There’s a good chance that in your group of friends, there’s at least one person who always seems to have a random fact you’ve never heard before that fits the situation no matter what you’re talking about.
And considering that a significant part of my job over the years has involved discovering and sharing bizarre facts, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to hear that I am that friend. I’m not the only one among my circle, but I’ve certainly reached the point where people have stopped asking me how I know this stuff.
But a while back, it seemed that this was exactly the kind of information that one Twitter user was in the mood for and she probably received enough to last a lifetime.
Early last year, writer and MSNBC contributor Brittany Packnett Cunningham had a simple request for Twitter.
She didn’t just want an interesting fact that people weren’t sure why they bothered remembering. She wanted one that would normally attract weird looks from anyone you told them to.
And it seems Twitter was more than happy to oblige her.
I don’t know if this ruins wombats for you or makes them better, but this user is speaking the truth.
As the BBC reported , this transformation into cubed droppings happens in the last 25% of the animal’s intestines before it’s excreted.
It’s also possible thanks to the varied elasticity of the wombat’s intestinal walls.
This one isn’t wrong but like with many animal facts, it seems to depend on the species.
According to Arizona Pet Vet network, some land snails are indeed capable of hibernating for three years straight and can also do so during the summer variant known as estivation.
As this person suggests, they do this when local weather conditions aren’t providing the moisture they need. So while they often prefer to slumber for 13-15 hours at a time, snails can stay dormant for extremely long periods if they have to.
This person’s post illustrates just how intensely staggering the “life cycles” of photons are and how easy they are to take for granted.
In fact, it seems that this user is actually lowballing the time this journey takes because it’s possible for a photon to spend millions of years breaking through the sun’s core.
Even more amazing is the fact that this process is what accounts for the vast majority of that journey. Because once a photon escapes the sun, it only takes eight minutes to reach Earth.
While there’s some truth to what this person is saying, the reality of how sonic vibrations affect the body makes their statements a little misleading.
According to Popular Science , not only does it take a lot longer than it seems for the vibrations this person is talking about to have this effect, but it has to happen at a decibel level of about 240 dB for that to even be a possibility.
Not only is a chicken unlikely to wait around for this to happen at such an uncomfortable volume, but the brains, blood, and other tissue in any creature’s heads don’t resonate with the same frequency as the skull and thus dampen any potentially destructive effects.
That’s not to say that animals and even people can’t become ill after spending long periods of time experiencing sonic vibrations like these, though.
This may sound hard to believe but it’s (mostly) true.
It’s not as though a baby has nothing in their knees when they’re born, but according to the Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego, the hard bone center that we associate with the kneecap doesn’t start forming until a child is between two and six years of age.
Until that starts happening, it’s all cartilage.
This one comes down more to spending the effort to determine this fact than research, but it certainly does a lot to illustrate the difference between a million and a billion.
It goes to show that even if one of us developed a bad Fabergé egg shopping habit, we’d probably have a hard time losing a billion dollars.
While the amniotic smell of this oil is more of a possibility than a hard certainty, research does confirm the gist of what this person is saying.
The first study to seriously examine the relationship did indeed find that the odor of this areolar secretion had much more of an impact on a baby’s compulsion to breastfeed than the actual milk itself.
We’ve always had the impression that Jesus and his followers led simple lives and this fact seems to confirm that.
Tilapia may not be everyone’s favorite fish to eat but it remains the signature fish of the Sea of Galilee.
The BBC reported that drought and overfishing has dangerously depleted fish stocks in the area but this unfortunate trend isn’t going unchallenged.
In any case, now you know why tilapia tend to be known as “St. Peter’s fish” in the region surrounding the freshwater lake.
Although this one isn’t actually true at the moment, it seemed like a possibility when this person wrote this and could be again.
According to the South Florida Sun Sentinel , a complicated series of mergers gave Office Depot a potential legal avenue to pursue a $1 billion claim against Cuba after it acquired rights to the Cuban Electric Company when the corporation purchased OfficeMax.
When the Cuban Electric Company essentially dissolved as a result of the emergence of Fidel Castro’s regime in 1960, it was worth $267 million. Inflation and interest have since ballooned that potential value to $1 billion.
As for why this person thought that money would go to Staples, that has to do with the fact that a merger between Office Depot and Staples was expected at the time.
This didn’t end up happening but USA Today reported that Staples is still trying to buy Office Depot to this day, so who knows what the future holds?
If you didn’t know that Donald Duck even had a middle name, this fact should come as a surprise.
However, considering that a Fauntleroy outift consists of a sailor suit and hat, it starts to make some sense.
This becomes even more appropriate when you learn that the character was likely based on the titular spoiled brat from the 1886 book, Little Lord Fauntleroy .
It’s an unexpected connection, but yes, the lives of Julia Roberts and Martin Luther King Jr. are indeed linked.
Roberts’ parents in fact ran the only integrated acting school in Atlanta at the time, and Coretta reportedly insisted on covering the costs for Julia’s birth as a way of thanking them for showing kindness to the city’s Black children.
Moms do give an extra boost to their nursing babies when sick.
When a mother’s body is exposed to the illness a baby carries, its immune response also affects her milk. And, not only does the breast milk change in composition to help the little ones fight off an illness, but it has been known to change color as well.
While you’re more likely to mistake a mushroom for a plant than an animal, you’re more like a mushroom than you are a plant.
It’s not just a matter of DNA , but it is that, too. In evolutionary terms, plants split off from animals and fungi about 1.1 billion years ago, and animals and fungi branched apart after that, meaning humans have a more recent common ancestor with mushrooms than we do with plants. Not sure what that’s worth, but
Here’s a great reminder to be kind to your fine feathered friends.
Crows are wicked smart birds, and it turns out they’re pretty wicked in general when they’ve been wronged, too. Researchers have found that crows can remember human faces, and they’re more likely to remember them well when associated with bad experiences.
Not only that, but crows will pass along knowledge of dangerous humans to their crow friends.
Good news for people who aren’t that observant about what they eat — sort of.
While it’s true that fruit stickers are technically edible, it’s also not exactly accurate, either. Sure, you probably won’t come to much harm, if any, if you bite off a chunk of apple with the sticker still attached, but they’re not made from a special edible paper or stuck on with a special adhesive. You’re much better off peeling them off before biting in.
This isn’t one that we think about too often if we can help it.
It’s hard to dispute this one, and now likely a lot of us are trying to remember back to what might have been that last day in a parent’s arms. Were you maybe three or four? Hop on your dad’s shoulders at five? Who knows, but those days are in the past now. Thanks for the bring down, @BradleyKing1980.
