People Are Sharing Things Most People Just Don’t Know About
Are you looking for weird facts to impress your friends? Maybe some obscure facts that might come in handy at your next trivia night? Perhaps some helpful, under-the-radar hints to make like a little bit easier are your jam.
In any event, we've got you covered. Thanks to the crowdsourcing powers of Reddit and social media, there's a gigantic repository of hidden knowledge just waiting to be delved into. After all, knowledge is power - and there's a whole lot of power in these facts.
Squirrels are born to run up trees.
Anyone who's watched a squirrel for more than a few seconds knows that these little beasts are particularly adept at running up and down trees. But did you know that they can actually run faster up trees than they can on flat ground?
Knowing this, it makes sense that squirrels are so skittish when they're on the ground, and so quick to jump up a tree trunk and start climbing. They're clearly more comfortable on a tree branch than on the ground.
You can injure yourself with humor.
Whoever said "laughter is the best medicine" was clearly not a doctor, because while laughter can feel good, too much of it can actually be quite dangerous. Yes, you can collapse your lungs from laughing too hard.
To expand on this newfound fear, it isn't just laughter that can cause a collapse lung. Something as benign as sneezing can also mess up your lungs. You can't go through life without sneezing and without laughter, so just try to be careful.
"Happy Birthday" was a closely guarded trademark.
If you pay attention, you'll find that most movies released before 2015 rarely feature people singing "Happy Birthday" - even though it's a staple of practically every English-speaking birthday party in the real world.
This is because one company, Warner Chappell Music, owned the licensing rights to the song up until 2015. To avoid paying royalty fees, most movies would just avoid the song and go with "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" or something similar.
Museum ships are still ready to go, kind of.
Have you ever been inside a preserved battleship from World War II, perhaps as part of a naval museum? These ships are decommissioned and can't start their engines. But the reason for this, counterintuitively, is to enable them to get back into service.
The reason for their engines being gummed up is because they're full of preservative grease. This grease helps prevent rust and decay, and removing it would allow the ships to be brought back into service relatively quickly.
Cemeteries and graveyards are not the same thing.
Some say cemetery, some say graveyard - same thing, right? After all, both refer to an area where bodies are buried. As it turns out, the etymology here is much more specific when it comes to burial plots.
Graveyards are, well, yards with graves, located on church grounds and adjacent to a church. If a group of burial plots is not connected to a church and is part of a separate facility, it's referred to as a cemetery.
Your body is ready to fight anything and everything.
If you've ever heard of t-cells, give them a round of applause. These cells are essentially trained and conditioned by the human body to alter their genetic code in order to fight specific diseases and infections.
This means that your immune system has at least one cell designated to fight every single infection that could possibly exist. It doesn't mean that you won't ever get sick and it isn't a guarantee against disease, but it's a powerful reminder of what the immune system is constantly doing behind the scenes.
The Amazon is more untamed than most rivers.
If you live somewhere that has a river, you can probably think of half a dozen bridges that cross it, just within a radius of a few square miles. But the Amazon River isn't like most rivers.
The mighty Amazon is not only epic at 4,000 miles long, it also doesn't have a single bridge to cross it. Not one. This is owing largely to the fact that for much of its length, it's traversing remote rainforest where bridges aren't necessary and are tough to build.
You're thinking of fonts all wrong.
What's your font? Do you like the classic Times New Roman, or do you embrace chaos with Comic Sans? Well, whatever your preferences, just know that neither of these two options is a font at all.
What we think of as fonts - variations in the styles of individual letters - are actually known as typefaces. The word "font" describes how a typeface is tweaked. So Arial is a typeface, and its size, boldness or italicization is the font.
Coal mines can burn for a long, long time.
In our never-ending quest for resources, human beings are bound to pull the occasional whoopsie. One of the most notable flubs occurred in the coal town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, where an underground coal mine was ignited in 1962 and just kept burning.
For years, residents reported hot ground and steaming vents, and it was only when sinkholes started opening up that the government took action. The town was slowly abandoned, and the coal fire will burn for decades, if not centuries, to come.
What is wet?
Think about what it feels like when you detect wetness. It feels...wet, right? In reality, the human body doesn't have any mechanism to detect wetness. What we're perceiving is actually a combination of temperature and pressure, and our brain makes the connection separately.
This means you can put on a thin latex glove and submerge your hand in water, and your hand will feel "wet" - even though, in reality, your hand is fully dry under the glove.
