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.
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Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Can't You Tickle Yourself?
The same finger that makes a friend squeal does nothing at all on your own ribs, because a part of your brain reads the script before the tickle arrives.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Tardigrades Spent Ten Days in Open Space and Lived
Three thousand microscopic animals were bolted to the outside of a spacecraft, the lids were opened, and most of them came back perfectly fine.
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
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.
Fiction Animal News — Fiction
Bees Vote to Keep the Hive Exactly as Warm as It Was
After a full day of consultation involving every worker in the colony, the hive has resolved to maintain thirty-five degrees, as it has every year since the hive existed.
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.