In English, leaving a party without telling anyone is called a “French Exit.” In French, it’s called a “partir à l’anglaise,” to leave like the English.
100 Mind-Blowing Without Facts
Tirana, the capital of Albania, has a lot of things in common with other European capitals – except one. It’s one of the few capitals without a McDonald’s, along with Vatican City Reykjavik, Iceland, and Podgorica, Montenegro.
A man with severe OCD and a phobia of germs attempted to commit suicide with a gun to his head. Instead of killing him, the bullet eliminated his mental illness without any other damage.
There is a correlation between pulling an all-nighter and snapping out of depression. This is because the brain gets more active the longer it goes without sleep.
All the paint on the Eiffel Tower weighs the same as ten elephants. It gets repainted every seven years without closing to the public.
There is a liquid that you can breathe in called perfluorohexane. Animals can be submerged in a bath of perfluorohexane without drowning.
The highest recorded fall without a parachute happened in 1972 at 33,333 ft. The victim, Vesna Vulović, was in the hospital for 16 months after the fall.
A mason in 1700s Jerusalem left his wooden ladder behind after doing some work on a church, and now it can’t be moved without the agreement & permission of six different Christian leaders.
Without saliva, humans are unable to taste food.
To protect themselves from poachers, African Elephants have been evolving without tusks, which unfortunately also hurts their species.
In 2007, a 1000-gallon inflatable swimming pool was stolen from someone’s backyard without a single drop of water being found!
During 9/11, some fighters took off without live ammo, knowing that to stop the hijackers, the pilots might have to crash their fighters into the planes.
Humans cannot walk in a straight line without a visual point – When blindfolded, we will gradually walk in a circle.
Victoria’s Secret was originally supposed to be a store for men to shop for their female partners without feeling embarrassed.
In the Philippines, it is considered good luck if a coconut is cleanly split open without jagged edges.
The only 15-letter word that can be spelt without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.
A chicken once lived for 18 months without a head. Mike the Chicken’s incredible feat was recorded back in the 1940s in the USA. He survived as his jugular vein and most of his brainstem were left mostly intact, ensuring just enough brain function remained for survival. In the majority of cases, a headless chicken dies in a matter of minutes.
Hippos can’t swim. Hippos do have big bones, so big and dense that they’re barely buoyant at all. They don’t swim and instead perform a slow-motion gallop on the riverbed or the sea floor. Hippos can even sleep underwater, thanks to a built-in reflex that allows them to bob up, take a breath, and sink back down without waking.
You travel 2.5 million km a day around the Sun without realising. The Earth’s orbit travels around 2.5 million kilometres around the Sun’s centre and around 19 million km around the centre of the Milky Way.
If the Earth doubled in size, trees would immediately fall over. This is because surface gravity would be doubled. It would also mean dog-size and larger animals would not be able to run without breaking a leg.
You inhale 50 potentially harmful bacteria every time you breathe. Thankfully, your immune system is working hard all the time, so virtually all of these are promptly destroyed without you feeling a thing. Phew.
You can see stars as they were 4,000 years ago with the naked eye. Without a telescope, all the stars we can see lie within about 4,000 light-years of us. That means at most you’re seeing stars as they were 4,000 years ago, around when the pyramids were being built in Egypt.
A chicken once lived for 18 months without its head.
The cornea is one of only two parts of the human body without blood vessels. The cornea is the clear part of the eye that covers the pupil and other parts of the eye. Cartilage and the cornea are the only types of tissue in the human body that do not contain blood vessels, according to scientists at the Harvard Department of Ophthalmology’s Schepens Eye Research Institute.
There’s only one U.S. state capital without a McDonald’s. Montpelier, Vermont, doesn’t have any of those Golden Arches. It also happens to have the smallest population of any state capital, with just 7,500 residents.
Boars wash their food. National Geographic reported that at Basel Zoo in Switzerland, zookeepers watched adult and juvenile wild boars pick up sandy apples and bring them to a nearby creek in their environment to wash before eating. Though some items like sugar beets were eaten without human-like behaviour, the boars brought a whole dead chicken to the creek to wash before chowing down. One ecologist called this a “luxury behaviour.”
