In the world of fake news, shams, and bogus claims, it’s hard to tell a fact from fiction. And you simply get used to doubting things. You read "unicorns exist" and the mind detects deceit. But what if I tell you they’re just bulky and we call ‘em rhinos? Sounds about right.
So when someone on r/AskReddit asked what fact sounds fake at first but is actually real, redditors rolled up their sleeves. 26K upvotes and 14.3K comments later, we have the finalists of these mind-boggling facts ready down below. Get ready to get that trivia muscle pumped up for the next game after quarantine is over. After you're done, take a look at our previous lists of crazy-sounding facts here.
#1
Ancient sailors believed that cats were magic and would often risk their own lives, even in an "every man for himself" situation, to save a cat from a sinking ship. All ships had at least one ship's cat as cats would eat the rats that have always plagued ships. The ship's cat would often be given a rank and sailors would generally take excessively good care of their cats.
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172points
#3
Because the number of possible combination of genes isn't infinite, there are probably at least 7 humans that looks the same as you.
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156points
#4
The sun is so loud, if space was filled with air instead of being a vacuum, we'd be hearing screeching sun noises at 125 decibel at all times.
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155points
#5
T-Rex (~64 million years ago) is nearer to now in years than it is to Stegosaurus (~151 million years ago)
Images depicting them fighting are very very wrong.
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152points
#6
The founders of Adidas (Adi Dassler) and Puma (Rudolf Dassler) are brothers.
..and their HQs are literally next door to each other in Germany.
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145points
#7
That most of the oxygen on earth doesn’t come from trees. It’s comes from plankton in the ocean
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145points
#8
Distance from USA to Russia 4 kilometers
This fact is always amusing.
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141points
#11
President Coolidge got sent a raccoon for Thanksgiving one year, but instead of eating it, he granted it a pardon because it was "cute"
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127points
#12
Lyrebird's imitations will seriously sound exactly like the thing they're trying to imitate. If they imitate a chainsaw, you will think it's a chainsaw. It sounds like a perfect recording.
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127points
#16
Astronomer here! The coldest place we know of in the universe is actually... on Earth!
To explain further, the coldest places we know of that naturally occur in the universe are inside dark nebulae with little to no star formation, and thus no starlight to heat things up. The coldest one known so far is the Boomerang Nebula, where the temperature has been measured as low as 1 degree above absolute zero (−272 °C or −458 °F). However, we regularly get below this temperature in labs on Earth! Specifically, absolute zero is at –273.15°C (or –459.67°F) and labs on Earth regularly get to within a tenth or even a hundredth of a degree of that.
Pretty cool!
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118points
#17
It takes about 3-4 generation before your entire existence is completely forgotten (assuming you don't invent the cure for cancer or discover the fifth dimension or anything like that)
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116points