All facts

The standard world map makes Africa look far smaller than it actually is.

Alaska is both the easternmost and westernmost state in the United States.

The first number you see before making an estimate quietly biases your final answer, even when that number is random.

Athletes in the ancient Olympic Games competed completely nude.

The shortest war in recorded history lasted well under an hour.

A 2,000-year-old bronze device is considered the world's first known analog computer.

The computer that guided Apollo astronauts to the Moon had a tiny fraction of the memory of a modern computer.

American Sign Language is not a signed version of English — it has its own independent grammar.

Australia is wider, coast to coast, than the diameter of the Moon.

The average adult body contains only a few grams of iron, mostly packed into the blood.

Babies are born with about 300 bones, but adults end up with only 206.

Bananas are botanically classified as berries, but strawberries are not.

Bananas are measurably radioactive.

Basketball was invented in 1891 using peach baskets nailed to a gymnasium balcony.

Beethoven premiered his Ninth Symphony after he had gone completely deaf.

Black holes don't suck things in any more than an equivalent star would.

Each of your eyes has a blind spot, but your brain fills in the gap so you never notice it.

The bombardier beetle defends itself by spraying a boiling-hot chemical jet.

Pound for pound, human bone is stronger than steel.

People are less likely to help someone in an emergency when more bystanders are present.

Canada contains more lakes than the rest of the world combined.

Carrots won't give you better-than-normal night vision.

Carrots were originally purple, not orange.

Chili peppers are native to the Americas and only reached India after European contact.

Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

The croissant's ancestor, the kipferl, comes from Austria, not France.

The Boston Red Sox went 86 years without a championship after selling Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees.

The Dead Sea shore is the lowest point on Earth's land surface.

Diamond and pencil graphite are both made of pure carbon.

Each side of the brain primarily controls the opposite side of the body.

The Eiffel Tower grows about six inches taller in summer.

The Eiffel Tower was originally built to be torn down after 20 years.

The @ symbol in email addresses was chosen because it was rarely used for anything else.

English has no official body regulating its grammar or vocabulary.

Fingernails grow about three to four times faster than toenails.

The first documented computer 'bug' was an actual moth.

The first computer mouse had a wooden shell.

The first text message ever sent simply read 'Merry Christmas.'

The world's first website is still online today.

Flamingos are born grey and turn pink from their diet.

The most vivid memories of shocking events are often the least accurate ones.

Fortune cookies were invented in California, not China.

Once you learn a new word or idea, you suddenly start noticing it everywhere, a quirk known as the frequency illusion.

The metal gallium melts in the palm of your hand.

Glass is an amorphous solid, not a slow-moving liquid.

Golf courses have 18 holes because of a round played at St Andrews in Scotland in 1764.

The Great Fire of London destroyed most of the city in 1666 but killed only a handful of people.

The Great Wall of China cannot actually be seen from space with the naked eye.

The Korean alphabet, Hangul, was deliberately invented by a king in the 15th century.

'Happy Birthday to You' was under copyright for nearly a century before a court ruled it wasn't.

Honey never spoils.

The adult human body is made up of an estimated 37 trillion cells.

The first commercial hard disk drive weighed over a ton and stored just 5 megabytes.

Modern Icelandic has changed so little that speakers can still read medieval sagas.

The internet and the World Wide Web are not the same thing, and the internet came first.

Istanbul is the only major city in the world located on two continents.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot is a storm bigger than Earth that has raged for centuries.

Ketchup was once sold in pill form as a cure for indigestion.

A single bolt of lightning is hotter than the surface of the sun.

Words for 'mother' and 'father' sound similar across many unrelated languages.

The mantis shrimp can punch fast enough to boil the water around it.

The marathon's official distance of 26.2 miles was set so the race could finish in front of British royalty.

What you see can change what you hear, a phenomenon called the McGurk effect.

Simply being exposed to something repeatedly tends to make people like it more.