The shortest war in history lasted 38 minutes. When the sultan of British-protected Zanzibar died and a new one took over without British approval in 1896, the Brits were not happy. Tension escalated when Sultan Khalid bin Barghash refused to step down, but the British warships spent less than 40 minutes bombarding the palace before Khalid fled, marking the (very quick) end of the Anglo-Zanzibar War.
“Fancy riding” on bikes is illegal in Illinois. That includes riding without hands or taking your feet off the pedals when you’re on the street.
Antarctica is the only continent without any reptiles or snakes. Not only does the elusive continent of Antarctica lack McDonald’s joints – but it also doesn’t have any of our lizard friends. Why? Well – we all know that reptiles are cold-blooded – so they can’t produce their heat. Meaning, they’d get turned into popsicles in the frosty Arctic.
Humans can’t taste food without saliva. Another fun fact about the body: You wouldn’t taste your food without spit. Your saliva dissolves food, which allows the receptors in your taste buds to detect food molecules.
Arnold Schwarzenegger practised with guns every day for a month to prepare for The Terminator. To achieve the mechanical motions of The Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger worked with guns daily for an entire month. During the first two weeks of filming, he practised stripping and reassembly while blindfolded until he was able to do it robotically and with both hands. He also practised using different weapons without blinking or looking at them when reloading.
Hugh Jackman went 36 hours without water for Les Miserables. This caused the actor to lose water weight around his eyes and cheeks and end up looking as gaunt as a prisoner.
Crocodiles are one of the planet’s oldest living creatures. These animals have survived for over 200 million years. This may be due to their superb ability to be able to go for long periods without eating.
The bones of the human body can multiply in density. This occurs in very extreme cases. People who have been discovered to have this rare gene mutation have cases of walking away from car accidents and other impact injuries without fractures.
Black taxis in London are tall for a reason. This is so that gentlemen can ride in them without having to remove their top hats. For many, this is considered to be very convenient.
Someone will write and recite a poem at your funeral if you die in the Netherlands. This is mostly the case for those who die without a next of kin. This practice is done so that there will be at least one person at their funeral.
The Baseball Hall of Fame had a secret inductee. In 1988, a surreptitious addition to the Baseball Hall of Fame was made without anyone knowing. A bar owner visiting the hall slipped a photo of his father in a baseball cap into one of the glass cases. This photo remained in the hall for over 6 years before being discovered.
The King of Hearts is the only King without a moustache. The king of hearts is also known as the ‘Suicide king’ because of the sword he inserts into his head. It sounds like he was going through a rough breakup.
You can become less depressed if you stay up. Research has found that there is a correlation between those who pull all-nighters and those hazing out of depression. This is because the longer you go without sleep, the more active your brain becomes. However, it is not recommended to go without sleep as it is a necessary need for humans to be able to function normally.
The human vagina always holds a small amount of yeast. Even without an infection, the vagina will always hold some kind of fungus. Regular cleaning of this area is advised to prevent the growth of bacteria and infections.
The flashes of light when you rub your eyes are called phosphenes. This phenomenon allows you to see light without any actual light source present. This occurs due to many possible sources like magnetic stimulation, or random firing of cells in the visual system.
The chacma baboons reside in Africa’s Namib desert. According to research, a group of chacma baboons once survived 116 days in the desert without any water. They survived solely by eating figs they found.
A tarantula can survive two years without food. Tarantulas can go much longer without food compared to water. So long as there is water available, a tarantula will not suffer any bad side effects from starvation.
Kangaroos can’t hop without their tails. If you were to lift a kangaroo’s tail, it would not be able to jump. This is mainly because they use their tails for balance while jumping.
Humans consume a lot of water. Water is a major part of most life forms and cannot survive without it. By the time humans reach the age of 70, they would have consumed about 12,000 gallons of water. Water is known to be the best and most hydrating liquid that promotes cardiovascular health.
