Temperature affects your attitude towards others. For example, if you hold a warm coffee as opposed to a cold coffee, you are more likely to be more selfless towards others.
100 Mind-Blowing Example Facts
Animals can experience time differently from humans. To smaller animals, the world around them moves more slowly compared to humans. Salamanders and lizards, for example, experience time more slowly than cats and dogs. This is because the perception of time depends on how quickly the brain can process incoming information.
Football teams wearing red kits play better. The colour of your clothes can affect how you’re perceived by others and change how you feel. A review of football matches in the last 55 years, for example, showed that teams wearing a red kit consistently played better in home matches than teams in any other colour.
The average dinosaur lifespan was surprisingly small. The Tyrannosaurus rex, for example, reached full size between 16-22 years old and lived up until 27-33. The largest dinosaurs such as the Brontosaurus and Diplodocus tended to live up to between 39-53 years old, maybe reaching the height of 70.
Some pandas fake a pregnancy to get better healthcare. An example would be a Chinese panda named Ai Hin who was believed to show signs of pregnancy. Zookeepers ensured that she was given better care for the upcoming baby that never arrived.
The only English word that ends with ‘mt’ is Dreamt. This is yet another example of idiosyncrasies in the English language.
Flowers grow faster with music. We’ve all encountered the age-old question of, “Do plants have feelings?” Fellows with a green thumb would argue yes, but it’s still being studied in science. However, plants have been shown to respond to certain stimuli in the most interesting ways. For example, playing a lullaby to plants makes them grow faster. However, they tend to wilt or die with heavier music. Plants may or may not have feelings, but they sure are gentle souls.
Fire moves faster uphill. One of the fundamental rules of science is that heat rises. As such, a fire would move faster uphill than downhill or laterally. For example, a forest fire at the base of a mountain would spread faster towards the mountain incline rather than spreading around the base.
Machu Picchu is 100% handmade. You read that right – Machu Picchu is the best remaining example of Incan engineering. No tools, wheels, or animals were used in constructing the royal estate. Instead, hundreds of men pushed up 50-ton rocks or scaled the mountain to form what we now know as the Incan ruins.
In some cultures, left-handedness was considered unlucky or associated with superstitions. For example, it was believed that using your left hand for tasks could bring bad luck.
You could survive for a couple of minutes in a leaky spacesuit. Although films such as Total Recall show instant explosions and rapidly puffed-up spacesuits, the effects of being exposed to space are slightly less dramatic. Although it would be unpleasant, you could survive for a couple of minutes. After around 10 seconds, you would lose consciousness. The lower pressure of the vacuum would cause your blood to boil, along with other body fluids (the moisture on your tongue, for example) – but this boiling alone would not be fatal due to the pressure maintained by our blood vessels themselves. Gas bubbles would form in your bodily fluids, causing your body to swell up and bloat. The low humidity of space would cause you to cool down rapidly, and your eyes may freeze over. Within one to two minutes, the lack of oxygen would be deadly. The stress of the situation may make these symptoms worse – you would become oxygen-deprived more quickly. A rapid decompression would cause damage to your lungs, eardrums and sinuses, along with bruising and bleeding from soft tissues.
No one wants a tick bite as it can lead to a plethora of diseases. But a tick bite from the Lonestar Tick can lead to a meat allergy to red meat. This growing phenomenon leaves the tick bite sufferer unable to eat certain meats without allergy-like symptoms. For example, a runny nose, nausea, headaches, and sneezing.
FORESTS ARE HOME TO OVER 80% OF THE WORLD’S LAND-BASED SPECIES OF ANIMALS, PLANTS AND INSECTS. These animals help to keep the forest healthy. For example, elephants distribute seeds from fruits they have eaten. When the seeds pass through their gut, they come out undigested in their dung, and germinate in the ground.
FORESTS ARE INCREDIBLY GOOD AT STORING CARBON. Most of this carbon storage takes place underground. For example, in UK forests, around 70% of carbon stored is kept in the soil. The rest is stored in the roots, surface litter and the tree above ground.
Habitat loss, pollution and invasive species are the primary reasons for the decline in axolotl numbers. For example, fish like perch and tilapia aren’t native to the waters of Lake Xochimilco, and these invasive species have had a massive impact on axolotl numbers.
A pangram is a sentence that contains every letter in the language. For example, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
Capitonyms are words which change their meaning if the first letter is capitalized. For example: Turkey (the country) and Turkey (the bird).
Smaller animals tend to perceive time as if it is passing in slow motion. Insects and small birds, for example, can see more information in one second than a larger animal such as an elephant.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs thought he didn’t have body odour. Steve Jobs, genius as he was, had some interesting beliefs. For example, he was vegetarian and flirted with being a vegan and a fruitarian at various points for much of his life. He believed that his vegan diet prevented any form of body odour – something that his co-workers were quick to disagree with!