Michael Phelps has won more Olympic medals than any athlete in history, with 28 total.

Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling standing up, not lying on his back.

The Mona Lisa has no visible eyebrows or eyelashes.

The Mongol Empire was the largest contiguous land empire in history.

The footprints astronauts left on the Moon could last for millions of years.

There are likely more stars in the observable universe than grains of sand on all of Earth's beaches.

Napoleon Bonaparte was of roughly average height for his time, not notably short.

A teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh billions of tons.

The plural 'octopi' is based on a grammar mistake — 'octopus' is Greek, not Latin.

Octopuses have three hearts.

'OK,' one of the most recognized words on Earth, started as a 19th-century joke abbreviation.

The oldest known musical instruments are flutes carved from bird bone and mammoth ivory around 40,000 years ago.

The largest known volcano in the solar system is on Mars, not Earth.

The University of Oxford is older than the Aztec Empire.

One of the largest living organisms on Earth is a single forest of genetically identical trees.

Peanuts are legumes, not true nuts.

People are measurably taller in the morning than at night.

Inert treatments with no active ingredients can still produce measurable improvements in symptoms.

Plasma, not solid, liquid, or gas, is the most common state of matter in the universe.

There's a spot in the Pacific Ocean farther from land than astronauts on the space station.

The Great Pyramid of Giza was built mainly by paid laborers, not slaves.

Modern boxing gloves and timed rounds only became standard in 1867, under rules named for a British nobleman.

Russia spans eleven time zones, more than any other country.

The Sahara desert was a lush, green landscape with lakes and rivers just a few thousand years ago.

The word 'salary' comes from the Latin word for salt.

Saturn's rings span hundreds of thousands of kilometers but are often less than a kilometer thick.

Sea otters hold hands while sleeping so they don't drift apart.

People tend to remember the first and last items on a list far better than the ones in the middle.

William Shakespeare is credited with introducing hundreds of words still used in English today.

Sharks have existed on Earth for longer than trees.

Your skin replaces itself roughly once a month.

The sky is blue because air molecules scatter blue light more than red light.

Sound cannot travel through the vacuum of outer space.

The Statue of Liberty was originally the color of a shiny new penny.

Stomach acid is strong enough to dissolve metal, yet it doesn't dissolve your stomach.

Naming the ink color of a mismatched color word takes noticeably longer than naming the color of a plain block.

The Sun makes up about 99.8% of all the mass in the solar system.

Sunlight takes about eight minutes to reach Earth.

Sushi originally referred to a method of preserving fish, not raw fish itself.

Every curved shell of the Sydney Opera House roof is a section cut from the same imaginary sphere.

Tardigrades can survive the vacuum of outer space.

Cricket's Ashes trophy exists because of a sarcastic newspaper obituary written in 1882.

The dot above a lowercase 'i' or 'j' has its own name: a tittle.

Tooth enamel is the hardest substance the human body produces.

The Tour de France was created in 1903 as a publicity stunt to sell more newspapers.

Turkey doesn't make you unusually sleepy compared to other meats.

Vincent van Gogh sold only one painting during his lifetime.

Vanilla is the second most expensive spice in the world, after saffron.

Vatican City is the smallest country in the world, smaller than most golf courses.

A day on Venus is longer than its year.

Venus flytraps can count how many times they've been touched.

Vikings reached North America roughly 500 years before Christopher Columbus.

Vitamin B12 isn't naturally present in any plant food.

Vitamin C does not prevent the common cold for most people.

Vitamin D isn't just a vitamin — it functions as a hormone.

Water is one of the few substances that expands when it freezes.

White chocolate contains no cocoa solids, so purists don't consider it real chocolate.

Wi-Fi doesn't actually stand for anything.

Wimbledon has required players to wear almost entirely white since the tournament's Victorian origins.

The Wizard of Oz starts in black and white and switches to color once Dorothy reaches Oz.

Wombats produce cube-shaped droppings.