Random why facts

The dating app is popular across the globe, but it didn't have a connection on the least-inhabited continent until , when a pair of research scientists—a man working at Antarctica's McMurdo Station and a woman camping a minute helicopter ride away—found they had matched.

And for more fun content delivered straight to your inbox, sign up for our daily newsletter. If you enjoy wasabi with your sushi, you'd probably be surprised to learn that most of the wasabi we consume in the U. The wasabi you're eating? That's white horseradish mixed with ground mustard seeds and green dye. Earhart, who was wearing a white silk gown, piloted the plane for most of the flight.

The Dr. Seuss classic grew out of a bet with his editor that he could not create a book using fewer than 50 different words. Louboutin shoes are known as much for their high price as for their red soles, but what many don't know is that the color was inspired by Andy Warhol.

According to The New Yorker , Warhol's drawing Flowers caught Christian Louboutin's eye and gave him the idea—with the aid of an assistant's red nail polish—to add the color to the bottom of the kicks.

Black sapote has another irresistible name: the chocolate pudding fruit. According to Good Morning America , the fruit—native to Central and South America— tastes like sweet custard with a hint of chocolate. When it's fully ripe, the flavor and consistency has been described as a dead ringer for chocolate pudding. Drinking too much water can be deadly.

When guzzling a lot of liquid, you can suffer from water intoxication or hyponatremia, which occurs after an obscene amount of water is consumed, often during endurance events when participants are also losing sodium through their sweat. There have been many notable cases, including the Boston Marathon competitor Cynthia Lucero , who died from overhydration. To give you a sense of how hot that is: The interior of our sun is only about 15 million degrees kelvin.

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories produced the record-breaking temperature in their lab using a superheated gas, equal to about 3. Every one hundred years, the moon adds approximately 1. While this may be minuscule, it does add up: When dinosaurs roamed the planet, days were 23 hours long , according to NASA. As the The New York Times reports, water on our planet may have originated from ice specks floating in a cosmic cloud 4. Not impressed? It follows that "the same liquid we drink and that fills the oceans may be millions of years older than the solar system itself.

Yes, the queen is actually quite handy. When she was 16, she joined the British employment agency the Labour Exchange, where she learned the basics of truck repair , including how to change a tire and repair engines. Nowadays, she has others who can do such things for her, but isn't it nice to know that if one of her cars broke down, she might be able to get it up and running?

Perhaps that early understanding of automobiles inspired Queen Elizabeth II's lifelong love of cars. To keep their whiskey stills from being spotted, moonshiners during prohibition would often wear "cow shoes," with wooden blocks attached to the bottoms to make their footprints resemble a cow's.

At least, according to some studies. Engineering students from Purdue University designed a licking machine—built to function like a real human tongue—and found that it took an average of licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. For what it's worth, 20 volunteers tried the experiment using their actual tongues and averaged licks.

Honestly, just bite it. You probably already know that tree rings can tell you how old a tree is. However, even non-redheads can carry the red hair gene , and it can pop up unexpectedly in generations down the line. While there are currently no female players in Major League Baseball, there have been plenty of women in professional men's leagues.

The first was Lizzy Arlington , who pitched during the ninth inning for the Reading Coal Heavers in and won her team the game. A little over 30 years later, an African-American woman, Jackie Mitchell , pitched against the Yankees during an exhibition game, striking out both Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. What's more impressive: Mitchell was 17 years old at the time. Chimpanzees and gorillas have human-like fingerprints and so do koalas. In fact, koala prints are very similar to human fingerprints, even to expert crime scene investigators.

As of yet, no koalas have framed humans for their crimes, but now we know it's not impossible…. Human beings may dominate the planet with our sprawling cities and far-reaching technology, but we are, in fact, just one species among some 8. One study published in the journal PLoS Biology estimated that "the various forms of life on the planet included 7. After multiple people reported they had passed a kidney stone while riding Walt Disney World's Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride, a research team from Michigan State University decided to investigate the phenomena in They conducted tests with a model kidney and found that there was a 64 percent kidney stone pass rate for those seated in the rear of the Thunder Mountain ride.

That number was just 16 percent for those seated in the front. Back in their day, dinosaurs lived on every continent on Earth, including Antarctica. The reason we only find their bones in certain places , though, is that weather and soil conditions in those places were just right for the bones to be fossilized.

Scientists also speculate that there may be many smaller-sized dinosaurs that we know nothing about because their bones were too small to fossilize well. Hummingbirds are known for being itty-bitty creatures , but Bee Hummingbirds are the teeniest versions of these shockingly tiny flyers.

They're actually the smallest bird in the world. They are so minuscule that they are sometimes mistaken for insects which explains their name , according to the National Audobon Society.

The birds are just two and a quarter inches long and weigh less than a dime. There are only two mammals on Earth with the proven ability to move their bodies in time with an external beat: humans though not all humans, to be fair and sea lions. When researchers at the University of Santa Cruz rescued a stranded sea lion in , they found that she was very smart, and she was even able to learn how to dance.

