Our world is a wild and mysterious place at times. It is full of all kinds of amazing things, bizarre creatures, incredible people, and fascinating landscapes. Sprinkled on top of all that is some weird and strange information that may seem too weird to be true but actually ends up proving that sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction.
1
Nintendo was founded in 1889, which was 69 years before the first video game was even invented. Nintendo was always a company invested in games, and they started out handcrafting playing cards before moving into manufacturing. Over the years, they also branched out into toys and board games.
2
There is an extremely rare condition called "Stone Man Syndrome", it causes any, smallest damage done to tissue to regrow into a bone, speaking briefly. People affected by this sickness slowly turn into living statues as they get older
3
There were more planes destroyed in World War II than there are (currently intact) planes on Earth today
4
To scale, the distance between a nucleus and orbiting electron is 16 times longer than the distance between the Sun and Pluto.
5
Cheetahs cant roar, but they can meow like house cats.
6
It's pretty well known by now, but calculators today have more computing power than Apollo 11. We got to the moon with slide rulers and huge balls.
7
If every single person on the entire planet took part in a rock paper scissors contest. Where everyone paired up and played, losers were knocked out and winners stayed on etcYou would only have to win 33 times in a row to beat all 7.53 billion people on the planet
8
From 1613 and 1620 a Samurai travelled to Rome by way of Mexico. During this time, Shakespeare was still alive, Virginia had been founded for around a decade, Gallileo was accused of heresy, and Pocahantes arrived in England. He met the Pope he was made a Roman citizen. His name was Hasekura Tsunenaga, and was the last japanese person to officially visit Europe until around 1860.
10
The longest time between two twins being born is 87 days.
11
One day Mao Zedong saw a sparrow eating grain. Thinking that the sparrows were hurting China's grain supply, he and the Communist Party launched the *Four Pests Campaign*. The Chinese military and population [took out] every sparrow they could find. Embassies didn't allow the Chinese to [take out] sparrows on their property, so the Chinese banged pots and pans outside the embassies 24/7 until the sparrows died of exhaustion. Unfortunately for the Chinese, sparrows mainly eat insects, not grain. The locust population exploded and [***43 million people starved to death.***]
12
People were deliberately infected with malaria to cure their syphilis, and the man who developed this treatment - Julius Wagner-Jauregg received the nobel prize for it.(The extremely high fevers of the malaria infections killed the syphilis bacteria, then the patients were cured of the malaria using quinine.)
13
We live many times closer to the last dinosaur than the first and last dinosaur did to each other.
14
Oxford University Predates the Aztec empire by over 200 years.And, for fun one of my favorites:Woolly Mammoths were still around at the time the Great Pyramids in Giza were built.
15
When Mt Everest was first measured it was exactly 29,000 feet. It was reported as 29,002 because exactly 29,000 was not believable.
16
The record for most children born to one mother is 69, to the wife of Feodor Vassilyev (b. 1707–c.1782), a peasant from Shuya, Russia. In 27 labors, she gave birth to 16 pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets.
17
Ireland was a net exporter of food during the great potato famine.
18
In the last 3,000 years, there were only 268 years in which there was no war in the world
19
More people died making the V2 rockets during WW2 than were [unalived] by them
20
A morbidly obese person can survive with absolute starvation without any sickness or feeling ill (under close control). There have been studies since 60's, there is a patient in 1973 who went under a 382 day starvation diet for therapuetic purposes under close control with only vitamin and mineral supplements and water intake without protein, carbohydrate or fat intake (no food at all). Dropped from 207 kg to 88kg and maintained it. After a follow up check-up 5 years later, the patient was 96 kilograms, stabilized. Prolonged fasting had no ill effects. If anybody is curious about the article, the pubmed ID is: PMC2495396.
21
There are more trees on the earth than stars in the Milky Way.Every time you shuffle a deck of cards, you've probably made an entirely unique order, as compared to every other shuffle in history.
22
if sound could travel through space, the roar of the sun would be deafening even though it's 93M miles away.
23
An eyewitness to Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theater told his story on national television.
24
There is no good metric for 'the number of languages on earth'. This is mostly because linguists cannot agree on what constitutes a new language and what constitutes a dialect of an existing language.The best current metric of how many languages exist is the number of translations of the Christian bible.
25
You are closer to being a millionaire than Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos.
26
If you earned $1 every second, it would take 2,921 years to have more money than Bill Gates.
27
there is no universally accepted definition of "vegetable."it's a cultural and culinary term, and varies from place to place.
28
In chess there are over 9 million variations after just 3 moves each. 288 billion different possible positions after 4 moves each. In a complete game there are more possible positions than there are electrons in the observable universe.
29
If Earth was a basketball, to scale the moon would be a tennis ball. It would orbit around 7.5 meters away, which is a lot farther than most people think.If the nucleus of a hydrogen atom was a tennis ball, to scale the electron would orbit at about 2500 meters away. There is no ball small enough to compare to how small electrons would still be at this scale.
30
The Tyrannosaurus Rex lived closer in time to us than it did the Stegosaurus.
