• What plant is bigger than a Wal-Mart store?
How can you tell the difference between hot and cold… by HEARING it?
Here are 15 completely random facts that sound completely made-up… but they’re not, and
we’re going to tell you why.
15 –Heroin was marketed to children • In the late 1890s, German drug company
Bayer made a ton of money by selling aspirin as a pain reliever.
• But that’s not all they sold.
Bayer also promoted the use of heroin, specifically for children.
• The line between narcotics and medicine has always been a thin one, but Bayer decided
to stop selling heroin to kids once people figured out what heroin actually was.
14 – Silly putty shatters • Silly Putty is rarely subjected to anything
more severe than someone just stretching it in their hands.
• And because it’s soft and stretchy, you would expect it to just always be soft
and stretchy.
• Not so.
• Some researchers proved it with an experiment.
They put 50 pounds of Silly Putty together and dropped it 5 stories… and it didn’t
splat on the ground.
It SHATTERED, like an ball of glass.
13 – There’s a tree bigger than a Wal-Mart • The Banyan tree looks like an entire,
gigantic forest.
• But it isn’t a forest.
It’s one tree.
One giant, connected tree that covers a surface area of about 156 thousand square feet.
• For reference, the average Wal-Mart covers about 105 thousand square feet – only about
two-thirds of the size of the Banyan tree.
12 – You’re twice as likely to be killed by a vending machine than a shark
• The annual risk of being killed in a shark attack is about one in 250 million.
• As a comparison, the risk of being killed by a vending machine is about one in 112 million,
and the risk of being struck by lightning is about one in 7 million.
• By the way, the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are about one in 292 million.
11 – Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire
• Sure, you probably knew that Oxford University is one of the oldest universities in the world.
But you probably didn’t know it was THIS old.
• Teaching started at Oxford in 1096.
Over the next 150 years, it expanded and became a full-fledged university in 1249, and has
been in operation basically ever since.
• Meanwhile, the Aztec empire was founded in 1325, and overrun by Spanish conquistadors
in 1521.
10 – An 18-inch pizza is more pizza than two 12-inch pizzas
• It sounds absurd, but math backs this up.
• Circles increase in area with their length of their radius, so it’s true – a 12-inch
pizza gets you twice as much pizza as two 8-inch pizzas, and an 18-inch pizza is more
than two 12-inch pizzas.
• Also, an 18-inch pizza has more than 5 times as much as an 8-inch pizza, but probably
costs half as much.
• Always order the big pizza.
That’s the rule.
The challenge now is getting everyone to agree on toppings.
9 – Everest’s first measurement was fudged to make it seem more real
• Mount Everest is the tallest above-land mountain on Earth at a height of 29,035 feet.
• But early surveyors who measured it initially measured it to exactly 29 thousand feet.
• With such a round number, they were concerned that people would think they just made it
up, so they actually fudged the measurement and called it 29,002 feet.
8 – A strawberry is not a berry, but a banana is
• It’s a simple test.
Berries have seeds inside them.
• Strawberries have their seeds on the outside.
• Bananas have their seeds on the inside.
• You’re welcome.
7 – A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus
• Venus rotates in the opposite direction that Earth does, and very, very slowly.
• It actually rotates slower than it orbits the Sun, which means that its day is longer
than its year.
• That means the Sun rises twice a year on Venus… and also twice a DAY.
6 – You can hear the difference between hot and cold water
• You wouldn’t think you could, but if you try, it is actually very easy to tell
the difference between warm water and cold water, simply by listening to it being poured.
• The reason for this is that water has a different viscosity, or “thickness,”
at different temperatures.
• All liquids have this property, which is why warm honey behaves differently than
cold honey.
• And speaking of honey...
5 – Honey has no expiration date • When an ancient Egyptian tomb was excavated,
one of the things archeologists found was a jar of honey.
• The honey was thousands of years old, perfectly preserved – and just as edible
as it would have been on day one.
• Honey never spoils – EVER – due to a combination of its acidity, lack of water
content, and the existence of hydrogen peroxide. 4 – Hot water can freeze faster than cold
water • This is a strange phenomenon called the
Mpemba effect.
It has been observed over time by Aristotle, Francis Bacon, and Rene Descartes,but didn’t
enter the modern scientific canon until 1969.
• The effect occurs if you take two containers of water, identical in size, volume, and basically
everything but temperature.
• Put those two containers in freezing temperatures, and the warmer one will regularly freeze before
the colder one.
• The conditions have to be just right, and the water has to be close in temperature
– water that’s near boiling won’t freeze before water that’s just above the freezing
point.
3 – France executed its last person by guillotine in 1977
• Just in case you thought Marie Antoinette and her powdered wig were the last people
to be put under the guillotine…
nope.
• The last man to be executed by guillotine in France breathed his last on September 11,
1977 – the same day as the premiere of Star Wars.
2 – There is a lost nuclear bomb off the coast of Georgia
• On Feburary 5th, 1958, an Air Force bomber collided with a fighter jet during a training
exercise, damaging both planes.
• The pilot feared the nuclear bomb the plane was carrying might come loose as he
was landing, so he ditched it in the water before landing the plane safely.
• The Navy conducted a two-month search for the bomb, but was never able to find it.
So it still just sits there, at the bottom of the ocean.
1 – A headless chicken lived for 18 more months
• In September of 1945, Lloyd and Clara Olsen were just doing their usual farm activities
– chopping the heads off of chickens and cleaning them out for sale.
• But one of those chickens, after having its head chopped off, got up and continued
walking around.
So they put it in a box overnight and waited… and in the morning, it was STILL alive.
• They turned their headless chicken into a sideshow attraction, feeding it by dropping
liquid food directly into its esophagus.
• Miracle Mike the headless chicken lived another 18 months before – of all things
– choking to death in the middle of the night.