35 Facts About The World That Sound Totally Fake But Are 100% True

The world is an amazing place, and our minds love to figure out why things happen as they do. The quest for answers continues as many remain attentive to discoveries about how things work. For avid thinkers, get ready for another deep dive: we have an intriguing list of factoids to share today, covering nearly every subject imaginable. Whether it’s history, science, or the mysteries of the human psyche, this unusual list may sound unbelievable, but it is, in fact, 100% true. Redditors online shared their responses to the question, “What’s a fact about the world that sounds totally fake but is 100% true?” , and we’ve gathered the most fascinating answers in the gallery below.

#1

Clouds weigh millions of pounds on average.

#2

Cows have best friends and get stressed when they’re separated. Honestly more emotional intelligence than some people.

#3

T-Rex lived closer in time to the cell phone than it did to stegosaurus.

Sharks have been in the ocean on earth for longer than Saturn has had rings.

#4

Norway is separated from North Korea by one country: Russia.

#5

The number of vertebrae in a giraffe’s neck is the same as in a humans – 7.

#6

Magnolias are one of the oldest flowering plants, with a lineage that dates back over 95 million years to the age of the dinosaurs. At that time, bees had not yet evolved, so magnolias developed a pollination strategy that relied on beetles, which are still their primary pollinators today.

#7

It was 66 years between the wright brothers first flight and landing on the moon.

#8

The first BBC radio broadcast in a foreign language was a broadcast to Egypt in Arabic.

Air France used to be the aviation arm of the French postal service.

American Express used to deliver packages.

The Portuguese were the first European sailors to make contact with the Indians and the Japanese.

Speaking of the Portuguese, the Portuguese border is the oldest, unchanged border in Europe.

#9

Mushrooms absorb vit D so much that they can basically be a supplement.

#10

90% of the trash floating around the oceans of the world come from 10 rivers in Asia and Africa.

#11

We are closer in time to Shakespeare than he was to the time people spoke in Old English. Yet half the English teachers in the US tell kids “Shakespeare wrote in Old English.” Drives me insane.

#12

It once rained for 1 million years straight around 225 million years ago.

#13

Woolly mammoths were still around when the pyramids were built.

#14

Australia is wider than the moon. 🌙.

#15

Data Centers now consume about 5% of the world’s total energy .

#16

There’s water reservoirs located over 400 miles beneath the Earths surface that hold 3x more water than all of Earths oceans combined.

#17

There are, in fact, Native Antarcticans – 11 people were born there.

#18

Wood is one of the rarest things in the galaxy. Much rarer and more valuable than any precious gems or metals.

#19

All the ants 🐜 in the world weigh more than all the people in the world!

#20

The human body is estimated to contain more bacterial cells than human cells, with trillions of microorganisms living on and inside you.

#21

Moose can dive 20 feet deep to graze on the bottom of lakes.

#22

Of all the humans that have ever lived throughout history, about 7% are still alive.

#23

A bolt of lightning is hotter than the surface of the sun.

#24

Oxford University was founded 332 years BEFORE the founding of the Aztec Empire.

#25

The last civil war pension was paid in December of 2020.

Helen Viola Jackson, lived until December 16, 2020, to the age of 101. At 17, she married 93-year-old Union veteran James Bolin in 1936 during the Great Depression. Their marriage was arranged so she could receive his pension, a fact she kept secret for most of her life.

#26

There are three candidates for the tallest mountain on earth, depending on how you define the tallest.

• Highest elevation above sea level: Everest (Nepal/Tibet) at 8,848.86 m / 29,032 ft * Tallest from base to peak: Mauna Kea (Hawai`i) at 10,205 m / 33,481 ft * Tallest from earth’s centre to peak: Chimborazo (Ecuador) at 6,384.4 km (3,967.1 mi) vs Everest at 6,382.3 km (3,965.8 mi).

#27

Running your hand on stainless steel removed smells from your hands. Onions. Garlic. Metal rust. Try it!

#28

That octopuses have three hearts always blows my mind. Feels like something a kid would make up on the spot but nope, completely real. They’re just built different.

#29

Anne Frank and Martin Luther King, Jr were the same age.

#30

Less than 1% of the atoms that you were composed of at birth are still there at age 70.

#31

#32

A teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh about a billion tons.

#33

The earth is missing a giant mass of itself which – after divesting itself of this mass in a collision with another celestial object – became our moon.

#34

Whales share a common ancestor with wolves, thus are more closely related to wolves than other marine animals.

#35

Although exercise is necessary, we actually build muscle when resting, especially while sleeping.

Shanilou Perera

Shanilou has always loved reading and learning about the world we live in. While she enjoys fictional books and stories just as much, since childhood she was especially fascinated by encyclopaedias and strangely enough, self-help books. As a kid, she spent most of her time consuming as much knowledge as she could get her hands on and could always be found at the library. Now, she still enjoys finding out about all the amazing things that surround us in our day-to-day lives and is blessed to be able to write about them to share with the whole world as a profession.