Surprising Facts

Believe it or not, evey fact mentioned on this wiki is true. Pick one, add one, reenact one.

1. There are 170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ways to play the ten opening moves in a game of chess.

2. In 1939, Hollywood film companies produced an average of two motion pictures every day.

3. No one knows where Mozart is buried.

4. Battleships are always named after states, submarines after fish, cruisers after cities and destroyers after naval heroes.

5. Maine is the only state in the United States whose name has one syllable.

6. Lemon sharks grow a new set of teeth every two weeks, more than 24,000 new teeth a year.

7. The whale has the slowest metabolism of all animals, despite its great size.

8. Cats have no ability to taste sweet things.

9. A horse can sleep standing up.

10. A hippopotamus can run faster than a man.

11.Male monkeys lose the hair on their heads in the same way men do.

12. The bat is the only mammal that can fly.

13. Bricks are the oldest manufactured building materials still in use.

14. A person’s nose and ears continue to grow throughout his or her life.

15. It is impossible to sneeze and keep one’s eyes open at the same time.

16. It takes 17 muscles to smile, and 43 muscles to frown.

17. A peanut us not a nut. It is a legume.

18. Bamboo is not a tree. It is a wood grass.

19. The Caterpillar has more than 2,000 muscles.

20. The animal with the largest brain in proportion to its body size is the ant.

21. A quarter has 119 grooves on its circumference; a dime has one less.

22. America once issued a 5-cent bill.

23. One can see the stars during the day from the bottom of a well.

24. A skunk will not bite and throw its scent at the same time.

25. You can get 7.5 million toothpicks out of a cord of wood.

26. The only part of the human body that can’t repair itself is the tooth.

27. Chess is said to be the only game without an element of chance.

28. Never sneak up behind a platypus; that’s where its spurs and venom are.

29. No year can have more the three Friday-the-13ths.

30. Early football had no halves, no quarters. Players just took breaks after every score.

31. A bowling ball outweighs a ping pong ball by 2800 to 1.

32. Twenty-two out of twenty-five people put their right shoe on first.

33. Hearts of astronauts get smaller in outer space.

34. There are 31,557,600 seconds in a year.

35. A flamingo eats with its head upside down.

36. The President and Vice President of the United States aren’t permitted to travel together.

37. A donkey can swallow five gallons of water in two minutes.

38. Melt the ice of Antarctica and half the world’s population would be forced to move up from flooded coastlines.

39. July is the month when the fewest people catch cold.

40. A cockroach spends more time cleaning itself than does a typical cat.

41. Do Penguins Have Knees?

42. No one can figure out why the vast majority of cowboy hats have dents on them.

43. If baseball dugouts were built any higher, the sight lines in back of the dugout would be blocked.

44. Different varieties of watermelons have an array of different colored seeds.

45. Water towers provide a reservoir that can meet short-term needs during periods of high water use.

46. The lowest-ranked admiral (in what?!) is called a Rear Admiral.

47. The French horn is designed for left-handers.

48. Until 1900, home plate was square like all the other bases.

49. Cat hairs tend to stick to our clothes more than a dog’s or other pets’.

50. Fish float upside down when they die.

51. Earth spins along at 1,000 mph at the equator.

52. A patch of quicksand isn’t really a bottomless pit. The average “pit” is only a few inches to a few feet deep.

53. Some clouds glow in the dark; they reflect light from the Sun even when is it far below the horizon.

54. When Humpback Whales sing, they can be heard by other whales from 100 miles away.

55. The animal with the longest tail is the male giraffe. It can grow up to eight feet.

56. Micropachycephalosaurus, the dinosaur with the longest name, was one of the smallest dinosaurs.

57. Scratching stimulates itch nerves to fire more and more, making you even itchier.

58. Some snores can reach 80 decibels, as noisy as a jackhammer breaking up cement on a sidewalk.

59. At this very moment, radio waves are invisibly penetrating the walls of your room and zinging through you.

60. A chameleon’s tongue is as long as its body.

61. The flea is the world champion high jumper.

62. An anteater has neither teeth nor a jaw.

63. The llama spits when angry.

64. Some turtles live for more than 200 years.

65. A seal can swim steadily for eight months.

66. Kangaroos can’t walk, but they can travel at 40 miles an hour.

67. Most clocks and watches in advertisements are often set for 10:10.

68. If you touched your tongue to a metal flagpole in the middle of the winter it would stick.

69. Fog is simply a cloud at ground level.

70. The bald eagle, America’s national bird and the only eagle native to North America, is not bald.

71. Bananas do not grow on trees; they grow on very large herbs.

72. Contrary to popular belief, bears do not hibernate.

73. Coffee beans are not beans at all; but actually the seeds, or pits, of red, cherry like fruit.

74. Dogs in the wild seldom, if ever bark; only those who have come into contact with humans or other domesticated dogs will bark.

75. The spot on the elbow known as funny bone, that when bumped produces the familiar twinge up the arm, is not a bone at all.

76. A dimpled golf ball travels fast and farther than a perfectly smooth ball of the same size.

77. Hollywood is not a city in California, but only a district within Los Angeles.  

78. A mirage is an optical illusion created by the bending of light rays from difference in atmospheric density and temperatures.

79. Oranges are not always orange, depending on the time of the year and weather; they can be green, yellow, or orange.

80. Contrary to popular belief, the panda is not a bear.

81. Peanut butter was invented by St. Louis physician Ambose Straub, who was concerned about the nutrition of his elderly, toothless patients.

82. The flavor we think of as bubble gum is a combination of wintergreen, vanilla, and cassia.

83. Wedding cake was originally thrown at the bride and groom, instead of eaten by them.

84. The paper used to make money is composed of linen and several types of cotton, including denim-which gives its unique fabric like feel and durability.

85. A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.

86. Cats have two sets of vocal cords.

87. The Venus flytrap feeds primarily on ants, not flies.

88. The number of cricket’s chirps you count in a fifteen-second interval, plus thirty-seven, will tell you the current air temperature.

89. No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.

90. “Stewardesses” is the longest word that is typed using only the left hand.

91. The fifty-two playing cards in a typical deck represent the fifty-two weeks in a year; the four suits represent the four seasons.