Fact-based How It Started
Your Pencil Has Never Had Any Lead in It
The grey core of a pencil is graphite, a soft form of carbon, and the lead in its name comes from a mix-up on an English hillside more than 450 years ago.
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Fact-based Weird Facts
Chameleons Change Colour to Send Messages, Not Just to Hide
A chameleon is not a living copy machine for whatever it sits on: its most dazzling colour changes are messages to other chameleons, made with tiny crystals in its skin.
Fact-based Weird Facts
A Fluffy White Cloud Weighs About as Much as a Hundred Elephants
The small cumulus drifting over your garden is carrying roughly five hundred tonnes of water, and it stays up there for a reason that has nothing to do with being light.
Fact-based Kitchen Science
Stale Bread Is Not Dry Bread, and the Fridge Makes It Worse
A loaf sealed so tightly that not a drop of water can escape will still go stale, because staling is the starch quietly rearranging itself rather than the bread drying out.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Hippos Make Their Own Sunscreen
A hippo climbing out of a river shines orange-red in the sun, and that glossy coat is a sunscreen it makes in its own skin, one that keeps germs away as well.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Goldfish Do Not Have a Three-Second Memory
The famously forgetful goldfish can remember things for months, learn to press a lever for food, work out what time dinner is served and tell its owner apart from other people.
Fact-based Weird Facts
You Cannot See the Great Wall of China From the Moon
It is one of the most repeated facts in the world, and it is wrong: from the Moon the wall is invisible, and even from orbit it is so hard to spot that astronauts argue about it.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does the Moon Look Bigger Near the Horizon?
A rising full moon can look enormous, yet a camera shows it is no wider than when it rides high in the sky, which means the giant moon is being built inside your head.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Flamingos Are Not Born Pink
A baby flamingo hatches fluffy and pale grey, and it only turns that famous pink because of what it eats, a colour its parents can lose again while feeding it.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Lightning Does Strike the Same Place Twice
The old saying is wrong: tall, pointy, isolated things are struck again and again, and New York's Empire State Building takes an average of 23 hits a year.