"Vatican City Has The Highest Crime Rate In The World": 47 Nonsense-Sounding Statements That Turned Out To Be True

Humans have stripes, they're called blaschko lines, they only normally appear visible if you have specific skin conditions/syndromes.

There are theories though that some animals can see them visibily even without those presenting conditions, which would be funny, if our pets are just thinking we're goofy striped animals.

Today, I learned about left-handed anger!
If you have an angry impulse, act it out with your left hand instead cause you look so weak and stupid doing it, It's automatically funny and you deescalate yourself.

The Banach-Tarski Paradox. It's a mathematical theorem that essentially states, if you have a solid ball, you can break it up into five disjoint sets of points, move them and rotate them, and end up with two separate solid balls of the same size as the original. In effect, duplicating a ball by cutting it up and rearranging it.

I love me my weird math facts, but this is one that I have trouble accepting sometimes.

The average color of the universe is a shade of beige.

Google "cosmic latte".

The closest planet to Earth is... *usually Mercury*.

Because Venus has a longer orbit and spends more time the other side of the Sun, while Mercury has far less of an orbit and does it quicker.

There used to be blue people in the US.

Seems like the sort of thing they should’ve taught us in history class.

Tumbleweeds are not native to North America. They are invasive.

My personal favorite: you'll find more genetic diversity in a room full of 50 chimpanzees than in the entire human species.

Transmutation

It's what scientists do with supercolliders, basically. A substudy of nuclear chemistry.

In my area (linguistics), the idea that languages can't be correct or incorrect. We grow up in such policed language environments in school that we normalise this entirely.

"Correct" language is quite literally what people want it to be, same with "incorrect" or "bad" language.

A woodpeckers tongue wraps around its skull.

"The old man the boat"

That is a perfectly grammatically correct and complete sentence. They're called garden path sentences and are plays on how we typically encounter words and our biases in how we interpret them.

If you want a crazy one: "The rat the cat the dog bit chased escaped."

That is a perfectly grammatically correct and complete sentence.

Sharks existed on Earth long before trees did.

There are more ways to shuffle a standard deck of cards than there are atoms in the solar system. By a lot. It’s not even remotely close.

With our current classification methods, either: Birds are reptiles, or Crocodiles are not reptiles, as they share a common ancestor more recently than everything else we normally consider a reptile, also the whole birds are dinosaurs and dinosaurs were reptiles.

That a woman's skin when wet has a higher coefficient of friction than a man's. And not by a small margin.

If you push your tongue to the roof of your mouth and hold it there, you can substantially reduce the pain from sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia, and enjoy ice cream again.

A full head of healthy Human hair has enough tensile strength to lift and support a full grown elephant.

Light is both a particle and a wave, and one or the other when you look at it. Something like that .

If you were able to fold a piece of paper in half 103 times, it would be thicker than the known universe.