Fact-based Weird Facts
Koalas Have Fingerprints Almost Identical to Ours
Under a microscope a koala's fingertip carries the same loops and whorls a human one does, close enough that specialists have struggled to tell the two apart.
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Weird Facts
Odd but true trivia that lives rent-free in your head.
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Fact-based Weird Facts
The Shrimp Whose Punch Boils the Water
The mantis shrimp swings its club so fast that the water in front of it boils into bubbles, and their collapse adds extra damage and tiny flashes of light.
Fact-based Weird Facts
A Day Was Half an Hour Shorter When Dinosaurs Were Alive
A 70-million-year-old fossil shell shows that a day then lasted about 23 and a half hours, and a year held 372 of them.
Fact-based Weird Facts
The Dot on an i Is Called a Tittle
The dot over a lowercase i or j has its own name, it began as a handwriting helper in medieval manuscripts, and it may be hiding inside the phrase to a T.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Are Trees Really Plumbed Into Each Other by Fungi?
Fungi really do live on tree roots and help trees grow. Whether they link whole forests into a sharing network is far less certain than the popular story says.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Cats Cannot Taste Sweetness
A gene cats need to build a sweet taste receptor is broken, so the cake your cat is sniffing does not taste sweet to it at all.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Snow Falls in the Sahara
At the desert's edge in Algeria, snow has settled on the dunes more than once, and NASA satellites have photographed it from space.
Fact-based Weird Facts
A Jiffy Is a Real Unit of Time
The word you use for hurry up is also a genuine technical term, and depending on who is using it, a jiffy lasts anything from a fiftieth of a second to a few trillionths of one.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Cows Have Best Friends
Cows build preferred relationships, groom the herd-mates who groomed them, and calves raised with a companion do better at learning.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Butterflies Taste With Their Feet
A butterfly landing on a leaf is not resting — it is drumming the surface with its front legs to find out what the leaf is, because it has taste receptors in its feet.