Some facts sound like facts; like the fact that the general human body is composed off 206 bones. That Springfield is the capital of Illinois. Or that science has identified 118 elements as part of the periodic table. Then there are facts that sound less true, but are all too
unforgettably real.
1
The microgravity in space can cause an astronauts blood to run backwards
2
Natural redheads have a genetic resistance to anesthesia + unusually high tolerance for pain. I guess the latter is to compensate for the former? Anyway, that’s why I always had a terrible fear of the dentist; they’d give me the normal dose of Novocain, then think I was lying when I said it didn’t work. Fun times! Knew I finally found the right dentist when he walked in, took one look at me, and told the tech to load up four times the Novocain - what he called the “redhead dose.”
3
Male reindeer lose their antlers in the winter but females don’t. Therefore Santa’s sleigh is pulled by a team of strong independent ladies.
4
Most people know that dogs have a really good sense of smell, but I recently did some research into the full extent of it. 40% of the brain goes entirely to their sense of smell. They have a completely different organ that is designed purely to take in the smell, separately from the oxygen they breathe (unlike humans, we process it together). To put this into perspective, we can taste a teaspoon of sugar in our coffee. They could smell a teaspoon of sugar inside two Olympic sized swimming pools. A cancer alert dog kept marking to one mole on a woman's arm. They had already tested it and it was negative. They decided to retest due to the dog's behavior, and found an incredibly small fraction of a cancer cell in the spot.
5
Lemons aren't naturally occurring, they were created through the breeding of bitter oranges and citrons. So we made lemons, then made lemonade.
6
The Sun is extremely loud, we just can't hear it because sound can't travel through the vacuum of space.
7
Juno, who was sent to Jupiter by NASA, was Jupiter's wife in Roman mythology. Jupiter's moons are named after Jupiter's mistresses. So NASA sent Jupiter's wife to 'spy' on him and his mistresses.
8
Cats don't meow to talk to other cats they use different language for that They meow to talk to us
9
A sword made from the blood of your enemies is technically possible. If you separate the iron out of the blood of 300 adults, you could smelt it down to an iron ingot. This ingot would be enough to be used to create a longsword.
10
Woodpeckers tongues wrap around their skulls to prevent them getting concussions.
11
People live closer in time to T Rex than T rex lived to stegosaurus.
12
The lighter was invented before the match.
13
For 1 600 billionth of a second when a hydrogen bomb detonates, it is 100 million degrees Celsius, the core of the sun is 15 million degrees Celsius.
14
In the 70s, in the USA, it was believed that infants didn’t feel pain. My first operation was in 74, when I was a day old, to shove a sac full of exposed nerves back into my spine (spina bifida myelomeningocele).
15
In the time it takes you to read this sentence, you’ve traveled approximately 2,200 miles through space relative to the cosmic background radiation.
16
Since it’s discovery in 1930 Pluto has yet to orbit the sun and won’t until 2178.
17
If our Sun was the size of a white blood cell, our galaxy would be the size of the continental United States.
18
You could fit all the planets in the solar system between Earth and The Moon at their average distance, with nearly 5,000 miles to spare.
19
Scientists don't know how anesthesia works. It just does.
20
Atoms don’t touch so you really haven’t touched anything
21
Splinter free toilet paper was invented in 1935. Which means before that, toilet paper had splinters. Ouch.
22
You only need to fold a piece of paper in half 45 times to be able to reach the Moon.