Keyboard shortcuts can save a lot of time.
Most people who use a computer for their job probably know a few keyboard shortcuts (if you have a broken-down computer, you've probably worn out your CTRL+ALT+DELETE shortcut, for instance). But it's worth delving into the whole array of shortcuts available to you.
For instance, CTRL+Backspace deletes your last word, making it a bit quicker to change what you've just written. CTRL+arrow keys also skip forwards and back between entire words. There are tons of shortcuts that are worth introducing to your muscle memory.
Most people survived the Hindenburg disaster.
The Hindenburg disaster of 1937, in which a massive German zeppelin burst into flames in front of a massive crowd, is commonly seen as the aeronautical equivalent to the Titanic. But in reality, passengers aboard the airship were more likely to live than to die.
Of the 97 people onboard the Hindenburg, 62 survived. Compare this to the sinking of the Titanic, in which more than two thirds of the people on board the ship lost their lives, and the Hindenburg doesn't seem that deadly.
Cats are good at falling.
If you know a little bit about physics, you're probably familiar with the concept of terminal velocity - essentially the top speed at which an object can fall, a speed that, by definition, cannot be exceeded.
Cats have an interesting quirk known as "non-fatal terminal velocity." This is exactly what it sounds like, which means that a cat could likely survive a fall from an airplane just as easily as it could a fall from a particularly tall tree.
Your eyes have their own immune system.
The human body has an immune system, and eyes have their own separate immune system. This sounds kind of cool, but the implications can actually spell trouble if things start to go sideways.
Because these immune systems don't communicate very well, the body's immune system can attack something that's affecting the eyes, even though the eyes' immune system is already handling things. This means that, in some cases, your own immune system can attack your eyes and blind you.
There are a lot of stars.
You're probably already aware on some level that the universe is big, really big. But just to put things into perspective, consider this: if you spent one second looking at each star in our local galaxy, the Milky Way, it would take over 3,000 years to see them all.
Remember, all of those stars reside in just one galaxy. The Milky Way is one of an estimated two trillion galaxies in the known universe. That's more than a few stars altogether.
Can you smell rain in the air?
The smell of rain, whether it's an incoming storm, or the way raindrops interact with surfaces, is pretty recognizable to humans. As it turns out, we're particularly well adapted to sniffing out rain.
In fact, human beings are four times better at smelling rain than sharks are at smelling blood. Considering the fact that a shark's life depends partially on its ability to sniff out blood, this makes our ability to smell rain all the more remarkable.
Marco Polo saw some things.
Marco Polo saw much more of the world of antiquity than almost anyone else who lived during that time. Along the way, he reported some fantastical sights - including, incredibly, a unicorn, which he said he saw at Kublai Khan's palace.
So did Marco Polo really see a unicorn? We can say with certainty that unicorns don't exist and never did exist, so modern historians have concluded that what he actually saw was most likely a rhinoceros.
Here's why your dog makes that awkward eye contact.
Have you ever taken your dog for a walk, then shared an uncomfortable moment of intense eye contact while doggo does its business? It's weird, right? It isn't like most humans want to make eye contact while they're on the toilet.
The evolutionary reason for this is that your dog loves you and sees you as a protector. The dog recognizes that taking a squat means letting its guard down, so it's looking to its most trusted ally during this vulnerable time.
You don't want to be stung by a jellyfish.
This applies to any jellyfish at all, really, but certain members of the species pack an especially painful punch. The tiny irukandji jellyfish is almost unnoticeable in the water, but one of the symptoms of its sting is an impending sense of doom.
People stung by irukandji jellyfish report not just intense pain, but often beg doctors and medical personnel to put them out of their misery, as they're completely certain they're about to die.
We're all stardust.
"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust" refers to the common knowledge that elements are recycled, and never really disappear. But did you know that a good percentage of your body is composed of bona fide stardust?
In fact, everything aside from hydrogen, some helium, and iron, was forged in the center of a star at some untold point in spacetime. So if anyone ever calls you a star, you can say with certainty that you literally are...in a sense, at least.
Police officers tap your taillight for a good reason.
If you've ever been pulled over, or if you just watch a lot of Cops or other police-centric shows, you might have noticed that police officers casually but deliberately tap a car's taillight after it's been pulled over.
This is a simple, low-tech way for police officers to leave their mark on a scene - literally. By leaving a fingerprint on the vehicle, they're creating a forensic marker that can be referred to later just in case anything goes wrong.