Decidedly surprising facts that you definitely didn't know! The weight of the Internet is equal to one strawberry. Antarctica is the world's largest desert

1. When you fly on an airplane, your hair grows 2 times faster.

2. Human DNA is 30% identical to lettuce DNA.

3. It is impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.

4. Global warming will deprive humanity of beer.

5. People with blue eyes are more sensitive to pain than others.

7. If you scream at a glass of water for 80 years, you can boil it.

8. A cockroach lives without a head for 9 days, after which it dies of hunger.

9. In Windows, you cannot create a folder called “Con”, which is the word Bill Gates was called as a child.

10. If Coca-Cola had not been tinted, it would have been green.

11. The film Titanic cost more than the Titanic itself.

12. Salvador Dali drew the logo for Chupa Chups.

13. Lemon contains more sugar than strawberries.

14. Chaplin took third place in the Chaplin look-alike competition.

15. Children grow faster in the spring.

16. A cat sleeps 70% of its life.

17. Most robberies happen on Tuesdays.

18. If a shark swims upside down, it can fall into a coma.

19. A frightened person sees better.

20. OK is the most popular word in the world.

21. A snail can sleep for 3 years.

22. The Alaska flag was created by a 13-year-old boy.

23. Most often, the Guinness Book of Records is stolen in English libraries.

25. In Siena, Italy, you can't be a prostitute if your name is Maria.

26. There are no clocks in Las Vegas casinos.

27. No sheet of paper can be folded in half more than seven times.

28. American Airlines saved $40,000 by removing just one olive from the salads served to first class passengers.

29. Venus is the only planet in the solar system that rotates counterclockwise.

30. On average, 100 people die every year from choking on a ballpoint pen.

31. It is anatomically impossible for a person to lick his own elbow.

32. Every day, US residents eat 18 hectares of pizza.

33. Almost everyone who read this text tried to lick their elbow.

34. The nose grows throughout a person’s life.

35. In Russian and English there is no word for the name of the back of the knee.

36. Tongue imprints are individual for all people.

37. More living organisms live on the body of one person than there are people on Earth.

38. One hair can support a weight of 3 kg.

39. If you add up all the numbers on a casino roulette wheel, you get the magic number 666.

40. For a long time, the Coca-Cola company could not find its name to sell in China. The fact is that the Chinese pronounce the name of this drink as “Kekukela”, which means “Bite the Wax Tadpole”. The company was forced to go through 40,000 variants of the spelling of its trademark before choosing “Coku Cola”, which means “Happiness in the Mouth”.

42. In the archives of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, two identical snowflakes were found preserved in a refrigerator.

43. If you have one nostril closed for 72 hours, you will slowly lose the ability to see colors. (Your vision will instantly return to normal when you release the nostril.)

44. Clouds cannot move southwest.

Incredible facts

People are half bananas, and a piece of paper can reach the moon. These facts seem implausible, although in fact they are absolutely true.

1. The human eye is so sensitive that if the Earth were flat, we would see a candle in the dark at a distance of 32 kilometers.

The most distant object visible to the naked eye is the Andromeda galaxy, which is located 2.6 million light-years from Earth.

2. If you remove all the empty space in the atoms of all people, then the entire human race can fit into a sugar cube.

Humanity, or the atoms that make us up, is 99.9999999999999% empty space. In theory, if you remove all the empty space, you can fit humanity into the volume of a sugar cube.

3. Alaska is the northernmost, western and eastern state of the USA.

Alaska is considered the easternmost and westernmost state. The Aleutian Islands of Alaska straddle the western and eastern hemispheres.

Amazing facts of the world

4. The deck of cards is never shuffled in the same order.

If every star in our galaxy had a trillion planets, and every planet had a trillion people living on it, and everyone had a trillion decks of cards, and they were shuffling the cards 1000 times a second and have been doing this since the Big Bang, then it is only possible now the order would be repeated.

5. Every 200th person alive today is a descendant of Genghis Khan.

The ruler of one of the largest empires in history, Genghis Khan went to great lengths to pass on his genes.

6. If a nickel were the size of the Earth, an atom would be the size of a nickel.

If you received an atom of gold every second since the Big Bang, your gold jewelry would weigh no more than 0.14 milligrams.

7. 1 out of 10 photographs taken in human history was taken in the last 12 months.

By some estimates, people took about 880 billion photos in 2014, mostly selfies.

