100 Interesting Facts About The World To Blow Your Mind (2024)

Madame Curie's notebooks are still radioactive. Researchers wishing to study them must sign a waiver in order to do so.

In response to The Lorax the foresting industry published Truax to teach kids about the importance of logging.

When Twister was introduced in 1966, it was denounced by criticsas "sex in a box."

There are more lifeforms living on your skin than there are people on the planet.

Otters sleep holding hands.

OJ Simpson was originally cast to play Terminator, but the studio was afraid that no one would buy him as a remorseless killer.

Leonardo da Vinci could write with one hand and draw with the other at the same time.

The last man to walk on the moon, Gene Cernan, promised his daughter he’d write her initials on the moon. He did, and her initials, “TDC,” will probably be on the moon for tens of thousands of years.

The Mimic Octopus can not only change colours, but will mimic the shapes of other animals, like the flounder, lionfish, and sea snakes.

Twenty percent of office coffee mugs contain fecal matter.

If you were to remove all of the empty space from the atoms that make up every human on earth, the entire world population could fit into an apple.

In the 1960s, the CIA tried to spy on the Kremlin and Russian embassies by turning cats into listening devices. The program, called Acoustic Kitty, involved surgically implanting batteries, microphones and antennae inside cats.

The three wealthiest families in the world have more assets than the combined wealth of the forty-eight poorest nations.

A traffic jam lasted lasted for more than 10 days, with cars only moving 0.6 miles a day.

Dueling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors.

Caterpillars completely liquify as they transform into moths.

There are over 200 corpses on Mount Everest and they are used as way points for climbers.

When adjusted for inflation, John D. Rockefeller is the richest man in the history of the world with a net worth 10 times more than Bill Gates.

All of the clocks in the movie "Pulp Fiction" are stuck at 4:20.

Dr. Seuss wrote "Green Eggs and Ham" to win a bet against his publisher who thought that he could not complete a book with only 50 words.

A human will eat on average 70 assorted insects and 10 spiders while sleeping.

There are more possible iterations of a game of chess than there are atoms in the known universe.

When the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers play football at home, the stadium becomes the state's third largest city.

Russia didn't consider beer to be alcohol until 2011. It was previously classified as a soft drink.

If a male lion takes over a pride, he executes all of the cubs.

Forbes estimated in 2011 that Scrooge McDuck was worth $44.1 billion.

Two-thirds of the people on Earth have never seen snow.

In Alfred Hitchco*ck's 1960 thriller Psycho, the sound effects for the famous shower scene were actually created by repeatedly stabbing a casaba melon.

A hummingbird weighs less than a penny.

There are more vacant houses than homeless people in the Unites States.

When St. Louis held the 1904 Summer Olympic Games, events included greased pole climbing, rock throwing and mud fighting.

The Woolly Mammoth was around when the Egyptian Pyramids were being built.

The average American drinks about 600 sodas a year.

If you try to suppress a sneeze, you can rupture a blood vessel in your head or neck and die.

When snakes are born with two heads, they fight each other for food.

The average person walks the equivalent of three times around the world in a lifetime.

A shark can detect one part of blood in 100 million parts of water.

The name Jeep came from the abbreviation used in the army for the "General Purpose" vehicle, G.P.

FDA regulations allow 10 insects and 35 fruit fly eggs per 8 ounces of raisins.

A jellyfish is 95 percent water.

You are 1% shorter in the evening than in the morning.

It would take over 1,000 years to watch every video on YouTube.

After racking up $40 in late fees for a VHS, Reed Hastings was inspired to start Netflix.

1 in 10 European babies are conceived in an IKEA bed.

A hippo can open its mouth wide enough to fit a 4 foot tall child inside.

A man named Charles Osborne had the hiccups for 69 years.

A co*ckroach can live several weeks with its head cut off.

Fifteen percent of the air you breathe in a metro station is human skin.

The tongue is the strongest muscle in the human body.

Guinness Book of Records holds the record for being the book most often stolen from Public Libraries.

A giraffe can clean its own ears with its 21-inch tongue.

A group of pugs is called a grumble.

Men are 6 times more likely to be struck by lightning than women.

In 2000, Pope John Paul II was named an 'Honorary Harlem Globetrotter.'

The words written on Twitter every day would fill a book of 10 million pages.

Frozen lobsters can come back to life when thawed.

Africa's population will more than double to 2.3 billion people by 2050.

Fortune cookies are actually an American invention -- Charles Jung created them in 1918.

Donald Duck comics were banned from Finland because he doesn't wear pants.

French was the official language of England for over 600 years.

A flea can jump 350 times its body length, the equivalent of a human jumping the length of a football field.

Actor Tommy Lee Jones and former vice-president Al Gore were freshman roommates at Harvard.

Tennessee was originally known as Franklin; West Virginia was nearly named Kanawha, and Utah almost became the state of Deseret.

You are more likely to die from a falling coconut than a shark attack.

The chance of you dying on the way to get lottery tickets is actually greater than your chance of winning.

Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.

In 1926, Arctic explorer Peter Freuchen was trapped under an avalanche while on an expedition. He escaped from death by fashioning a shiv out of his own feces and amputating his foot.

Elvis Presley got a 'C' in his 8th grade music class.

The average person consumes a pound of insects per year, mostly mixed in from other foods.

Coca-Cola would be green if coloring wasn’t added to it.

The average mattress doubles in weight over the course of 10 years due to accumulation of dust mites and dust mite poop.

The United States, Burma, and Liberia are the only countries in the world that have not officially adopted the metric system as the standard of measurement.

Earth is the only planet not named after a god.

Cows have best friends and experience stress when they are removed from them.

The doctor who claimed there was a link between autism and vaccines created fraudulent data for his study and lost his medical license.

Going to work is statistically three times more dangerous than war.

During the year 1881, three men served as President of the United States: Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, and Chester A. Arthur.

Before colonial rule Africa comprised up to 10,000 different states and autonomous groups with distinct languages and customs.

In 1386, a pig in France was executed by public hanging for the murder of a child.

Almost a quarter of the land area of Los Angeles is taken up by automobiles.

An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.

If you sneeze too hard, you can fracture a rib.

Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them use to burn their houses down - hence the expression "to get fired."

A "jiffy" is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.

For years, the pharmaceutical company Bayer held the trademark for the word “heroin” and sold the drug as a cough and headache remedy.

Polar Bears trying to blend in with the ice will cover up their black nose with their paws.

In an average NFL football game, there are only about 12 minutes of actual play time.

It would take 1,200,000 mosquitoes, each sucking at once, to completely drain the average human of blood.

Approximately 2,500 left handed people die a year as a result of using equipment designed for right handed people.

If you started with $0.01 and doubled your money every day, it would take 27 days to become a millionaire.

Baby robins eat 14 feet of earthworms every day.

In a statue dedicated to a person, if the horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.

The biggest tapeworm found inside a human body was 35 meters long.

Dogs are capable of understanding up to 250 words and gestures, and have demonstrated the ability to do simple mathematical calculations.

Blue Whale fart bubbles are large enough to enclose a horse.

Louis Armstrong played the trumpet so much that he got callouses on his lips. He cut them off with a razor blade.

The longest jellyfish on record measured 160 feet.

Due to breathing, your ribs move about five million times a year.

Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.

Since 1945, all British tanks come with tea making equipment.