Useless Facts

All 88 Facts

1. 1.Bananas are berries. Strawberries aren't.
2. 2.Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the construction of the Great Pyramid.
3. 3.Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire.
4. 4.A group of flamingos is called a flamboyance.
5. 5.Wombats produce cube-shaped poop. They are the only animals known to do this.
6. 6.There are more possible chess games than atoms in the observable universe.
7. 7.Honey never spoils. Archaeologists have found 3000-year-old honey in Egyptian tombs that was still edible.
8. 8.A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus.
9. 9.Otters hold hands while sleeping so they don't drift apart.
10. 10.The shortest war in history lasted 38 to 45 minutes. (Anglo-Zanzibar War, 1896.)
11. 11.Humans share 60% of their DNA with bananas.
12. 12.The inventor of the Pringles can is buried in one.
13. 13.Butterflies taste with their feet.
14. 14.A snail can sleep for three years.
15. 15.The Eiffel Tower grows about 6 inches taller in summer due to thermal expansion.
16. 16.Sharks are older than trees.
17. 17.There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all of Earth's beaches.
18. 18.Crows can recognise and remember human faces, and will hold grudges against people who wronged them.
19. 19.The heart of a blue whale is so large, a human could crawl through the arteries.
20. 20.Sloths can hold their breath longer than dolphins.
21. 21.Octopuses have three hearts, blue blood, and a beak. They are extremely weird.
22. 22.Scotland's national animal is the unicorn.
23. 23.A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time: 1/100th of a second.
24. 24.The Twitter bird's name is Larry.
25. 25.Dolly the sheep was named after Dolly Parton, because she was cloned from a mammary cell.
26. 26.Pineapples take two years to grow.
27. 27.The average person walks the equivalent of five times around the Earth in their lifetime.
28. 28.Hot water freezes faster than cold water under certain conditions. Nobody fully agrees on why.
29. 29.Penguins propose to their mates with pebbles.
30. 30.Finland and Norway share a mountain which they moved the border of so the peak would land on Norway's side as a birthday gift.
31. 31.The color orange was named after the fruit. Before that, people called the color 'yellow-red.'
32. 32.Cats can't taste sweet things. They're simply not interested.
33. 33.There's a species of jellyfish that is considered biologically immortal.
34. 34.Sunsets on Mars are blue.
35. 35.The wood frog can survive being completely frozen during winter and thaw out in spring, fully alive.
36. 36.Elephants are the only animals that can't jump.
37. 37.The longest recorded flight of a chicken is 13 seconds.
38. 38.Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.
39. 39.Hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly backwards.
40. 40.A group of owls is called a parliament.
41. 41.The smell of rain has a name: petrichor.
42. 42.Sea otters have skin pockets where they store their favourite rocks.
43. 43.A group of pugs is called a grumble.
44. 44.Nintendo was founded in 1889 as a playing card company.
45. 45.Carrots were originally purple. Orange carrots were cultivated by the Dutch in the 17th century.
46. 46.Tomatoes are fruits. So are cucumbers, peppers, and avocados.
47. 47.Your nose and ears never stop growing.
48. 48.The average cloud weighs about 1.1 million pounds.
49. 49.Cows have best friends and get stressed when separated from them.
50. 50.There's a village in France called 'Yas.' The Twitter bird is named Larry.
51. 51.Goats have rectangular pupils so they can see almost 360 degrees.
52. 52.Ants never sleep.
53. 53.A group of cats is called a clowder.
54. 54.The national animal of Canada is the beaver, which appears on the nickel. The national animal of Australia is technically the red kangaroo.
55. 55.The odds of you existing are astronomically low. And yet here you are, reading useless facts.
56. 56.Koalas have fingerprints almost identical to humans. Crime scene investigators have been fooled.
57. 57.The Hawaiian alphabet has only 13 letters.
58. 58.A potato has more chromosomes than a human.
59. 59.Ketchup was sold as medicine in the 1830s.
60. 60.Water has no taste or smell. Everything you think water tastes like is actually the container or minerals in it.
61. 61.The inventor of the question mark was named Henry Denham. This is probably not the most interesting thing about him.
62. 62.The shortest place name is 'Å' — a village in Norway. It means 'river.'
63. 63.Catfish have about 100,000 taste buds. Humans have around 10,000.
64. 64.A group of hippos is called a bloat.
65. 65.Male seahorses carry and give birth to babies.
66. 66.It's impossible to hum while holding your nose closed.
67. 67.The moon is slowly moving away from Earth at about the same rate as your fingernails grow.
68. 68.Humans are the only animals that blush.
69. 69.The blue whale's tongue weighs as much as an elephant.
70. 70.A flock of crows is called a murder.
71. 71.There is a species of ant that explodes when threatened, covering predators in toxic goo.
72. 72.Bees can recognise human faces.
73. 73.The average person has between 50,000 and 70,000 thoughts per day. Most of them are about nothing in particular.
74. 74.Light from the sun takes about 8 minutes to reach Earth. By the time you see it, you're already slightly in the past.
75. 75.Cashews grow on the outside of a fruit called a cashew apple, which is not something most people know.
76. 76.Humans are the only animals that cook their food.
77. 77.A goldfish has a longer attention span than commonly reported. The '3-second memory' thing is a myth.
78. 78.The shortest complete sentence in the English language is 'Go.'
79. 79.Velcro was invented after a man noticed burrs sticking to his dog's fur.
80. 80.The word 'checkmate' in chess comes from the Persian phrase 'Shah Mat,' meaning 'the king is dead.'
81. 81.Rubber ducks were not made of rubber for most of their history.
82. 82.The original Monopoly was designed to demonstrate the evils of capitalism. It did not work.
83. 83.The T-Rex lived closer in time to us than it did to the Stegosaurus.
84. 84.You can't sneeze with your eyes open. Don't try to prove otherwise.
85. 85.The average person spends six months of their life waiting for red lights.
86. 86.Coffee is technically a fruit juice — it's made from the seeds inside a berry.
87. 87.There is more computing power in your phone than was used to land on the moon.
88. 88.Polar bear fur is transparent, not white.