Humans have five vital organs. Without any of these organs, a human being cannot survive. These organs include the heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, and the brain.
An American man tried to fake his death so he wouldn’t have to pay his phone bill. In 2007, Corey Taylor attempted to fake his death to get out of his smartphone contract without paying for anything. However, despite his efforts, it did not work.
Australia is the only continent without an active volcano. The nearest active volcanoes are located off the continent of Australia but are still within its territory. One is located on Head Island and the other on McDonald Islands. The reason why Australia does not have any active volcanoes located on the continent is that it isn’t on a plate boundary.
Ducks cannot walk without bobbing their heads. Ducks often bob their heads to signify moods or emotions. At times, it may also be used to signify flirting during the mating season.
A woman once survived falling from an aeroplane at 33,000 ft high. Vesna Vulovic holds the world record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute. The Serbian flight attendant was the only survivor of the JAT Airways plane crash of 1972. Following the crash, she was in a coma and could not walk for 10 months. She managed to live until the age of 66.
The lungs are the only organs that can float on water. The shortest explanation is that air is less dense than water. With air in our lungs, we float. Each lung cavity has about 300 million balloon-like structures called alveoli. Proper breathing is crucial to swimming because you’d sink (not to mention, drown) without air in your lungs.
Every odd number has an “e” in it. Trying to find an odd number without the letter “e” would be like attempting to beat God.
An octopus can eat its tentacle. When an octopus is stressed, it may suffer from autophagy or self-cannibalism. In some cases, a stressed octopus can eat its arms. However, an octopus can lose an arm without pain and regrow it with no problem. Imagine if we did the same when we got stressed. Now that would be one for funny facts.
Dogs like squeaking toys because they sound like their prey. Dogs are known to have a fixation on squeaky toys. Although dogs have been domesticated by man, they still retain some of their animal instincts – which is why squeaky toys stimulate them. Squeaky toys almost sound like small prey screaming for their life. Now that’s one of the WTF facts you could’ve lived without ever knowing.
Woodpeckers would eat brains if they get too hungry. One of the darker WTF facts: If a woodpecker goes too long without food, they will pin down other birds and peck at their heads until they can eat their brains.
The shortest war in history lasted less than an hour. When the sultan of Zanzibar died and a new one took over without British approval in 1896, the Brits saw it as disrespect. When the unofficially appointed Sultan Khalid bin Barghash refused to step down, British warships spent 38 minutes bombing the palace before Khalid fled. This marked the end of the Anglo-Zanzibar War.
When you sneeze, your heart stops for a millisecond. Ever let out a sneeze so hard, you feel like everything stopped for a moment? Well, your heart does stop when you sneeze, but only briefly. There’s another one of the WTF facts you could’ve gone without knowing.
A woman was once constipated for nearly two months. After 45 days without a bowel movement, a 28-year-old woman from India had to have surgery to remove a “football-sized” mass of faeces.
A headless chicken survived for 18 months. Mike The Headless Chicken, also known as Miracle Mike survived for 18 months without his head. According to scientists, his brain stem and jugular remained intact, and a clot prevented him from bleeding to death. His owner would feed him through a dropper and his trachea. Eventually, though, he choked to death.
A man reached level 90 in World of Warcraft without leaving the starting zone, ever. The player Double agent spent 173.5 days mining and picking herbs for XP. Technically, he was stuck in the Wandering Isles for life – he couldn’t even play PvP since you’d need to have a faction for that.
A cockroach can live for weeks after its head has been cut off. If you’ve ever been assaulted by a cockroach, your instincts would be fight or flight – and the brave few who would fight can probably agree that cockroaches can be ridiculously hard to squish and kill. Even with its head cut off, a roach would survive because of its open circulatory system or using tiny holes in its body called spiracles to breathe. Additionally, cockroaches don’t need food like we do, so they’d be able to go for weeks without it.
