Bananas glow blue under black lights. To the everyday eye under normal conditions, ripe bananas appear yellow due to organic pigments called carotenoids. When bananas ripen, chlorophyll begins to break down. This pigment is the element that makes bananas glow, or fluoresce, under UV lights and appear blue.
100 Mind-Blowing Begins Facts
Michelangelo wrote a poem about how much he hated painting the Sistine Chapel. One translation of the poem he sent to his friend begins: I’ve already grown a goitre from this torture, hunched up here like a cat in Lombardy (or anywhere else where the stagnant water’s poison). Doesn’t sound like he was too thrilled with his task.
Underground is the only English word that begins and ends with the letters “-und.” There’s another one of the useless facts you can use to sound smart.
World’s first skyscraper. The story of skyscrapers often begins in New York and Chicago from around 1884 with increasingly tall buildings. However, what is technically the world’s first skyscraper was built in Shropshire in 1796–7. Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings may not look like a skyscraper, but its Main Mill was the first building in the world to have an iron frame supporting the weight of the structure, the formula for every skyscraper ever built so that it has been dubbed the ‘Grandparent of Skyscrapers’.