Human noses and ears get bigger as we age. It’s pretty common to see the claim that our nose and ears are the only parts of our body that keep growing as we age, but that’s not exactly true. Our nose and ears stop growing along with the rest of our body, but thanks to the weight of gravity, both parts continue to lengthen over time, according to the Discovery Channel.
100 Mind-Blowing Pretty Facts
The Spice Girls were originally a band called Touch. “When we first started [with the name Touch], we were pretty bland,” Mel C told The Guardian in 2018. “We felt like we had to fit into a mould.”
Tinder made its first match in Antarctica in 2014. Tinder made its first match on the continent of Antarctica in 2014. The match in question was between two research scientists. You could pretty much find a match for you anywhere with these new dating apps.
Manatees can get cold stress. These gentle giants may look like tough guys, but they can be pretty sensitive to cold. In waters below 20°C, manatees can get “Florida frostbite.” Manatee fat isn’t enough to insulate their body temperature in the cold – which is why manatee deaths spiked in the Florida cold snap of 2010.
Wayne’s World was filmed in two weeks. The critically and commercially acclaimed 90s comedy only took two weeks to shoot. Pretty surprising for a 95-minute film.
The Krusty Krab restaurant is a lobster trap. In Spongebob Squarepants (1999), the Krusty Krab is designed after a lobster trap. Pretty dark for a cartoon about sea creatures.
The word “Typewriter” is the longest word you can type using only one row of the keyboard. Other words you could also try typing are pretty, power, and tweety.
Birds have hollow bones which help them fly. Birds are unique creatures with many interesting facts to feature. However, one of their more creepy features is their hollow bones. Deep inside, birds are pretty much paper mache. While humans have dense bones filled with marrow, most birds of flight have only air and struts in their bones.
It took 12 years to paint the Mona Lisa’s lips. Leonardo da Vinci took his sweet time on his masterpiece: Mona Lisa’s pretty pucker took 12 years to paint. Yes, just the lips.
The small intestine is bigger than the large intestine. The human body is pretty weird. The small intestine measures 20 ft long and 1” in diameter. Meanwhile, the large intestine is 5 ft long and 3” in diameter. Essentially, the small intestine is larger than the large intestine.
Roman Polanski had pee thrown at his face during Chinatown. If you’ve had any experience making a video group project, you’d know the high-tension environment of productions. Fights are pretty much inevitable. One of the most iconic cinema fights and funny facts: During the shoot for Chinatown, Faye Dunaway asked for her character’s motivation in one particular scene. Instead of offering advice, Roman Polanski yelled, “Say the fucking words. Your salary is your motivation.” This friction continued until the director wouldn’t let Dunaway take a toilet break. Fed up, Dunaway threw a coffee cup with her pee in his face.
LEGO is the world’s largest tyre manufacturer. Pretty ironic considering how small LEGO tyres are, but LEGO is the biggest tyre manufacturer in the world. Lego manufactures over 318 million toy tyres per year, with 870,000 tyres per day.
One kiss transfers more than 80 million germs. When Dua Lipa said, “One kiss is all it takes,” she meant more than just falling in love. In one 10-second French kiss, over 80 million microbes are transferred between partners. Sounds pretty icky, but scientists think kissing may boost the immune system through shared bacteria. Similarly, people in long-term relationships were found to have the same bacteria in their mouths. How sweet!
Women blink nearly twice as much as men! This is a pure myth! Blink rates are pretty identical for both sexes. Scientists have suggested that the interval between blinks is nearly about 2-10 seconds so an average person blinks about 10 times per minute. Another interesting fact is that we blink less frequently if our eyes are focused on one thing. For instance, while you read, you only blink three times per minute because while reading you are very focused.
5 billion Suns could fit in UY Scuti, one of the biggest known stars. Compared to the rest of the worlds of our Solar System – even colossal Jupiter – our Sun is pretty big. But it’s nothing compared to the biggest stars we know of red hypergiant stars that would positively dwarf our Sun if ever there was a cosmic ‘who’s the biggest star?’ contest. UY Scuti is one such stellar giant. It’s often referred to as the biggest known star in the Universe (although this can’t definitively be proven). But what calculations have revealed is that if UY Scuti were to replace our Sun, its outer edge would sit beyond the orbit of Jupiter. 5 billion Suns, 7 trillion Jupiters or 7 quadrillion Earths would fit inside UY Scuti! What’s more, UY Scuti is 300,000 times brighter than the Sun but is so far away you wouldn’t know this when observing it in our night sky.