No one knows why flamingos stand on one foot. Flamingos usually pose with one foot tucked under their bodies. A theory suggests that they do it to conserve body heat in the cold water of their feeding areas, but it has not been confirmed. Astonishingly, a study showed that this behaviour does not cause muscle strain in their legs, meaning they can do it without physical effort.
Britain remains the world’s only country without a written constitution.
Babies are born without kneecaps. Turns out, babies are as soft and delicate as they look. Babies may have more bones than the average fully-grown human, but they definitely won’t be doing any stunts anytime soon. Babies are born with a cartilaginous structure in their knees that will eventually develop into kneecaps by the time they are four years old.
Bears don’t poop during hibernation. You might wonder, “How do animals keep in their poop when they hibernate?” Before an animal goes into hibernation, they will eat a lot to sustain them until they wake. So, where does all the food go? Bears keep their food in by eating grass and twigs, creating a plug or stopper in their bowels. With this stopper, they can sleep continuously without having to poop. However, once they wake up, it all comes out.
The longest time without sleep is 11 days. The longest time recorded of a person without sleep is approximately 264 hours. Within 3 to 4 days without sleep, you may start having hallucinations. Sleep is a biological function for a reason – it is not advisable to pull all-nighters all the time.
Alfred Hitchcock didn’t have a belly button. He wasn’t born without a belly button, but Alfred Hitchcock lost his belly button due to multiple gastrointestinal surgeries.
In 1990, List was convicted of five counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to five consecutive life terms without parole.
The movie was shot entirely in black and white. Spielberg made the deliberate decision to shoot the film without colour to evoke a sense of historical authenticity and emphasise the starkness of the Holocaust.
To protect themselves from poachers, African elephants have been evolving without tusks.
If you have 3 quarters, 4 dimes, and 4 pennies, you have $1.19. You also have the largest amount of money in coins without being able to make a change for a dollar.
The king of hearts is the only king without a moustache.
Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of unwanted people without killing them used to burn their houses down — hence the expression “to get fired”
Rhythm is the longest English word without a vowel. Without using any vowel letter, the longest English word can be formed which is a letter word – ‘Rhythm’.
The longest walking distance in the world is 14,000 miles. You could walk from Magadan in Russia to Cape Town in South Africa without needing a vehicle.
A chicken once lived more than a year without a head. It survived an incredible (and sad?) 18 months.
Once a chicken lived without its head for 18 months. Perhaps you’ve already heard of Mike the Chicken. Well if you haven’t, you’ll be surprised to find out that in the 1940s, Mike survived because his jugular vein and brainstem were still functioning. But don’t expect this for every chicken. It’s a weird animal fact, but a rare one.
The cornea is one of two parts of the human body without blood vessels. Coming in as another weird fact about the human body is the cornea and the cartilage do not have blood vessels.
Tardigrades are extremely durable microscopic animals that exist all over Earth. They can survive any of the following: 300 degrees Fahrenheit (149 Celsius), -458 degrees F (-272 C), the vacuum of space, pressure six times stronger than the ocean floor, and more than a decade without food.
Dalmatians are born without spots! They are born with plain white coats with their first spots appearing after they are 1 week old.
Planets can wander through space without a parent star. Not all planets form and stay around stars: astronomers estimate that there could be more than 200 billion of them floating free and drifting through our Galaxy. These ‘rogue’ planets were thought to have been kicked out of their home systems. While this is true for some, other planets may have formed completely independently of an accretion disk (as was the case for our Solar System) instead of forming from the collapse of tiny, cold clouds known as globulettes.
Most Sun-like stars in our galaxy are in multiple star systems. Our Sun may be a single star, but it is in the minority. Over half of the Sun-like stars in the Milky Way are part of multiple star systems, binaries or triplets, with stars orbiting around a common centre of mass. Most lower-mass stars like red dwarfs, however, live alone without a companion.
They can go several days without drinking water.
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.
Octopus skin contains the same light-sensitive proteins as octopus eyes. This means its skin can “see” and respond to light without information from the eyes or brain.
Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them used to burn their houses down – hence the expression “to get fired.”