8. Your blood vessels are long enough to circle the Earth 12 times.

There are 160,000 km of blood vessels in the human body. This is enough to circle the Earth with a diameter of 12,742 km.

9. There are more stars in the Universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of our planet.

There are about 10 sextillion stars in the Universe (1 followed by 22 zeros). There are approximately 5 sextillion grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth.

10. Antarctica is the world's largest desert.

Although Antarctica is not desert-like, it receives less than 5 cm of precipitation per year. The Sahara Desert receives up to 10 cm of precipitation per year.

11. A line of all possible combinations of a Rubik's Cube can reach the Sun more than 17 million times.

If you had a separate cube for each possible permutation of the Rubik's Cube, and you laid them out in a continuous chain, it would stretch over 262 light years. For comparison, the Sun is 8 light-minutes away, and the nearest star is Proxima Centauri at a distance of 4 light-years from Earth.

12. If you fold a piece of paper 42 times, it will be thick enough to reach the moon.

Every time you fold a piece of paper, its thickness increases exponentially. By the time you fold a piece of paper 20 times, it will be 9.6 km high, taller than Everest. This means that 42 folds would be thick enough to reach 239,000 km to the Moon.

13. Your brain has more nerve connections than stars in the galaxy.

The number of synapses in the average human brain is in the trillions, namely 0.15 quadrillion. There are about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way.

14. If there are 57 people in a room, there is a 99 percent chance that at least two of them will have the same birthday.

Add 13 more people and the odds increase to 99.99 percent.

15. There is a whole “jungle” in your navel.

In the tiny pit of your belly lies an ecosystem the size of a jungle. After studying 60 navels, scientists found 2,368 species of bacteria there, 1,458 of which are unknown to science.

The most incredible facts

16. The world population of ants has the same weight as the world population of people.

Ants outnumber humans by 1 million to one, which compensates for their small size.

17. The weight of the Internet is equal to one strawberry

Most digital information in motion is made up of electrons, just like everything else. It is estimated that global Internet traffic weighs about 50 grams.

18. A calculator more powerful than the computers that landed people on the moon in 1969

And the iPhone5's memory capacity is 240,000 times greater than that of the Voyager spacecraft.

19. 50 percent of human DNA is similar to banana

Our DNA is 95 percent shares chimpanzee DNA, and 50 percent bananas. We all come from the same family tree, the tree of life, and therefore we have similar characteristics.

20. The surface of Mars is better explored than the ocean floor.

About 72 percent of the Earth's surface is covered with water. So far we have explored only 5 percent of this vast area.

21. Human fingers are so sensitive that if they were the size of the Earth, they would feel the difference between houses and cars.

Human fingers are capable of feeling incredibly small imperfections on a nanoscale on an apparently completely smooth surface.

22. Plankton produces 50 percent of the Earth's oxygen.

Phytoplankton, like trees and plants, use photosynthesis to convert light into energy.

23. Russia's landmass is greater than that of Pluto

Pluto is one of the largest dwarf planets. Pluto's surface area is 1.67 x 10^7 square meters. km. Pluto's size is approximately 3.3 percent of the Earth's surface.

24. Every day a video is uploaded to YouTube,equivalent to 16 years

6 billion hours of recorded human history are uploaded every month.

25. The deepest place in the ocean is so deep that if Everest were placed on the bottom, the top would still be 1.6 km underwater.

The Mariana Trench, which is about 11 km deep, is located in the Pacific Ocean and is home to the most mysterious marine life.

Interesting historical facts attract with their diversity. Thanks to them, humanity has a unique opportunity to understand what happened in a given period of development of a nation, society and states. Facts from history are not just what we were told at school. There is a lot that is classified in this area of ​​knowledge.

1. Peter the Great had his own method to combat alcoholism in the country. Drunkards were awarded medals that weighed approximately 7 kilograms and could not be removed from their person.

2. In the times of Ancient Rus', grasshoppers were called dragonflies.

3.The anthem of Thailand was written by a Russian composer.

5.Those who urinated in the pond were executed during the time of Genghis Khan.

7. Braids were a sign of feudalism in China.

8.The virginity of English women in Tudor times was symbolized by bracelets on their arms and a tightly tightened corset.

9.Nero, who was an emperor in ancient Rome, married his male slave.

10. In ancient times in India, ear mutilation was used as a punishment.

11.Arabic numerals were not invented by Arabs, but by mathematicians from India.

