If you cut a starfish, it won’t bleed – it doesn’t have blood! Rather, they circulate nutrients by using seawater in their vascular system.
100 Mind-Blowing Won’t Facts
The longest English word is 189,819 letters long. We won’t spell it out here, but the full name for the protein nicknamed titin would take three and a half hours to say out loud. While this is, by far, the longest word in English, the longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary has 45 letters, and the longest made-up word has just 28. Just a few more interesting facts for your next cocktail party!
Triskaidekaphobia is the fear of the number 13. This is mainly connected to the belief that the number 13 is unlucky and can bring about misfortune. This is why you won’t see the number 13 on most building elevators.
Most of the viruses embedded in our DNA are gone already. Most of these viruses have already gone extinct due to human evolution and changes in environments. Modern medicine also played a role in the extinction of these viruses. If scientists were to revive any of these viruses, it could cause a major outbreak that humans won’t quickly heal from.
There’s a company you can pay to kidnap you. The Ultíme Réalité is a French company that offers kidnapping services. If you pay them a fee, they will come to kidnap you when you least expect it – ropes, binds, and all. They won’t do it immediately, though. They’ll wait for a certain period so you won’t remember that you paid someone to kidnap you.
Handshakes were originally a safety measure. In 5th century Greece, handshakes were done to make sure that the other person wasn’t carrying a hidden weapon. The hand clasp proved that your hand was empty and shaking it was meant to “shake out” weapons hiding in the sleeve. One of the WTF facts you probably won’t stop thinking of.
There’s a cheese eaten with live maggots. If you’re one for exotic eats, the Casu marzu is a Sardinian cheese that has a special ingredient: live maggots. These maggots can jump up to five inches out of the cheese while you’re eating it, so it’s advised to shield it with your hand so it won’t get on your face.
At the equator, you would weigh less than if standing at one of the poles. You would weigh less on the equator than at the North or South Pole, but the difference is subtle. Your body itself won’t change, but the force of gravity will, thus reducing your weight.
Jelly beans are coated with insect juice. Jelly beans and candy corn are usually coated with shellac, a substance made from the secretions of a Thai species called kerria lacca. However, you probably won’t see this ingredient in the list: the industrial term for it is “confectioner’s glaze.” This secret ingredient gives your favourite confectionery that delicious sheen.
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.
It won’t be possible to walk on planets like Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn or Uranus as they don’t have a solid surface and are made of gases mostly.
The longest walking distance in the world adds up to 14,000 miles. You won’t need a vehicle when you walk from Magdan, Russia to Cape Town, South Africa.
SOME WHALES USE BUBBLE NETTING TO FEED. This involves whales cooperatively blowing bubbles that encircle their prey. As the prey won’t cross through the bubbles, they’re trapped, making it easy for the whales to eat them.
The original name of Microsoft Windows was “Interface Manager”. In 1981, Microsoft began the development of a program called “Interface Manager”. Most people won’t recognise that name because Interface Manager became Windows in 1983. Microsoft released Windows 1.0 in 1985, and it’s now the most common operating system in the world. It’s hard to believe the OS would be successful with its original name. Interface Manager perfectly describes what Windows would become. In the marketing department, making that name sound interesting or useful would have been impossible. Everyone recognises Windows, and millions of computers run on Windows 10 today. Interface Manager should be considered a work-in-progress name and something best left in the past.
Tech companies often test their products in New Zealand. New Zealand is such a diverse country with English-speaking residents, which makes it a great place for testing. But the main reason is that since it’s somewhat isolated, news about a product failing won’t spread very fast.
Because astronomical time and atomic time don’t always line up, every so often, we get a leap second. Earth’s spin speed can be a bit unpredictable. Atmospheric winds, Northern Hemisphere winters with heavy snow, and other big weather systems can affect how fast the planet rotates. To keep the difference between astronomical time and atomic time to less than .9 seconds, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service will occasionally announce the need for a leap second. Most people won’t notice a leap second, but they can be a huge pain for tech companies. Because leap seconds are added irregularly, developers have no way of working them into their codes, which has caused websites like LinkedIn and Reddit to crash in the past. A bug caused by 2012’s leap second created so much chaos on Qantas’s servers, more than 400 flights wound up being delayed.
Travelling back in time is possible—theoretically, at least. According to Einstein’s theory, you could travel back in time by moving faster than the speed of light, as long as you could somehow have infinite mass. Since that probably won’t work, you could create “wormholes” between two points in space-time. (This would also be tough since humanity still hasn’t invented the technology to build a wormhole.) Or you could try bending space-time by plucking some “cosmic strings.” Two of these theoretical strings, which are thin streams of pure energy that are moving in opposite directions at very near the speed of light, could theoretically warp space-time enough to create a closed time-like curve—also known as a time machine.
On 25th August 1991, 21-year-old Finnish computer science student Linus Torvalds announced that he was working on a new operating system which was ‘just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like GNU’.
60% of senior decision-makers still aren’t taking cybersecurity seriously (Keeper Security): A report by Keeper Security found around 60% of decision-makers in small to mid-sized companies place cybersecurity at the bottom of their list for things to invest in. Small businesses with less than 500 employees in particular are most likely to believe they won’t fall victim to a cyber-attack. Two out of three senior SMB leaders say cyber attacks are unlikely. Perhaps more worryingly, around one out of four senior leaders in this report said they have no idea where to get started with their cybersecurity measures.
No matter where you are in the UK, you won’t ever be more than 115 km away from the sea.
‘’…according to artificial intelligence expert Dr. David Levy, in a few generations, we won’t just be having sex with robots, we’ll be marrying them.” He predicted that human-robot marriages will be legal by the year 2050. – CBC Radio