Depending on how you look at it, life is always full of little surprises.
Since we developed big brains, humans have always had a thirst for knowing things and
understanding how they work.
Every now and then, you’d come across a bit of trivia that leaves you scratching your
head or questioning your existence.
For one, you could have gone your whole life without knowing that a toothpaste blob was
called a nurdle, but now you do.
Watch on to find out the rest of the unknown wonders that surround your daily lives and
never run out of conversation starters ever again.
Here are 30 useless facts which are actually not so useless after all.
Don't forget to like and subscribe for more neat facts to discover the world, one click at a time!
1. You spray 2.5 drops of saliva per word.
The average talker sprays 300 microscopic saliva droplets per minute.
No one has the statistics for announcers and DJs yet, though.
2. You spend 92 days of your life on the toilet.
Based on a UK study with 2,500 respondents, the average man spends 1 hour and 45 minutes
on the toilet, which amounts to 92 days in a lifetime.
3. A coin toss isn’t 50-50.
The next time you try to decide something, a coin toss may not be the best idea.
Typically, the chances for a coin toss is 51-49, not 50-50.
If you flip a coin, there is a 51% chance it will land on the side that it started on.
4. Junk food is as addictive as drugs.
The struggle to quit and the tendency to lose control may sound like a drug problem, but
it’s a similar problem for junk food.
Studies have shown that eating junk food has a similar effect on brain activity as narcotics do.
This phenomenon is more common with highly-processed food such as fast food and instant food.
5. Salt used to be a currency.
For ancient civilizations, salt was so valuable that the Romans used it as money.
They even paid their soldiers in salt rations instead of money.
6. Mr. Potato Head used to be made of actual potato.
When Mr. Potato Head was first released in 1952, the toy only included
eyes, noses, and mouths.
For the potato body, kids were expected to provide their own spud.
However, due to the possible safety hazards of the sharp pieces, the plastic body was
provided in 1964.
7. The Super Soaker was designed and invented by a NASA engineer.
Upon its release in 1990, the Super Soaker quickly made over $1 billion in sales.
Inventor and NASA engineer Lonnie Johnson used the royalties from his invention to fund
research on solar power.
8. Chicken meat is not a main ingredient of chicken nuggets.
The main ingredients for a typical chicken nugget is fat, epithelium,
bone, and connective tissue.
Sounds appetizing!
9. You can’t see the Great Wall of China from space.
You may have seen fact sites claiming that the Great Wall is the only man-made structure
visible from space, but this is actually not the case.
According to the Apollo astronauts, the Great Wall cannot be seen from space.
However, city lights, roads, and the Pyramids of Giza are said to be visible.
10. Ice cream warms the body.
It might make perfect sense to eat ice cream when you’re feeling hot, but it actually
does the opposite to our bodies.
The high fat content in ice cream warms us up rather than cooling down the body
as it metabolizes.
11. Hershey's makes one million miles of Twizzlers every year.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, there is certainly enough demand for Hershey’s to create over
1.6 million kilometers of Twizzlers a year.
Think about that the next time you slander Twizzlers.
12. The oldest piece of chewing gum is over 9,000 years old.
The oldest chewing gum ever found was a lump of birch tar that dates back to the Stone Age.
13. Oreo has made enough cookies to go to the moon and back 5 times.
Since Oreo was introduced to the market in 1912, over 450 billion Oreo cookies have been
sold worldwide.
14. There are 336 dimples on a regulation golf ball.
The little indents on golf balls aren’t just there to help you differentiate it from
other sports balls.
The dimples on a golf ball’s surface create a thin turbulent boundary layer of air that
clings to the ball’s surface, which affects the overall trajectory of the ball.
15. Over 10,000 Coca-Cola drinks are consumed per second worldwide.
The 10,000 drinks per second includes other Coca Cola products such as Fanta, Dr. Pepper,
Sprite and other Coke varieties.
16. "Underground" is the only English word that begins and ends with the letters u, n and d.
That’s another one of the useless facts you can actually use to sound smart.
17. You have a one in 2 billion chance to live past 100 years old.
Out of two billion people, only one person will live to be 116 or older.
18. Rice is the oldest food we still eat today.
In 2003, scientists recovered 15,000-year-old burnt rice grains in Korea.
This makes rice the oldest known food that we eat till the present.
19. Some lions mate over 50 times a day.
When lions are in heat, they mate every 20–30 minutes, which makes almost 50 times per day.
20. The first webcam was invented to monitor a coffee pot.
In 1993, researchers at Cambridge’s computer science department got tired of walking up
to an empty coffee machine.
So, they wired up a system that would stream images from the Trojan Room that housed the
coffee pot.
21. The holes in spaghetti spoons have a purpose.
The single, circular hole in the middle of pasta spoons isn’t just for draining.
It is actually a measure for the serving size of spaghetti.
The amount of dry spaghetti that fits snug in the hole counts as one serving.
22. The earliest computer mouse used to be called a turtle.
Manufacturers of the early versions of the computer mouse called it a turtle, because
of its hard shell and moving part underneath.
23. Pencils are yellow because of Chinese royalty.
In the 1800s, the best graphite in the world came from China.
Since the Americans wanted to give a tribute to the Chinese for the graphite, they manufactured
them in yellow which symbolizes royalty and respect in China.
This is also why the default color for pencils to this day is still yellow.
24. Amazon box sizes aren’t just random.
Sometimes, Amazon ships small items in big boxes.
However, it’s not a mistake or a random fluke.
Amazon has an algorithm for shipping which decides how all items should fit together.
This algorithm is why you may sometimes receive a huge box for little items – it prevents
the items from sliding around and colliding with each other.
25. Maps sometimes have fake places to prevent plagiarism.
Plagiarism can be hard to avoid for mapmakers.
After all, what should they do?
Invent new places?
You’d be surprised to know some mapmakers do just that.
Cartographers can add wrong streets, fake towns, or other landmarks to prove whether
a competitor mapmaker is copying their work.
26. The average belly button has 67 species of bacteria.
Your mom wasn’t playing around when she told you to clean your belly button.
According to research, the belly button is a rainforest of bacteria, with even previously
unknown bacteria found in the 60 participants’ navels.
27. A sponge can reconstruct itself in hours.
If you force a live sea sponge through a mesh screen, it will rearrange itself after a few hours.
28. Every second, over 2 million e-mails are sent.
For each second on the internet, 9.4 websites are created, 3,000,000 google searches are
done, and 672 people search for porn.
29. The remote control was invented earlier than the television.
30 years before the first digital television, Nikola Tesla invented a “teleautomaton”
that could control certain devices at a distance through radio waves.
His first remote-controlled device was a remote-contolled boat in 1898.
Since then, people adapted the wired remote for television.
However, due to injuries, they developed it further to be a wireless remote.
30. 7-UP is a straightforward name.
When Charles Leiper Grigg created 7-UP in 1929, he named it after the original 7-ounce
bottle (7) and “Up” to describe the direction bubbles go in a soda.
As we get caught up in our daily routines, it’s easy to grow tired of doing the same
thing over and over again.
However, there’s actually a lot to learn even about the most mundane things in our lives.
There’s always something new to discover if you know where to look.
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