Though parrots can also keep a rhythm, it was previously thought that only animals capable of complex vocal learning could do this. However, even if you have that kind of dough lying around, you won't be able to buy it—only one was made, and it was custom-built from the ground up according to the buyer's specifications. Though she had no symptoms of typhoid fever, she carried the bacteria in her blood and could pass it on to other people.

Because no doctor could convince her that this was true and she didn't feel sick, she insisted on working as a cook. During her career, she infected at least 51 people, three of whom died, before she was isolated in enforced quarantine for the last decades of her life. There's a tale written in the year A. While there, Saint Columba heard stories of a "water beast" that attacked and killed the local people when they went in the river.

Wanting to help, the monk used his friend as bait to lure the beast into sight, at which point Columba commanded it to "go no further," and the creature stopped and swam back upstream. A little dash of nutmeg in a pumpkin pie or on your egg nog can give it some extra flavor and a lovely, spicy scent. Too much nutmeg, however, can be toxic. Two to three teaspoons of raw nutmeg can induce hallucinations, convulsions, pain, nausea, and paranoia that can last for several days.

Actual fatalities are rare, but they have happened. You've heard of police dogs, but police geese? As of , 12 police stations in a rural area of China have begun to use geese as sentries. They are alert animals and, as you probably know, can create a lot of noise and commotion, which creative Chinese law enforcement officers are taking advantage of.

While this trend has yet to spread throughout China, Dongwan police claim that the geese have already stopped at least one theft. The first mobile device to be called an "iPhone" was made by Cisco , not Apple.

It allowed the user to use the voice functions of Skype without a computer. Apple announced its own product just 22 days later, and Cisco sued for trademark infringement. The lawsuit was ultimately settled out of court and both companies were allowed to keep using the name.

However, you've probably never heard of the Cisco iPhone. Benin, a country in central Africa, is notable for having the highest birth rate of twins in the world. While the world average is just 13 twins per 1, births , Benin more than doubles that rate, at nearly 30 twins per 1, births. There's no single factor that causes this, but genetics, diet, and even the mother's height are thought to play a role. Most adults nowadays who know anything about graphic design steer away from using the Comic Sans font in formal documents.

The font was designed by Vincent Connare , who drew direct inspiration from his favorite comic books, including Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons ' celebrated Watchmen series. Almost nothing is known about Sandy Island , a land mass about the size of Manhattan in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Australia.

Supposedly, explorer James Cook discovered it in , and it began appearing on nautical maps in It wasn't until , when a team of Australian scientists set out to survey the island, that they discovered there was no island there at all. The scientists guessed that Cook may have in fact spotted a "pumice raft" of floating volcanic stone and gas.

Babies, particularly newborns, are surprisingly different from the children they'll grow up to be. When they're born, their heads account for a quarter of their full body weight , and the size of their brains will double in the first year of life. Babies have bones and around 10, tastebuds all over their mouth. Some of the bones will fuse as they age into , as an adult , but the tastebuds not on the tongue will eventually vanish.

Since the early 13th century, the city of London has officially paid rent to the Crown for two small pieces of property. Fortunately for the city, the price has stayed the same for more than years: one knife, one ax, six horseshoes, and 61 nails, presented every autumn in the Ceremony of Quit Rents.

Although one of these properties is located in the Moors in Shropshire and the other is near the Royal Courts of Justice in the city itself, no one knows the exact location of the Queen's land. Bram Stoker was an Irish author who is now best remembered for his gothic horror novel Dracula. Partially set in Transylvania, a mountainous region in central Romania, the story cemented the legend of the vampire in mainstream European and American culture.

Despite Stoker's many world travels, he never visited Eastern Europe —and, by virtue, Transylvania—at all. There are probably slang or informal words that get on your nerves from time to time, particularly when you think something should be taken seriously. In , Australian Parliament took a few citizen complaints a little too seriously and banned anyone on their staff from using the word "mate" while at work.

Fortunately, Prime Minister John Howard objected, claiming that "mate" was an important part of Australian culture, and the ban was overturned within 24 hours. English, Portuguese, Latvian, Pashto, and Greek all sound very different today, but these languages all have a common ancestor called Proto-Indo-European.

Though we don't have any written examples of it, linguists have worked backwards from a variety of modern languages to try to reconstruct it. Plenty of people have food allergies, but few are the result of an insect bite.

In a strange and growing trend, some people who get bitten by the Lone Star tick can develop a sudden allergy to red meat. Beef, lamb, and pork which are technically classified as red meat can make people with this allergy experience headaches, sneezing, a runny nose, and nausea. In severe cases, it can cause the person to be unable to breathe. For some sufferers, the allergy fades over time, but for others, it's permanent. You probably know that Harriet Tubman was a former slave who became a political activist for the abolition movement.

