It's important to remember that not all information found on the internet is true. Similarly, not everything that sounds fictional is necessarily fake. In fact, reality can sometimes be stranger than anything we can imagine. There are many bizarre aspects of life on Earth that are closer to truth than myth.
We’ve collected the most wonderfully weird facts that sound made up, but are actually true. Check them out by scrolling down! There is a good chance you will learn something new.
Related: 10 Surprising Facts That Sound Funny But Are True!
1. The color orange was originally called "geoluhread," which means "yellow-red" in Old English.
2. If you open your eyes in a completely dark room, the name of the color you will see is eigengrau, a kind of dark gray shade
3. The Vikings, who came from Scandinavia, used iron as their primary element for forging weaponry, but it was also common to mix in the bones of dead animals. It was thought that infusing the weapon with the creature's spirit would strengthen it. However, they ended up generating a primitive type of steel due to the carbon in the bones mingling with the iron, making the weapon stronger, just as they expected.
4. When basketball started out, every game featured a guy climbing a ladder to retrieve the ball after each basket. It took them almost 20 years to realize that cutting the bottom of the basket out would make recovering the ball much easier!
5. Bald eagles are not actually bald. Balde is old English for "white".
6. Redheads require more about 20 percent more anesthesia than non-redheads to be sedated.
7. There are 2.5 million ants for every human on the planet. Yes, there are around 20 quadrillion ants on this globe. They've been around for about 150 million years!
8. Strawberries are not actually berries, but bananas are. Botanically, a banana can be classified as both a fruit and a berry. Strawberries, according to the scientific definition, are not berries. In truth, they are not a fruit at all. Strawberry is a "false fruit," or pseudocarp, according to biologists. A strawberry is essentially a group of numerous tiny individual fruits embedded in a fleshy container.
9. The fear of long words is called "hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia".
10. New Mexico (the state) was named long before the current nation of Mexico (the country) gained independence from Spain and adopted the name in 1821.
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11. A coffee bean is not a bean, but rather the pit of the coffee plant, which is a fruit.
12. Pink is actually a pale shade of red, but we think of it as a separate color because we have a word for it. That is not true of all languages. In Italian, for instance, the word for light blue is "azzurro," and it's so common that people think of it as a separate color from blue. The word "azure" exists in English, but it isn't nearly as widespread, so we tend to think of that color as simply a tint of blue.
13. You can’t hum while holding your nose.
14. It is impossible to breathe and swallow at the same time. The epiglottis covers the glottis during swallowing, preventing food from entering the respiratory tract. As a result, when swallowing, your breathing stops.
15. Russia has a larger surface area than Pluto. Pluto has a total surface area of 16.7 million square kilometers. Russia has a land area of 17.1 million square kilometers.
16. Hippo milk is pink in color. This is due to the animal secreting two types of acid: hipposudoric acid and norhipposudoric acid. Norhipposudoric acid is orange in color, while hipposudoric acid is red. Both acids protect hippos from UV radiation and act as sunscreen. White milk from a breastfeeding hippo is blended with these two acids. As a result, it is pink.
17. At the time of the construction of The Great Pyramid, mammoths were still roaming the earth.
18. We take more pictures every two minutes than the entire human race did in the 1800s. In the 80 years leading up to the first commercial camera, just a few million photos were shot. Kodak reported in 1999 that we had taken around 80 billion photographs.
19. You have never seen your own face. You have only seen reflections or pictures of it.
20. The Eiffel Tower can be 15 cm taller during the summer. The hot weather in the summer causes the metal of the Eiffel Tower to gain heat and expand.
21. The world's longest place name is made up of 85 letters. It's Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu. With 85 characters, this 1,000-foot hill in the municipality of Porangahau holds the Guinness World Record for the longest place name.