13.Binding feet was considered an ancient tradition of the Chinese people. The essence of this was to make the foot smaller, and therefore more feminine and beautiful.

14.Morphine was once used to relieve cough.

15.The ancient Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun had a sister and brother.

16. Gaius Julius Caesar had the nickname “boots”.

17.Elizabeth the First covered her own face with lead white and vinegar. This is how she hid traces of smallpox.

18. The symbol of the Russian tsars was precisely the Monomakh cap.

19. Pre-revolutionary Russia was considered the most non-drinking country.

20.Until the 18th century, Russia did not have a flag.

21. Since November 1941, the Soviet Union had a tax on childlessness. It amounted to 6% of the entire salary.

22.Trained dogs provided assistance in clearing mines during World War II.

23. Almost no earthquakes were recorded during the large-scale nuclear tests of 1960-1990.

24. For Hitler, the main enemy was not Stalin, but Yuri Levitan. He even announced a reward of 250,000 marks for his head.

25.The Icelandic “Saga of Hakon Hakonarson” talked about Alexander Nevsky.

26. Fist fights have long been famous in Rus'.

27. Catherine the Second abolished flogging for the military for same-sex contacts.

28. Only Joan of Arc, who called herself a messenger of God, managed to expel the invaders from France.

29.The length of the Cossack seagull, which we remember from the history of the Zaporozhye Sich, reached approximately 18 meters.

30. Genghis Khan defeated the Keraits, Merkits and Naimans.

31. By order of Emperor Augustus, houses that were taller than 21 meters were not built in Ancient Rome. This minimized the risk of being buried alive.

32.The Colosseum is considered the bloodiest place in history.

33. Alexander Nevsky had the military rank of “khan”.

34.During the time of the Russian Empire, it was allowed to carry edged weapons.

35.Soldiers in Napoleon's army addressed the generals on a first name basis.

36.During the Roman war, soldiers lived in tents of 10 people.

37. Any touching of the emperor in Japan before World War II was blasphemy.

38.Boris and Gleb are the first Russian saints who were canonized in 1072.

39. A Red Army machine gunner named Semyon Konstantinovich Hitler, who was Jewish by nationality, took part in the Great Patriotic War.

40. In the old days in Rus', to clean pearls, they were given to a chicken to peck at them. After this, the chicken was slaughtered and the pearls were pulled out of its stomach.

41. From the very beginning, people who cannot speak Greek were called barbarians.

42. In pre-revolutionary Russia, name days for Orthodox people were a more important holiday than birthdays.

43.When England and Scotland came to a union, Great Britain was created.

44.After Alexander the Great brought cane sugar from one of his Indian campaigns to Greece, they immediately began to call it “Indian salt.”

45. In the 17th century, thermometers were filled not with mercury, but with cognac.

46.The first condom in the world was invented by the Aztecs. It was made from a fish bladder.

47. In 1983, not a single human birth was registered in the Vatican.

48.From the 9th to the 16th centuries in England there was a law that every man must practice archery daily.

49.When the Winter Palace was stormed, only 6 people died.

50.About 13,500 houses were destroyed during the great and famous fire of London in 1666.

This selection will definitely expand your horizons. Look!

Why are eyebrows needed?

This is a natural “headband” that we inherited from our ancestors. Eyebrows prevent acrid sweat and raindrops from rolling down from your forehead directly into your eyes. There is a possibility that the invention of umbrellas and hats, as well as the ruthless evolution over the coming millennia, will remove eyebrows from the list of organs necessary for survival and procreation. Because of this, women of the fourth millennium will no longer need to track discounts on plucking and styling on beauty salon Instagrams.

How does dirt appear in the navel?

The accumulation of dirt in the navel is - no joke - the most mysterious physical process on the human body. Austrian chemist Georg Steinheiser investigated the formation process and composition of “umbilical mud” and published the results of his scientific research in 2010. It turns out that during the day, the hairs around the navel collect fibers from clothing and push them inside, where they mix with dust particles, beads of sweat and microscopic particles of skin, falling into clumps. To combat this scourge, says Steinheiser, you can either shave the hair around the problem area or get a piercing: the metal will repel dirt and there will be nothing to pick out in the shower in the evenings.

What does the subway smell like?

Creosote is a special chemical that is used to lubricate wooden sleepers and other subway parts. In the quantities in which it is in the air at stations, it is non-toxic and does not cause any unpleasant effects, except for reactions in allergy sufferers. In the subways of other cities (New York, Tokyo, London and even CIS cities - Minsk and Kyiv) this characteristic smell is not present.

