You know that feeling when you are minding your business, scrolling through Twitter, and you stumble on a question so good, you have to stop and check the replies? That is exactly what happened when one Ola asked, “Does anyone have any random fun facts about a very niche subject? I’m bored and love learning random things.”
And let me tell you, the internet delivered. People came through with facts so random, so oddly specific, you will wonder how they even know these things. But that is the beauty of it, pure, unfiltered knowledge you did not ask for but now can not unsee.
So, here are 12 of the most unexpected, mind-blowing, and wonderfully useless facts that will live rent-free in your head from now on.
Your brain forgets things on purpose as a survival mechanism.
This process, known as adaptive forgetting, helps us focus on important information and discard irrelevant or outdated memories. If we remembered everything, our brains would be overwhelmed with useless details.
The Earth actually takes about 365 days and 6 hours to complete a trip around the Sun.
For convenience, we ignore the extra 6 hours. Over four years, these accumulate to a full day (24 hours), which we then add as February 29th, creating a leap year.
October 31, 2000, was the last time all of humanity was on Earth.
Since then, there has always been at least one person in space.
The smell of old books comes from lignin, a compound in paper that’s chemically similar to vanilla.
As books age, lignin breaks down and releases vanillin, giving them that nostalgic, slightly sweet scent. So next time you sniff a book and get hit with that nostalgic scent, just know your nose is basically detecting ancient vanilla-flavoured paper.
The smell of freshly cut grass is actually a plant distress signal.
When grass is cut, it releases chemicals meant to warn other plants of danger.
When crocodiles eat their prey, they sometimes “cry.”
Not because they feel guilty, but because their sinuses get blocked while eating, causing involuntary tears, hence the phenomenon, known as “crocodile tears syndrome”.. So, if a crocodile ever starts weeping in front of you, it’s not having an emotional breakdown, it just had a really big lunch.
When a person’s name is closely related to their profession, it is called an aptronym.
Examples include Usain Bolt (fast runner), Margaret Court (tennis player), and Bob Flowerdew (gardener).
There’s a neurological condition called synaesthesia that allows people to taste words, see music, or hear colours.
This rare condition causes sensory overlaps, such as associating sounds with colours or tastes.
When you look at the Sun, you are actually witnessing the past.
You’re seeing it as it was 8 minutes and 20 seconds ago because that’s how long it takes light to travel from the Sun to Earth
The desire to escape slavery was once classified as a mental illness called drapetomania.
Yes, in 1851, an actual doctor coined the term drapetomania to describe enslaved people who wanted to escape. Because apparently, the idea of not wanting to be enslaved was so confusing that they just called it an illness instead.
If two clocks are separated vertically by 1 cm, the lower clock will run more slowly than the upper clock due to gravitational time dilation.
Time passes slightly slower at lower elevations because of the Earth’s gravitational field.
The letter ‘e’ is the most commonly used letter in the English language.
It appears in approximately 11% of all words.