The man who invented pop-up advertisements deeply regrets it and says he’s very sorry. In 1997 Ethan Zuckerman wrote the code for the first pop-up and added it to a website. This, he believes, was the Internet’s equivalent of the original sin. While he understands that many websites and services on the Internet wouldn’t function without getting funding from advertisements, he believes that it’s high time to find an alternative that doesn’t involve an invasion of our privacy.
It turns out that you don’t need to drink six to eight cups of water per day. Water is without a doubt one of the most important things on our planet, and since around the 1940s, it’s been popularly believed that you should drink about 84 ounces (2.5 litres) of the stuff every day to stay healthy. Researchers have since delved deeper into the issue and concluded that you don’t need to drink anywhere near that much, as you get a lot of water from the food you eat. Instead, you’re merely advised to drink when you’re thirsty and drink extra on particularly hot days.
J. R. R. Tolkien invented the languages of Middle Earth before he even thought of writing stories in the fictional universe. Tolkien was without a doubt a natural polyglot, learning more than 35 languages throughout his life. When he was a teenager, he invented his first language, which would inspire the 20 or so languages he ultimately created for Middle Earth. Once he began inventing the languages, he realized that he needed people to speak them, and it was only from this point that he thought to write The Lord of the Rings and his other works.
Rabbits can see behind them without moving their heads.
Raccoons have four times more sensory cells in their paws than most mammals. This allows them to “see” with their hands and get images of the objects they touch without even looking at them.
A chicken named Mike lived for 18 months without his head in the 1940s.
Mongolia has the world’s sparsest population and in some regions, you can go days without seeing another person.
Wikipedia is run and maintained by thousands of humans and hundreds of bots. Everyone knows Wikipedia is powered by thousands of human contributors. On the other hand, most people don’t realize hundreds of bots contribute to the effort, too. ClueBot NG catches vandalism on Wikipedia pages almost in real-time. A variety of other bots contribute standardised data to the online encyclopedia. This combination of humans and bots ensures Wikipedia runs without any problems 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.
There are Amish computers. There are computers specially designed without Internet, video, or music capabilities, just for the Amish. The features include word processing, drawing, accounting, spreadsheets, and more – but not much more.
Shopify reports a 94% higher conversion rate for retail customers using AR/VR technology than those without.
In 1862, the King of Siam offered Abraham Lincoln many elephants because a “Country as great as the United States should not be without elephants.” Lincoln politely declined.
The term “footage” comes from films being measured in feet when being edited in the early days of filmmaking. Why footage got its name is one of those questions that you have when taking a long shower or when you’re just starting to drift off to sleep. Fortunately, we have the answer for you and even an explanation! Back in the day, when movies were released without audio, they used to use 35mm film. During this era, the film was measured out and cut into foot-long (0.3 m) strips, which contained 16 frames in each. One foot of 35mm film was just one second of screen time. The amount of seconds in a film naturally became known as the footage.
The Boston Marathon didn’t allow female runners until 1972. The first woman to finish the Boston Marathon, Roberta Gibb, actually ran the race a few years earlier in 1966. She hid in some bushes until the race started to avoid detection and then ran the marathon without any official sanction. Another woman, Katherine Switzer, didn’t declare herself a woman when she competed in 1967 and was allowed to enter the race. When it became apparent that she wasn’t a man, the officials unsuccessfully tried to stop her from competing. It wasn’t until the fall of 1971 when the Amateur Athletics Union allowed women to compete, which made 1972’s marathon the first to officially allow female entrants. Eight women competed in the 1972 Boston Marathon, and all eight completed it, with Nina Kuscsik claiming the first official female victory.
Havoc! One of the few known medieval battlefield orders is the cry of ‘Havoc!’. Havoc released the army from any formation and gave freedom to loot, and was an order only ever to be given when it was utterly certain that a battle was won and discipline was no longer required. It was considered so dangerous that it was expressly forbidden without permission from the army’s commander. A wrongly timed cry of havoc could cost a battle and there were severe punishments for crying havoc without permission – sometimes extending to beheading.