Fun facts
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Honey never spoils. Archaeologists have found 3,000-year-old honey in Egyptian tombs that is still perfectly edible.
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Honey never spoils. Archaeologists have found 3,000-year-old honey in Egyptian tombs that is still perfectly edible.
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A day on Venus is longer than its year โ it rotates slower than it orbits the Sun.
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Octopuses have three hearts and blue blood.
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Bananas are botanically berries, while strawberries are not.
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The human body contains enough carbon to fill about 9,000 pencils.
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Wombat poop is cube-shaped, which stops it from rolling away.
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A single bolt of lightning is about five times hotter than the surface of the Sun.
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There are more possible games of chess than atoms in the observable universe.
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Sharks existed before trees โ they have been around for over 400 million years.
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Your nose can remember around 50,000 different scents.
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The Eiffel Tower can grow over 15 cm taller in summer as the metal expands in the heat.
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Sea otters hold hands while sleeping so they donโt drift apart.
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A teaspoon of neutron-star material would weigh about a billion tonnes on Earth.
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The first computer "bug" was a real moth found stuck inside a machine in 1947.
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Humans share roughly 60% of their DNA with bananas.
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A group of flamingos is called a "flamboyance".
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It rains diamonds on Jupiter and Saturn, according to atmospheric models.
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The Great Pyramid of Giza was the tallest human-made structure for over 3,800 years.
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Some turtles can breathe through their rear ends.
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The dot over a lowercase "i" or "j" is called a tittle.
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Some neutron stars spin over 600 times every second.
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A shrimpโs heart is located in its head.
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Bamboo is the fastest-growing plant on Earth โ some species grow nearly a metre in a single day.
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Your stomach acid is strong enough to corrode metal; its lining is replaced every few days to protect you.
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The oldest known written customer complaint was carved into a clay tablet in Babylon around 1750 BC.
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The first message ever sent over the internet was meant to be "LOGIN", but the system crashed after just "LO".
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Cows have close friends and can become stressed when they are separated from them.
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There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all of Earthโs beaches.
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Hawaii drifts about 7 cm closer to Japan every year as tectonic plates move.
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The adult human body is made up of roughly 37 trillion cells.
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A snailโs tongue-like radula can carry thousands of microscopic teeth.
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Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire โ teaching began at Oxford before the Aztec capital was even founded.
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More than 90% of the worldโs money exists only as digital records, never as physical cash.
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The footprints left by Apollo astronauts on the Moon could remain for millions of years, as there is no wind to erase them.
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Lightning strikes the Earth around 8 million times every day.
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You are about a centimetre taller in the morning, because the discs in your spine compress over the day.
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Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.
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Cleopatra lived closer in time to the first Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
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The QWERTY keyboard layout was designed back in the 1870s for mechanical typewriters.
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Saturn is so light for its size that it would float if you could find a bathtub big enough.
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At least half of the oxygen we breathe is produced by ocean plankton, not by forests.
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Elephants are among the very few animals that can recognise themselves in a mirror.
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The human eye can distinguish an estimated 10 million different colours.
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Ketchup was sold in the 1830s as a medicine to treat an upset stomach.
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The first computer mouse, built in the 1960s, was carved out of wood.
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About one million Earths could fit inside the Sun.
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Antarctica is technically the largest desert on Earth, because so little precipitation falls there.
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A group of crows is called a "murder".
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Your brain uses about 20% of your bodyโs energy, despite being only around 2% of your weight.
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The Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896 is the shortest in recorded history โ it was over in under 45 minutes.
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The "@" symbol was used in trade for centuries before it became central to email in 1971.
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Space is completely silent, because there is no air to carry sound waves.
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One species of jellyfish can revert to an earlier life stage, making it effectively biologically immortal.
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Hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly backwards.
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Humans appear to be the only animals that blush.
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Nintendo was founded in 1889 and originally made playing cards.
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Polar bears have black skin beneath their fur, which only looks white.
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A bolt of lightning contains enough energy to toast around 100,000 slices of bread.
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The total length of the blood vessels in an adult human body is roughly 100,000 km.
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Venus is the only planet in our solar system that spins clockwise when viewed from above.