Kim Il Sung loved Hennessy cognac so much he bought more than $800,000 of it per year! The vast majority of people in North Korea live rather impoverished lives, and this has been the case under multiple generations of the ruling dynasties now. High-ranking officials and North Korea’s leaders live very different lives, spoiling themselves lavishly and allowing themselves access to otherwise forbidden imported goods. For example, Kim Il Sung was so crazy about Hennessy that he was the cognac company’s number-one customer for a few years in the 1990s.
1 Million Recycled Laptops = Energy Savings of 3,500 Homes. Most laptops reach landfills rather than the recycling bin. Americans need to recycle as much electronic waste as possible, including laptops. Doing so comes with significant energy savings. For example, a million recycled laptops save enough energy to power 3,500 homes for a year. That’s an incredible energy savings and cuts back on further production of new laptops from new materials.
A Petabyte is a lot of data. We all know 1 GB is the same as 1024 MB, but did you know that 1 petabyte (PB) is equivalent to 1024 terabytes (TB)? To give an example of how big this is, a 1 PB hard drive could hold 13.3 years of HD-TV video. A 50 PB hard drive could hold the entire written works of mankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages.
The first known example of “modern style” graffiti is found in the ancient Greek city of Ephesus. The graffiti shows a handprint that somewhat resembles a heart, along with a footprint and a number. It is thought that this indicated that a brothel was nearby.
Throughout history, different cultures around the world have experienced time in different ways. In the Western world, we tend to think of time as linear and flowing from left to right. But this isn’t the case for everyone. Language affects how people conceptualize time, particularly the spatial metaphors they use to describe and map it. Those who read languages that flow from right to left, such as Arabic and Hebrew, generally view time as flowing in the same direction. The Aymara, who live in the Andes Mountains in South America, consider the future to be behind them, while the past is ahead. In their view, because the future is unknown, it’s behind you, where you can’t see it. Some Indigenous Australian cultures, which rely heavily on direction terms like north, south, east, and west in their languages, visualise the passage of time as moving from east to west. If they’re facing north, for example, the past would be to their right, or east, whereas the future would be to their left, which would be west.
We can thank Albert Einstein for a lot of our current understanding of the physics of time. Rather than viewing time as a set order, he proved that it’s relative. For example, according to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, there’s an inverse relationship between your speed and the speed of time. The faster you move, the slower time moves. This is why someone blasting through space will age slower than the people still hanging out on Earth: Astronaut Scott Kelly was born several minutes after his twin brother, Mark, but after Scott spent 340 days living on the International Space Station, he returned to Earth around an extra 5 milliseconds younger than his “big” brother. Had Scott been travelling at a speed close to the speed of light, that age difference would have become much more pronounced.
Time zones can still be a bit complicated. Big countries like Canada and the United States have multiple time zones, whereas China, another large country, only has one. China adopted the Beijing Standard Time to foster unity, but the effect can feel a bit uncanny—two cities in the country can be at roughly the same latitude, but experience sunrise hours apart, according to their clocks. In some parts of China, for example, the sun doesn’t rise until nearly 10 a.m.
Linux is the most famous example of open source software but did you know that it wasn’t always that way? Early versions of Linux were distributed with a license forbidding commercial use or redistribution. It was version 0.12, released in 1992, that saw Linus adopt the GPL, making his code freely available to all.
There are 10+ Linux-based mobile Operating Systems other than Android. For example, OpenZaurus, Firefox OS, Sailfish OS, Ubuntu Touch, Ubuntu Mobile, Mobline etc.
The South East of England is mostly flat: England’s topography is quite varied, with the Lake District National Park being a great example of the country’s high elevation. If you venture towards the South East, you’ll find the opposite. This part of the country is mostly low-lying, offering flat countryside with uninterrupted views. Some of the best places to experience these views are the Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, including the Cotswolds and Chiltern Hills. The glorious South Downs National Park offers a stunning mixture of coastal and countryside sights, including the Seven Sisters cliffs. It’s well worth checking out!
There’s a Reason US Dollars Are Green: Dollar bills weren’t always green. Colonial money, for example, was tan with black or red ink. It wasn’t until the Civil War the government started using green ink to print paper money that it got the name greenbacks. The colour was selected because the ink didn’t fade or easily decompose, which protected against counterfeiting.
AI is capable of making diagnoses just as accurately as world-leading experts in the medical field. For example, there is one such AI-driven algorithm that can detect metastatic breast cancer with 99 per cent accuracy.