A weekly insight in to the world with 20 stunning facts.
Challenge your friends and family and see how many they get right (or not).
Adult cats are lactose intolerant
Cats Are Usually Lactose Intolerant. Lactose intolerance is a fact of life for most adult mammals. Baby animals have lactase in their intestines to digest their mother’s milk. But once they are weaned, lactase levels drop. This isn’t a problem in nature because adult animals would have no reason to drink milk.
There’s only one letter that doesn’t appear in any U.S. state name
Which one do you think it is?
Not one spelling of a US state has a… Q in it.
Scotland has 421 words for “snow”
Scotland has more than 400 words and expressions for snow, according to a project to compile a Scots thesaurus. Academics have officially logged 421 terms – including “snaw” (snow), “sneesl” (to begin to rain or snow) and “skelf” (a large snowflake).
Peanuts… aren’t technically nuts
If you want to get technical about it, peanuts are actually considered legumes. While real nuts grow on trees, peanuts grow in pods that mature underground; other types of legumes, such as lentils and peas, also grow beneath the surface. Additional nut frauds include cashews, walnuts, pistachios, and almonds. In actuality they are all seeds.
The longest English word is 189,819 letters long
The longest word in the English language (leaving literature to one side for a moment) is a staggering 189,819 letters long. Or rather, it is and it isn’t. The chemical formula for the protein otherwise known as titin runs to 189,819 letters, but whether this constitutes a ‘word’ is a moot point. An attempt to read it out would take about 3 hours.
Octopuses lay 56,000 eggs at a time
Octopuses lay 56,000 eggs at a time The mother spends six months so devoted to protecting the eggs that she doesn’t eat. The babies are the size of a grain of rice when they’re born.
Blue whales eat almost half a million calories in one mouthful
The filter-feeding strategy of blue whales, the largest animals on Earth, may explain their enormous size, according to a study that determined a single mouthful of food can contain 457,000 calories, or 240 times as much energy as they burn when grabbing that mouthful.
Only a quarter of the Sahara Desert is sandy
One of the most well known deserts in the world is not the largest (thats Antartica) and is NOT 100% sand. In fact, most of the Sahara is covered in gravel.
Dogs tell the time with their noses
Smells in a room change as the day goes on. Hot air rises, and it usually rises in currents along the walls and will rise to the ceiling and go kind of to the centre of the room and drop. If we were able to visualise the movement of air through the day, what we’re really visualising is the movement of odour through the day.
You only have two body parts that never stop growing
Those would be our noses, and ears and the main culprit is cartilage. Cartilage cells keep dividing with time making the tissue larger.
Is Pluto classed as a planet?
Pluto never made a full orbit around the Sun from the time it was discovered to when it was declassified as a planet.
Honey is a food that never goes bad
Honey is the only food that lasts forever, due to the handiwork of bees and it’s magical chemistry. The nectar from the flowers mixes with the enzymes inside the bees that extracted it, it changes the nectar’s composition, breaks it down into simple sugars that are deposited into honeycombs. Fanning action from the bees’ wings and the enzymes from their stomachs create a liquid that is both highly acidic and low in moisture—truly inhospitable digs for bacterial growth.
How much of you is a banana?
Many of the “housekeeping” genes that are necessary for basic cellular function, such as for replicating DNA, controlling the cell cycle, and helping cells divide are shared between many plants, Bananas included, they share up to 60% of the same DNA as humans.
There are more stars in the sky than there are grains of sand on every beach on Earth
What letter was missing from the novel ‘Gadsby’?
Back in 1939, American author Ernest Vincent Wright published Gadsby, a 50,000 word novel that doesn’t use the letter ‘e’ once. That’s astounding when you consider that ‘e’ is the most commonly used letter in the English language.
The invention of bubble wrap was a complete accident
Engineer Al Fielding and Swiss inventor Marc Chavannes tried to create a textured wallpaper in 1957 by trapping air between two shower curtains. They created bubble wrap, how irresistible it would be to have popping wallpaper.
Humans can swim through Blue Whales arteries
In order for blood to flow through the Blue whales magnificent body, it needs its massive arteries. They are so large a full size human could swim through them. The aorta alone measures in at over 9 inches
If you substituted Jupiter for the Moon this is what you would see
McDonalds have developed bubblegum flavoured broccoli
McDonald’s is always coming up with new ideas. Some are more successful than others. But their bubblegum flavoured broccoli, which the fast-food chain developed in 2014 as a tastier version of the leafy green for children, was a complete failure. McDonald’s CEO Don Thompson admitted that kids were confused by the taste.
How loud can you cheer?
At a Louisianna State University football game, the crowds cheered so loudly that it registered as an earthquake on a local seismograph.
See you next week.
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