Some say that facts are often stranger than fiction. Did you know that there’s an animal that produces pink milk, or that it is almost with certainty that the water you are drinking right now once passed through a dinosaur?
Here is a collection of 80 fascinating facts to enrich your knowledge. So read on, and get ready to have your mind blown into a different timezone.
1. Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire.
2. Harvard University was founded before calculus was derived.
Harvard is the oldest higher education institution in the US, founded in 1636. Calculus wasn’t derived until later in the 17th century, with the work of Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton.
3. France was still executing people with a guillotine when the first Star Wars film came out.
Star Wars premiered in theaters in May 1977. The last execution by guillotine took place September 10th of the same year.
4. Anne Frank, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barbara Walters were born in the same year, 1929.
5. The name Jessica was created by Shakespeare in the play Merchant of Venice.
6. Not once in the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme does it mention that he’s an egg.
7. In the span of 66 years, we went from taking flight to landing on the moon.
8. Pluto never made a full orbit around the sun from the time it was discovered to when it was declassified as a planet.
9. Russia has a larger surface area than Pluto.
10. Saudi Arabia imports camels from Australia.
11. Hippo milk is pink.
12. The toy Barbie‘s full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts.
13. Woody from Toy Story has a full name too — it’s Woody Pride.
14. And while we’re at it, Mr. Clean’s full name is Veritably Clean.
15. Oh, and Cookie Monster’s real name is Sid.
16. Carrots were originally purple.
17. The heart of a blue whale is so big, a human can swim through the arteries.
18. Vending machines are twice as likely to kill you than a shark is.
19. Home Alone was released closer to the moon landing than it was to today.
20. If you put your finger in your ear and scratch, it sounds just like Pac-Man.
21. The YKK on your zipper stands for “Yoshida Kogyo Kabushikigaisha.”
22. Maine is the closest U.S. state to Africa.
23. Armadillos nearly always give birth to identical quadruplets.
24. Betty White is actually older than sliced bread.
Otto Frederick Rohwedder invented sliced bread in 1928, while Betty White was born in 1922. Bread had existed prior, just not in the pre-sliced form.
25. The unicorn is the national animal of Scotland.
26. A strawberry isn’t a berry but a banana is.
27. So are avocados and watermelon.
28. New York City is further south than Rome, Italy.
29. North Korea and Finland are separated by one country.
30. Mammoths went extinct 1,000 years after the Egyptians finished building the Great Pyramid.
While most mammoths died out long before civilizations arose, a small population survived until 1650 BC. By that point, Egypt was halfway through its empire, and the Giza Pyramids were already 1000 years old.
31. There are more fake flamingos in the world than real flamingos.
32. Nintendo was founded as a trading card company back in 1889.
33. The man who voiced Fry on Futurama, Billy West, also voiced Doug on Doug.
34. The last time the Chicago Cubs won the baseball World Series, the Ottoman Empire still existed.
35. And lollipops had not yet been invented.
36. And women did not have the right to vote in the United States.
37. If you shrunk the sun down to the size of a white blood cell and shrunk the Milky Way Galaxy down using the same scale, it would be the size of the continental United States.
38. John Tyler, the 10th president of the United States, has two living grandchildren.
John Tyler served from 1841 to 1845, a full 20 years before Abraham Lincoln. He had a son, Lyon, at age 63. Lyon would have Lyon Jr. and Harrison at 71 and 75, respectively. Both are still alive today and in their 80′s.
39. Will Smith is now older than Uncle Phil was at the beginning of The Fresh Prince.
40. The show the The Wonder Years aired from 1988–1993 and covered the years 1968–1973. Today, in 2014, if one were to make a similar show, it would cover the years 1994–1999.
41. Humans share 50% of their DNA with bananas.
42. Duck Hunt is a two-player game. Player two controls the ducks.
43. The difference in time between when Tyrannosaurus Rex and Stegosaurus lived is greater than the difference in time between Tyrannosaurus Rex and now.
44. The probability of you drinking a glass of water that contains a molecule of water that also passed through a dinosaur is almost 100%.
45. Alaska is simultaneously the most northern, the most western, and the most eastern state in the U.S.
46. Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of the iPhone than she did to the building of the Great Pyramid.
47. A thousand seconds is about 16 minutes.
48. A million seconds is about 11 days.
49. A billion seconds is about 32 years.
50. And one trillion seconds is about 32,000 years. A trillion is a lot.
51. But the good news is: Honey never spoils. You can eat 32,000-year-old honey.
52. There are more stars in space than there are grains of sand on every beach on Earth.
53. And there’s enough water in Lake Superior to cover all of North and South America in one foot of water.
54. There are more public libraries than McDonald’s in the U.S.
55. For every human on Earth there are approximately 1.6 million ants. The total weight of all those ants is approximately the same as the total weight of all the humans on Earth.
56. An octopus has 3 hearts.
57. Super Mario hits blocks with his hand, not his head.
58. The CEO of Food For The Poor is named Robin Mahfood.
59. One in every 5,000 babies is born with a condition known as imperforate anus. This means the baby is born without an anus and has to have one created manually in the hospital.
60. You can’t hum while holding your nose.
61. It rains diamonds on Saturn and Jupiter.
62. Also, this is what Jupiter would look like if it were as close to us as the Moon is:
63. And this is what sand looks like under a microscope:
64. If a piece of paper were folded 42 times, the thickness is enough to reach the moon.
65. The pyramids were as old to the Romans as the Romans are to us.
66. If you dug a hole to the center of the Earth and dropped a book down, it would take 42 minutes to reach the bottom.
67. There is 10 times more bacteria in your body than actual body cells.
68. And 90% of the cells that make us up of aren’t human but mostly fungi and bacteria.
69. Every two minutes, we take more pictures than all of humanity in the 19th century.
70. Peanuts are not nuts. They grow in the ground, so they are legumes.
71. Turtles can breathe out of their butts.
72. The dot over an “i” is called a “tittle.”
73. There are more atoms in a glass of water than glasses of water in all the oceans on Earth.
74. If the history of Earth were compressed to a single year, modern humans would appear on December 31st at about 11:58pm. The human race has lived on Earth for only 0.004% of the planet’s history.
75. At the time the current oldest person on Earth was born, there was a completely different set of human beings on the planet.
76. The oldest living person’s birth is closer to the signing of the Constitution than present day. Misao Okawa was born in 1898, an astonishing 116 years ago. The Constitution was signed in 1787, which makes her life 4 years closer to the historic Philadelphia convention than to today.
77. And at the time you were born, you were briefly the youngest person in the entire world.
78. If you’re over 45, the world population has doubled in your lifetime.
In 1968, the world population was 3,557,000,000. Today, the world population is 7,217,000,000 and grows by over 200,000 daily.
79. There is more processing power in a TI-83 calculator than in the computer that landed Apollo 11 on the moon.
80. And, finally, “dog food lid” backwards is “dildo of God.”
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