpeckers tongues wrap around their brain to cushion them from a concussion when they peck against tree trunks.
17. The weight of paint.
If you want to paint a violin red you have to use a Naphthol or Pyrrol Red as a Cadmium Red pigment is too heavy and will alter the sound.
It adds up, the first two space shuttle External tanks were painted white. The external tanks ended up weighing 600 pounds more than the unpainted ones.
18. Can you learn them all?
There are more ways to shuffle a deck of cards than there are atoms on Earth.
You can arrange a deck of cards into a new unique order once a second since the big bang and you wouldn’t even be 1% of the way through all possible combos today. Like, not even close to 1%.
I liked V-sauce’s analogy. If you were to measure the time to count 52 factorial seconds, first start at Earth’s equator. Every billion years that goes by, take one step forward. Once you walk completely around the Earth, take a drop of water out of the Pacific ocean and repeat. Once the ocean is dry, set down one sheet of paper, refill the ocean, and repeat the whole process again.
Once the stack of sheets of paper reaches the sun, knock it down and repeat the whole process again. Once you do that about one thousand times, you’d be almost a third of the way to being done counting.
19. Beware the coconuts.
Coconuts kill 103 people a year.
That’s more than many animals we’re traditionally scared of, too. I guess they’ve developed a taste for human flesh.
20. Totally random. Love it.
The dot on top of an i and a j is called a tittle.
21. He could have sprung for the good stuff.
The term “drink the kool-aid” is historically incorrect. Jim Jones used Flavor-aid.
What a cheapskate. What’s even the point of saving that money?
Not like he was gonna need it.
22. These are both amazing.
Technically speaking, a male ballet dancer is a ballerino.
Also, a single strand of spaghetti is a spaghetto.
(Spaghetto is also my favorite term for a rough Italian neighborhood).
23. It does seem questionable.
You have a ball sack because you need to have your balls at 34 degrees C to produce sperm but your body is 37 degrees. The sack keeps them farther away.
That’s also why your balls shrivel when you are cold. Gotta maintain homeostasis.
One of nature’s biggest failures. “The male humans need testicles. They have to be kept warm. But not that warm. Let’s just hang them outside in a thin sack made of skin, so everyone can see their weak point.”
24. Time is so weird.
The stegosaurus was extinct for about 90 million years before tyrannosaurus showed up, and the tyrannosaurus has been extinct for about 65 million years. We are much closer in time to the T Rex than the T Rex was to stegosaurs.
Also, Cleopatra was born closer to our time than she was to the building of the pyramids. Our perception of time is funny.
Oh! and adding on to this:
- Oxford University has been around since 1096 (earliest evidence of teaching there)
- In 1697, Martín de Ursúa launched an assault on the Itza capital Nojpetén and the last independent Maya city fell to the Spanish.
- Oxford University and the Maya civilisation co-existed for about 600 years!
25. Solidarity.
There is a species of penguins called Adelie penguins in Antarctica that are so horny they will screw anything.
Examples include: female penguins, male penguins, injured penguins, dead bodies, dead fish, the freaking ground, basically anything that moves or doesn’t move.
26. Sharks have seen some things.
Sharks are older than trees. A lot older. 40 million years older.
Trees as we familiarly know them today — a primary trunk, large height, crown of leaves or fronds — didn’t appear on the planet until the late Devonian period, some 360 million years ago. You might be surprised to learn that sharks are older than trees as they’ve been around for at least 400 million years.
Weirder, I understand all coal formed during the time after trees appeared, but BEFORE the bacteria that breaks them down after they fell. No new coal has formed in a very long time. 100 million years?
27. They’re so squishy all over.
Babies don’t have kneecaps.
28. Poor little bunnies.
The average human erection has roughly about 130ml of blood in it, while the average rabbit has about 126ml in its entire body. So, there is more blood in your boner than in a bunny.
Also, did you know that a rabbit used to die every time a lady needed a pregnancy test?
