40 Random Facts That Sound Fake But Aren’t, Shared In This Online Thread

Crows have extremely good memory, they can even get their relatives to recognize people that they've already recognised

The lighter was invented before the match.

If you're within vicinity of a fallen powerline, bunny hop or slide your feet side-to-side to get away from the pole. This is to counteract "step potential" as lifting your feet off the ground will cause a difference in voltage causing an electrocution.

Woman already have their lifetime supply of eggs in their bodies when they're unborn, inside their pregnant mothers as a fetus, so the egg that would become you as ultimately also existed inside your grandmother via your mother.

Time scale stuff breaks my brain

Cleopatra lived closer in time to the building of the first Pizza Hut than to the building of the pyramids for example (to use a well known example)

It was only 66 years between the first successful flight test by the Wright brothers and landing man on the moon... Human ingenuity knows no bounds when money isn't an issue and barriers are removed.

I did about two months of research into subliminal messaging and mental health through virtual environments for my psych class. It is commonly known that negative messages in the morning can cause people's day to be ruined, and can heavily influence mood and work ethic. With my research and experiment, I found that the opposite is also true. You see, the problem lies with the different brain waves as you wake up.

I'm no psychologist, and this paper was written a senior seminar ago, so I don't remember the waves exactly. The important part is that there are four waves your brain releases depending on consciousness. Going through all four are very important for your mental well-being. By looking at your phone in the morning, you skip from the forst to the last wave, which leaves you mentally and emotionally vulnerable.

As I mentioned, however, the opposite is true. I used a test group of 5 people, who all had diagnosed depression and/or anxiety, as well as one participant having no history of depression or anxiety. Every night, at around 3am, I would send them a text message personalized to each of them, with positive messages assuring them that they'll have a good day and that if times are hard, the best they can do is try their hardest. I put a lot of effort into these, and every week I checked in on them, taking into account changes in their personal lives.

When I connected all the data, what I found was that all the people with anxiety and depression had significantly better work ethic, and took more initiative to solve their problems. They also noted slightly lowered levels of anxiety, and thought of self harm were lowered, too. As for the participant who had no mental health problems, he noticed a general increase in positivity and work ethic, as well.

So I guess of you have someone who's been really down lately, and you love them, send them a text for when they wake up. The effects needed about a week to set in, and they cap out at around a month and an half in from what I noticed. This is not a cure to depression and anxiety, but it is a small thing that someone can do for a loved one.

It's this study that has made me realize that I want to use my computer science degree to help people's mental health, and why I decided to get my masters in computer science, and get a degree in Psychology while I'm at it. Technology had proven itself to be bad for humanity's mental health, and it's time someone tried to fix it. I don't think I'm that man, but I'd sure as hell like to help pave the road for the guy that is.

Tldr; encouraging messages to be read as soon as someone wakes up is a great way to slightly help someone through their mental health problems

That the placebo effect is real. It has to be accounted for in human trials of medical treatments.

This means that our minds have the capacity to affect real healthcare outcomes and this happens consistently.

For 1 600 billionth of a second when a hydrogen bomb detonates, it is 100 million degrees Celsius, the core of the sun is 15 million degrees Celsius.

Since it’s discovery in 1930 Pluto has yet to orbit the sun and won’t until 2178.

In the time it takes you to read this sentence, you’ve traveled approximately 2,200 miles through space relative to the cosmic background radiation.

Your tongue rests on the roof of your mouth, not the base.

In the 70s, in the USA, it was believed that infants didn’t feel pain. My first operation was in 74, when I was a day old, to shove a sac full of exposed nerves back into my spine (spina bifida myelomeningocele).

Multiplying any two digit number with eleven is the sum of the two digit inserted between the two digits 63×11=> (6+3) => 693

If our Sun was the size of a white blood cell, our galaxy would be the size of the continental United States.

Humans create as much heat as a 100 watt incandescent bulb. Which is why greenhouses have a single 100 watt bulb burning that workers turn off when they enter. Keeps the temperature constant.

The 1966-1967 UCLA Bruins Men’s Basketball team went undefeated and won the National Championship. They were ranked number 1 throughout the entire season. In those days, freshmen weren’t allowed to play on the varsity team, but every year, at the end of the season, the freshmen team played the varsity team in an exhibition game. UCLA’s freshmen team beat the undefeated varsity team by 15 points with a young center named Lew Alcindor, later changing his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

The microgravity in space can cause an astronauts blood to run backwards

clown fish are hermaphrodite and, if the movie was realistic, Marlin in Finding Nemo would become a female and try to copulate with his son, as the mother was killed

Purple isn't a real frequency of light like red or blue. It's how our brains interpret jumbled frequencies of red and blue light. It seems to be a byproduct of how our brains developed to interpret the light that hits the blue, green, and red cones in our eyes.

The last living person who was the child of a Civil War veteran, died in June of 2020. Her father was 83 when she was born.