If the mother of Russian cities is Kyiv, then who is the father?

First, we need to figure out why Kyiv is still a “mother”, despite the masculine gender. The pre-revolutionary spelling of Kyiv is “Kiev”. The hard sign at the end did not sound anything in the 19th century, but indicated the hardness of the previous consonant sound. But in IX it was pronounced as an unstressed “o” (for example, like the first two “o” in the word “milk”). During the reign of Prince Oleg, who called Kyiv “the mother of Russian cities,” the word was read as “Kieva” and belonged to the feminine gender. The pope of Russian cities, according to historians, is Novgorod. It was built before Kyiv, and served as an important trading hub - it was the beginning of the legendary route “From the Varangians to the Greeks.”

Do penguins have knees?

There are two sets. The first is the so-called tarsus, which looks like a backwards-turned knee, which almost all birds have, and a real functional knee that connects the femur and tibia.

The problem is that the penguins' tarsus is too close to the foot, and the knee itself is too close to the body. Therefore, the lower legs of penguins look like a solid, rigid structure.

Where does the excavated soil go after the construction of the metro?

She doesn’t disappear anywhere without a trace. Depending on the quality of the resulting soil, the soil is sent either for processing and disposal to technical enterprises, for example, to construction sites in Moscow and the region, or, if it is of good quality, for landscaping parks and forest areas.

What dreams do blind people see?

People who are blind from birth actually see dreams that do not have visual images. Dreams may contain sounds, smells and touches in various combinations, but they will not even have color or light elements. People who have lost their sight during their lifetime experience normal dreams. Their brightness decreases year after year: colors disappear and images blur, until eventually they fade to zero.

Why do traffic police officers have striped batons?

The contrasting black and white coloring is equally noticeable both in the city and in the field at any time of the day and in any weather. The traffic police came to the idea of ​​painting the batons black and white 77 years ago. Before this, back at the beginning of the century, until traffic lights appeared and the traffic flow grew to the modern endless traffic jam for the entire city, traffic controllers made do with first all-white and then red-yellow wands, similar to lightsabers from Star Wars. . Then the USSR launched a bold but unsuccessful experiment: for several years they made do with white gloves and a special set of gestures. It was after the fiasco of this venture that the traffic controllers were given the famous black and white sticks.

What is the most popular word in Russian?

A special organization of linguists that monitors the state of the Russian language found out in 2014 that the most popular word in the Russian language is the interjection “damn”, which is used in speech even more often than the pronouns “I” and “you”. This says a lot about the state of modern Russian speech.

Will a gun fire in space?

It will definitely shoot once. A bullet, devoid of air friction, gravity and other obstacles, will fly for a very long time and very far (quite likely millions of kilometers) until it falls into the gravitational zone of a star or extinguishes inertia in another way, but the shooter will have to fight with the recoil from shot, spinning around its axis and coping with nausea and disorientation. The second, third and other shots may well not happen: in order for some parts of the gun to work as required, they need an air gap to compensate for the friction of the parts. So every shot in space will render the gun unusable a thousand times faster than on Earth.

What causes "butterflies in the stomach"?

Adrenalin. For the brain, falling in love is very little different from other types of stress, such as grief or danger. This is why lovers eat little and sleep poorly. As soon as a person sees a loved one, the brain recognizes this as a stress signal and begins to pump adrenaline through the vessels. Please note: you most likely experienced the same sensations in your stomach before an important exam or before an important interview.

Why don't people sneeze in their sleep?

First, you need to understand how people sneeze: the brain receives information about irritation, transmits a signal to the chest muscles to fill the lungs with air, closes the holes in the throat and gives a signal to exhale. The air ends up exploding through the nasopharynx. It is impossible to sneeze in a dream, because problems occur at the very first stage: the brain receives a signal about irritation, but due to the fact that the nervous system works in a suppressed “sleep” mode, it cannot do anything about it except to wake up the owner, if the irritation is strong enough. And then, you won’t be able to sneeze immediately after getting up: the nervous system has not yet entered working mode.

Why are some dreams so difficult to remember?

During sleep, norepinephrine is not released - a hormone that, among its other duties, is responsible for fixing memories in long-term memory. An interesting detail: norepinephrine is released during lightning stressful situations: injuries and burns, as well as during serious nervous shocks, states of anxiety and fear. This is why nightmares and disturbing dreams are much more memorable than good dreams.