29. The more you know.
All mammals over 3 kg (~6.5 pounds) pee for an average of 21 seconds with a full bladder, independent of body size. From a 2014 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
Using high-speed videography and flow-rate measurement obtained at Zoo Atlanta, we discover that all mammals above 3 kg in weight empty their bladders over nearly constant duration of 21 ± 13 s. This feat is possible, because larger animals have longer urethras and thus, higher gravitational force and higher flow speed. Smaller mammals are challenged during urination by high viscous and capillary forces that limit their urine to single drops. Our findings reveal that the urethra is a flow-enhancing device, enabling the urinary system to be scaled up by a factor of 3,600 in volume without compromising its function. This study may help to diagnose urinary problems in animals as well as inspire the design of scalable hydrodynamic systems based on those in nature.
30. Cells blow my mind.
HEK 293 Cells
A scientist named “Alex Van der Eb” in netherlands made immortal cells, from the liver of an aborted human fetus in the 70’s.
Those cells have been producing our vaccines for the last 50 years.
I dont mean to spread this as misinformation, or as any correlation to the current pandemic. It’s just a super weird fact I knew.
31. I don’t understand how there are so many bedbugs then.
Female bedbugs lack a genital cavity, so the male bedbug has to literally STAB HIS DICK INTO THE FEMALE BEDBUGS STOMACH and then when they’re done screwing, that’s it.
But what makes it even MORE interesting, is that bedbugs are unable to tell the difference between other male and female bedbugs. Use your imagination a little for that one…….
32. Fungus is amazing!
Radiotrophic fungus was first discovered at the Chernobyl site in 1991, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the start of internationally-aided cleanup/containment efforts. Not so sure about right next to the Elephant’s Foot, but it was definitely found growing in large, flourishing colonies all throughout the site’s cooling water supply.
This fungus appears to use melanin – the same dark-brown pigment that gives humans all their various normal skin tones, except in much, much higher concentrations – to power sugar-producing reactions by deriving energy from nuclear decay the same way plants and cyanobacteria use the green pigment chlorophyll to synthesize sugars by deriving energy from (sun)light.
Basically, this stuff is a mold colony that has the most extreme tan ever, and uses it to eat radiation.
Similar fungi have been found accumulated on the exterior hulls of low-orbit spacecraft, and experiments were recently (2018-2019) conducted to begin investigating if the stuff could be used as shielding to protect astronauts from solar/cosmic radiation. Apparently, results were promising!
33. Sounds…fun?
Many species of snails and slugs are hermaphroditic – possessing fully functional male and female reproductive characteristics – and go about a similar process.
When mating, two “males” will wrestle each other / “joust” with their penises.
The loser of this contest becomes the “female” in the encounter, gets stabbed by the winner’s dick, and is impregnated.
34. Who would have thought?
Sloths can die of starvation with a full stomach.
Their gut bacteria is very temperature dependent. Due to Global Warming ™, the temp in the Caribbean can go below its more usual 23C down to about 20C at times, which will kill their digestive bacteria, so they can’t digest what they eat.
Sloths can’t regulate their body temperature well, so they can’t maintain an internal temp to stop this happening.
35. This all sounds right.
Your anus comprises either thirty-five or thirty-seven creases, resulting in a pattern as unique as your fingertips.
This discovery – first made by Salvador Dali – allowed for the development of an anus-examining smart toilet.
On the same topic, it turns out that humans are deuterostomes. This means that at the start of its development, an embryo goes through a stage during which its tissue folds back over itself, creating something called a blastopore. As maturation continues, this blastopore becomes the anus.
In short, you can make the argument that every person is an overgrown (and unique) a$$hole.
36. She really was a marvel.
Titanic was fitted with microphones for receiving underwater bell signals. With this system the sound of submarine bells was received through the hull of the vessel.
Submarine bells, used as fog signals, were located on lightships, at lighthouses, and even on some specially equipped buoys. They were actuated by electric signals, compressed air, or simply by wave motion.
Titanic had two submarine microphones on her hull, one on each side. These were the “ears” of the ship. By switching between the port and starboard microphones and comparing the volume of the bells, the navigation officer could determine the direction to the navigation aid. Sound travels much further through water than through air – these bells could be heard over 15 miles away through the headset.
A pretty cool way of navigating at a time when GPS and RADAR didn’t yet exist!
I’m so happy some of these are now tucked safely in my own fact arsenal.
Drop your favorite weird fact on us down in the comments!
