Oh, I have two good ones:
-
Nuclear power causes less deaths per energy unit produced than wind. (source
-
You have slightly less radiation when living near a nuclear power plant, than living on an average place.
To explain the second: A major misconception is, that nuclear power plants are dangerous due to their radiation. No they aren't. The effect of radiation from the rocks in the ground and the surroundings is on average 50x more than what you get from the nuclear power plant and it's fuel cells. (source). Our body is very well capable of dealing with the constant background radiation all the time (e.g. DNA repairs). Near a power plant, the massive amounts of isolation and concrete will inhibit any background radiation coming from rocks from that direction to you. This means, that you'll actually get slightly less radiation, because the nuclear plant is there.
-
There are people still alive who remember a world before "splinter-free" toilet paper.
The manufacturing of this product had a long period of refinement, considering that as late as the 1930s, a selling point of the Northern Tissue company was that their toilet paper was "splinter free".
Your car keys have better range if you press them to your head, since your skull will act as an antenna. It sounds like some made up pseudoscience that would never work in practice or have a negligible effect, but it actually works.
Edit: idk if it's actually because your skull acts as an antenna, although that's what I've heard. I looked it up and it seems like it's your head acting as a reasonance chamber. Since your body is conductive, your head can bounce and amplify the radio signal.
A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus.
If you start to think about how these lengths of time are defined it becomes clearer.
1 day = time to rotate on it's axis once 1 year = time to complete a full rotation around the sun
For Earth, it takes us ~24hrs to rotate on our axis and 365.25 days to orbit the sun.
However, because Venus' axial rotation is so slow (and another interesting fact, it rotates in the opposite direction to other planets) it actually completes a full orbit of the sun before 1 axial rotation.
Hence, a year is shorter than a day
For those interested:
1 Venus day = 243 earth days 1 Venus year = 225 earth days
General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil, and Phillips Petroleum were convicted of an actual conspiracy related to the monopolization of transit systems, which replaced beloved streetcar (rail) systems with rubber-tired oil-burning buses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
That I cleaned the house (according to my fiance at least)
Russia is actually pretty small and it almost fits inside Africa. Try it out: https://www.thetruesize.com/
EDIT: Ok I expressed myself in the wrong way. What I meant was, Russia is not as big as I thought it was. Of course, it's still really huge.
Turtles can, in fact, breathe through their butts.
We might actually not know why magnets work.
The formula used to prove the functionality of magnets can also be used to prove the existence of a theoretical state called a monopolar magnet - positive or negative on both sides. So either monopolar magnets can exist, even if in some esoteric circumstance, or we don't know why magnets work.
There are four stanzas to the Star Spangled Banner (the US national anthem) and what you typically here at sporting events is only the first.
Bonus fun fact, the fourth stanza contains the line that, in the 1860s became the shorter, "In God We Trust," motto on coinage that eventually became the national motto of the US in the 1950s (which was also when it was added to paper money). That original line from the fourth stanza was, "And this be our motto - 'In God is our trust.'"
Moose are prey to Orca Whales.
The world's two largest cities by area are both on Greenland.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-city-rankings/largest-city-in-the-world-by-area
The word "alone" comes from a compound of "all" + "one".
I am quite old and responsible when I'm not here?
A fairly large amount of traditional Italian dishes aren't Italian. Many of these, such as carbonara, pizza, and tiramisu, were actually invented in the US, and only became known in Italy sometime in the mid-late 20th century.Edit: I've been corrected, these dishes do originate from Italy. I should've re-read the article instead of going off of memory.
Would be great to have sources for the less obvious answers.
Nikola Tesla loved a pigeon so much he spent todays rough equivalent of $34,970 on her happiness.
"I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life." Nikola Tesla (according to this biography)
The source for most of these are confounding statistics. My favorite being that a deck of cards can shuffle into such a vast number of options, more than grains of sand on earth.
Another good one I like is that there are about ten times more bacteria cells in your body than human cells. But they are so much smaller they are only about 5 pounds of your total mass.
Also one most people get wrong and makes me sad. The seasons on Earth are not caused by the rotation of the earth around the sun, nor it's elliptical orbit. They are caused by the tilt of the earth's axis and the time of year the Earth is closest to the Sun it is actually winter in the northern hemisphere.