Why do some drinks taste bad after brushing my teeth?

The toothpaste contains sodium lauryl sulfate. It is added as a foaming agent, which makes brushing your teeth easier and distributes the paste more evenly throughout the mouth. The substance is not considered harmful, but may cause an allergic reaction or irritation. Another thing is that upon contact with the tongue, sodium lauryl sulfate suppresses the receptors responsible for sweetness. In addition, the component temporarily destroys the phospholipid layer, which suppresses the bitterness of food. So it turns out that the taste of food and drinks that a person consumes immediately after thoroughly brushing his teeth changes beyond recognition and not for the better.

Why does ice cream hurt my forehead?

The effect is called “brain freeze” and is observed in a third of people living on earth. Unpleasant pressing sensations in the forehead or behind the ears are caused by the fact that from the cold in the mouth (specifically in the palate), the brain is “scared” that the cold will soon reach it, and begins to urgently pump warm blood to itself. Because of this, blood flow is disrupted for some time, and unpleasant sensations arise in the head. In science, the effect is called sphenopalatative ganglioneuralgia. You can make warning stickers and use them to mark ice cream in stores.

What happens to the pages of deceased people on social networks?

In most cases - nothing. There is still no automatic deletion of a page after a certain period of inactivity in many social networks. For example, pages on Facebook, Odnoklassniki and VKontakte remain forever. However, Twitter deletes a profile in which no new posts have appeared for more than six months. In other cases, pages change status. Facebook allows you to turn a user profile into a “memorial”. To do this, you need to send a copy of the death certificate to the network administration. The status of the page will change - the inscription “In loving memory of...” will appear, and you can continue to leave comments and entries on the wall. When changing status, access to personal correspondence is not transferred to either relatives or other close people. Your secrets will definitely remain yours forever. A single solution to the problem of the social network has not yet been developed, but in the coming years it is already worth having in stock: around 2050, the number of pages of the dead will be equal to the number of profiles of the living, and then the ratio will change in favor of the dead.

The number of deaths in the boxing ring has increased dramatically since the advent of boxing gloves. While they were gone, the boxers hit each other with their bare knuckles. Blows to the head (the most dangerous) often ended in broken arms, so almost no one used them.

One tigress killed 430 people.

This is more than the number of victims of shark attacks in the last 300 years.

This is more than have been killed by snakes, bears, wolves and poisonous spiders combined in the last 100 years.

She was a Champawat tigress who hunted in Nepal and the Kumaon region of India. In 1911, she was shot and killed by legendary hunter Jim Corbett.

3,600 years ago, mammoths roamed Siberia. And the Egyptians built the pyramids about 4,000 years ago.

There is a planet covered in burning ice. Not dry, but incredibly hot. On this planet, called Gliese 436 b, temperatures hover around 300 degrees Celsius, but the ice doesn't melt. The point is gravity - it is so powerful that it compresses water and keeps it in a solid state.

Radiation exposure can be measured in bananas. This is called the “banana equivalent”. The fact is that bananas are naturally radioactive due to the potassium-40 they contain. Banana equivalent is defined as the activity of the substance introduced into the body when eating one banana. And an X-ray of a tooth, for example, is approximately 50 banana equivalents.

Anosognosia is when a person, after a stroke or any other brain damage, becomes disabled (for example, loses the ability to move his arm), but cannot realize his illness, assuring others that everything is fine with him and categorically refusing treatment.

The grandchildren of the tenth US President, John Tyler (born 1790), are still alive.

Don't miss it! The most luxurious public toilet in the world cost $123 thousand

14 years before the sinking of the Titanic, a book by Morgan Robertson entitled “Futility” appeared. It tells the story of the largest ship of its time, with a lack of lifeboats, which crashed into an iceberg and sank. The ship was called the Titan and, like the Titanic, was a three-screw liner.

The day of the second anniversary of family life was marked for 25-year-old Theodore Roosevelt by two tragic events: First, his mother died in his arms from typhoid fever. An hour later, after saying goodbye to his mother, Roosevelt went up to the second floor of his house and witnessed the death of his wife in childbirth.

On Venus, a day is longer than a year.

The Amazon rainforest periodically receives fertilizer from the Sahara. The wind carries nutrient-laden sand particles across the ocean to the tropics, where they sink and help forest vegetation thrive.



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