Alongside Sudoku, chess has been named one of the best ways to improve the mind and memory.
100 Mind-Blowing Mind Facts
Nutmeg is a hallucinogen. The spice contains myristicin, a natural compound that has mind-altering effects if ingested in large doses.
Like fingerprints, everyone’s tongue print is different. One of the more mind-blowing fun facts: no two tongue prints are alike. The use of tongue prints as a forensic identifier began fairly recently.
A full jumbo jet tank has enough fuel to drive a car around the world four times. One of the most mind-blowing fun facts: The average jumbo jet burns roughly a gallon (approx. 4 litres) of fuel every second. Compared to the average car fuel tank, this capacity can fill a car with enough fuel to circle the world four times over. Talk about a road trip.
Sudan has the most pyramids out of any country. One of the mind-boggling fun facts: The plentiest pyramids in the world is not in Egypt! Instead, the record belongs to Sudan with 255 pyramids – which is twice the amount of the pyramids in Egypt.
Mr. and Mrs. came from the words master and mistress. Mind? Blown. The first use of the abbreviated Mr. and Mrs. were traced to a letter written in the 1600s by an unknown R. P. addressed to William Farington Esqu.
T-shirts were originally made for unmarried men who didn’t know how to sew buttons on collared shirts. However, people didn’t pay much mind to T-shirts until the 1950s.
Ravens are always aware when someone is watching them. These birds are known for being notoriously clever creatures and they display what is called the ‘theory of mind’. This is also known as the ability to attribute mental states to others.
A cloud can weigh more than a million pounds. If you’ve ever pictured yourself lying in the clouds, keep this in mind: the average weight of a cumulus cloud is 1.1 million pounds – or almost 500,000 kg! They don’t seem as light and fluffy now, do they?
Bald eagles don’t sound like in the movies. If you’ve seen a Western film, the iconic bird screech comes to mind. However, you’d be surprised that it’s not the sound of a bald eagle. The piercing call that most people associate with the bird is a sound made by another bird of prey: the red-tailed hawk. Hollywood uses the red-tailed hawk’s cry because it has a more dramatic effect. Real bald eagles would chirp rather than screeching.
Fungi can control the mind and make them a zombie. Ophiocordyceps is a kind of tropical fungus that affects the ant’s central nervous system. After nine days, when it’s been inside the ant’s body, it has complete control over the host’s movements. It can influence the ant’s behaviour too by making them climb the tree and then fall.
Nutmeg is a hallucinogen. Because it contains myristicin, a natural compound that has mind-altering effects, you can experience hallucinations if you ingest large quantities of nutmeg. Yikes!
There are more possible variations of a game of chess than there are atoms in the known universe. That’s mind-blowing!
Nutmeg is a hallucinogen. If you eat large amounts of nutmeg, you can hallucinate because it contains myristicin which is a mind-altering ingredient.
1 tsp of neutron star weighs the same as the human population. A neutron star’s density is mind-boggling. These stars are composed almost entirely of neutrons packed together in a tiny radius. Just a teaspoonful of this material would weigh over a trillion kilograms — more than the weight of the entire human population (which reaches a few hundred billion kilograms). To make something as dense as a neutron star, the whole of humanity would need to be crammed into a space the size of a sugar cube.
The author of the James Bond novels wrote the first book to take his mind off the fear of getting married. Ian Fleming was a bachelor of 44 years when he wrote Casino Royale in 1952, the first in a long series about the devilishly handsome British spy. Many years later, Fleming wrote in his memoirs that he was so terrified at the concept of finally getting married that he wrote his first Bond novel. Some authors doubt this dismissal, claiming he simply wrote it as a quick cash job, but it makes a hell of a good story!
The first Apple logo isn’t what you would think. Originally, it featured Sir Isaac Newton sitting beneath a tree, with an apple about to fall on his head. It was designed back in 1976 and featured a phrase around the border that read “Newton…A mind forever voyageing through strange seas of thought…alone”.
Your nose is always visible to you. Your mind ignores it through a process called Unconscious Selective Attention.
The oldest prosthetic. In 1997, an excavation near the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes revealed the oldest prosthesis ever discovered: an engraved wooden toe, fitted to the right foot of an Egyptian noblewoman who lived 3,000 years ago. The ‘Cairo toe’ was practical, modified over time to accommodate the woman’s gait. But it was also designed with aesthetics in mind, intended to be worn in open-toe sandals, not concealed.
Headline Puzzle: The Headline Puzzle is a monthly feature started in 1964 by Paul Derthick to keep his mind sharp outside of cryptanalytic work. It involves solving monoalphabetic substitutions from recent newspaper headlines.
There is an annual cheese rolling competition: The unusual sport of cheese rolling was guaranteed to make this list of facts about England. A unique event, the annual cheese rolling takes place on Cooper’s Hill in Gloucester and has been done since 1826. The event involves a 9-lb, round Double Gloucester cheese rolled down a hill, with competitors chasing after it to the bottom. The first person to reach the finish line wins the cheese. Contestants are often locals from the area, however, the event attractions competitors from all over the world. If you’re up for a challenge, why not sign up for the race? Please keep in mind that due to the fast pace of the race, the event can be quite dangerous.
Import of haggis to the US has been banned since the 70s: Scottish haggis is a sheep’s stomach filled with the sheep’s liver, heart and lungs, as well as oatmeal, suet, stock, onions and various spices. This dish has been forbidden in the United States of America since 1971. The reason for this is that the U.S. Department of Agriculture believes that lungs should not be saved for use as human food. The lungs of a sheep can contain bacteria, so the ban is in place with food safety in mind.
Brits Consume Over 100 Million Cups of Tea Daily: The first interesting fact about the UK that comes to mind may be that the Brits love drinking tea. This fun fact about the UK directly confirms the idea that people from Britain drink a lot of tea. They consume between 100 and 160 million cups of tea daily, or around 36 billion annually. The UK differs from most other countries in the world in that a whopping 98% of tea drinkers add milk to their brew.
Coins Didn’t Always Say “In God We Trust”: The original American penny, reportedly designed by Benjamin Franklin, features a motto he popularized, “Mind Your Business.” The message wasn’t telling people not to be nosy. Instead, it was meant as a literal instruction about business and commerce, to keep focused on your livelihood.
Between 2010 and the first quarter of 2020, venture funding in AI hit a mind-blowing $61 billion. Most of this investment went to companies in the USA and China.