The Moon is drifting away from Earth. You read that correctly! The Moon is gradually drifting away from Earth at a rate of approximately 4 cm per year. This phenomenon is caused by the Moon pulling on Earth’s oceans creating tidal forces that produce a bulge of water on the side of Earth facing the Moon. This bulge in turn creates a gravitational pull on the Moon, causing it to accelerate slightly and move further away from Earth. Over time, this process has caused the Moon to move farther away from Earth each year. This gradual drift is not noticeable on a day-to-day basis, but over millions of years, it can have significant effects on Earth’s rotation. Today, most scientists believe the Moon is ‘Earth’s child’ – a large body collided with Earth, destroying our planet’s mantle and sending material into orbit from which the Moon formed. This ‘big splash’ theory would explain why the Moon’s rocks are similar to those on Earth. Bonus fun fact: Australia is wider than the Moon. The Moon sits at 3400 km in diameter, while Australia’s diameter from east to west is almost 4000 km. The Moon, as a sphere, has more surface area, but it’s still pretty impressive.
Ancient Roman commoners went on strike by evacuating their cities, leaving the upper classes hopelessly fending for themselves. Secessio plebis (secession of the plebeians) is similar to a general strike but proved much more effective as the upper classes almost entirely relied upon the working classes. Pretty much everything in the city would close down, which proved to be incredibly effective at having the peasants’ demands met. Maybe this is something that we should try again in modern times.
There’s a pub in Ireland that’s been running for more than 1,100 years! Sean’s Bar in Athlone Ireland has been open for business since about 900 AD, with records of every owner of the pub since its founding. While surprising at first, it makes sense that it has stood the test of time. Sean’s Bar is in the middle of a town that’s pretty much smack-bang in the centre of Ireland.
The quietest place on Earth is in Minnesota. Pretty much wherever you go in the world, there’s always going to be some sort of background noise, whether that’s the chirp of crickets or the slow, lazy whoosh of a gentle breeze. That’s the case everywhere except Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where something called an anechoic chamber lies. While the background noise in a tranquil bedroom measures somewhere around 30 decibels, Orfield Laboratories anechoic chamber recorded an average of -13 decibels – that’s so quiet that the inner workings of your body are audible.
The dog ate John Steinbeck’s homework—literally. The author’s pup chewed up an early version of Of Mice and Men. “I was pretty mad, but the poor fellow may have been acting critically,” he wrote.
Which came first, Spam mail or Spam meat? Spam mail was named after the canned meat! In a Monty Python skit, they said Spam meat was “horrible and being ubiquitous and inescapable.” Sounds pretty accurate to the annoying junk mail I get! Also, did you know that, on average, for every spam email sent, they only get one reply for every twelve million spam emails sent? Is it even worth it at that point?
But Sosigenes made a bit of a miscalculation, so the calendar continued to be a little off. He thought a year lasted 365.25 days. It’s around 365 days, five hours, 48 minutes, and 45 seconds, equivalent to about 365.242 days. This tiny error had some pretty big consequences: By 1577, the Julian calendar was off by 10 days, meaning key Christian holidays were being celebrated on incorrect dates. Pope Gregory XIII took issue with this and established a commission to get the calendar back on track. In 1582, the Gregorian calendar was created. Rather than having an extra day every four years without exception, years that are divisible by 100—like 1700 or 1900—skip leap year. Unless the year is also divisible by 400, like the year 2000, in which case the Leap Year is back on! Even this system isn’t perfect, though: It has an error of one day in 3236 years.
Daylight saving time does more than make people lose an hour of sleep. It can have some pretty concerning health effects. Studies have linked daylight saving time with an uptick in heart attacks, car crashes, and mining injuries. The extra hour of daylight is good for koalas, though: Researchers found that koala-car collisions went down by up to 11 per cent during daylight saving time.
A Banknote Can Be Folded 4,000 Times: Our currency is pretty durable. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the sole producer of U.S. paper currency, says it would take 4,000 double folds, forward and backward, for a dollar bill to tear. It might be because paper money isn’t made of paper. It’s a blend of 75% cotton and 25% linen with tiny blue and red synthetic fibres of various lengths evenly distributed throughout the bill.