But in addition to smuggling escaped slaves through the Underground Railroad, during the Civil War she was the first woman to lead an armed assault. She planned and executed a number of raids and was known to carry a revolver for personal protection. Tornadoes can develop over water just as well as they can over land. When they do, they're called "waterspouts," and they suck up large amounts of lake or sea water—as well as whatever's swimming in that water. If the waterspout travels on to the land and the winds decrease, there's nowhere for those fish to go but down.

As far as we know, there's no tornado powerful enough to pick up sharks, but a fish-nado is entirely possible. Napoleon Bonaparte was once one of the most powerful men in Europe, but he suffered an ignominious defeat at the hands or paws of rabbits. After a military victory, Napoleon's chief of staff organized a rabbit hunt to celebrate. Thousands of rabbits were brought in to be set loose, but instead of hopping away when the cages were opened, they turned to attack, swarming the partygoers.

After trying and failing to shoo them away, the great Emperor Napoleon ran for the safety of his carriage. As a commissioned lieutenant, he led his troop up a mine-strewn Juno Beach as part of the Allied Forces' D-Day invasion. Later in the day, he was wounded by friendly fire that caused the amputation of the middle finger on his right hand.

You might not have noticed it because, during his time on Star Trek , directors did the best they could to avoid showing the injury on screen. Apples originally come from Asia. The first pies were baked in Medieval Europe. Even the concept of putting apples in pie traces back to a recipe from England in Nevertheless, the phrase " as American as apple pie " turned up by and became a common saying during the years of the Second World War.

First written in , the Constitution of the state of Florida guarantees the right to privacy, the freedom of speech, and the right of pregnant pigs to be free from cages. Unlike many crazy or outdated laws , this amendment is recent passed in and comes from a well-meaning place: the prevention of cruelty to animals. During pregnancy, a pig must not be caged or even tethered such that it can't turn around freely.

Japan's record breaker for most records broken is Cherry Yoshitake , a children's entertainer who goes by " Mr. Cherry set one-minute records for the most pairs of underwear pulled on 36 , the most baked beans eaten 71 , and the most apples bobbed You might notice that any sweat you produce right after a shower doesn't smell so bad. That's because your sweat itself isn't stinky ; it's the bacteria on your skin that breaks the sweat down that causes the odor.

Additionally, you'll find that the sweat on your arms and legs doesn't smell as much as your armpits. That's because sweat glands in your armpits secrete more protein into a dark, damp environment—the perfect place and food for bacteria. Saturn and Jupiter are gas giant planets that produce a truly unique form of weather. Recently, scientists discovered that there is plenty of carbon in these atmospheres. When carbon soot gets hit by lightning, it hardens into graphite and falls downward, where the pressure of the atmosphere hardens it further, until it becomes… a diamond!

Storms on these planets may literally rain diamonds as big as a centimeter across. Greenland Sharks are known to be some of the oldest living animals in our world. Researchers did carbon dating on a Greenland Shark that was caught in and found it to be around years old. Further testing revealed that our fishy friends could be up to years old. Yes, that would mean that our geriatric friends would have been alive when Leonardo Da Vinci painted the "Mona Lisa.

If you've ever been accused of "living under a rock," you'll feel right at home in Setenil de Las Bodegas in Spain. Many of this tiny town's 3, residents live and work and play in a gorge beneath a huge rocky outcropping, where homes are built right into the rock. It provides so much shelter that historians think this area has been occupied by human settlements since the Stone Age.

This law put Connecticut Librarians in quite the pickle. The law actually arose as a legend and the people demanded the truth. For hours, librarians in the state scanned past archives of laws within the state until one librarian eventually found the truth in the Hartford Courant. The law was in fact an ordinance that was created in to thwart pickle packers Moses Dexler and Sidney Sparer. These two men were selling inedible pickles , so laboratories conducted experiments and found that if it doesn't bounce, don't eat an ounce!

It has been thought to seemingly swallow up ships and aircrafts. Explorers as far back as Christopher Columbus have reported odd occurrences, like fireballs in the sky that turned out to be a meteor crashing. But historians, scientists, and the U. Coast Guard have proven that vessels are no more likely to disappear in the Bermuda Triangle than they are anywhere else in the ocean. Many prior disappearances have been demystified as remains of numerous wrecks were discovered or explained by weather patterns in the area at that time.

This is one world record you may not want to try and top. A car traveling 70 miles per hour struck Matthew McKnight , an off-duty paramedic, when he stopped to help out with an accident on the side of an interstate in He was thrown feet, almost half a football field.

Brader was so impressed by the feat that he sent in the paperwork anyways , which was approved in , but didn't make the cut until its edition. Clocking in at mph , we can sneeze faster than cheetahs run, four-and-a-half times faster than Usain Bolt 's record, and 20 times faster than Michael Phelps.

Unfortunately, we also expel about , germs when we sneeze. The fire hydrant patent is credited to Frederick Graff Sr. Unfortunately for Graff Sr. After years, retired firefighter George Sigelakis reinvented the hydrant after they had been failing to work in too many critical emergencies. Saudi Arabia is known for its vast expanse of desert, so it may seem unbelievable that they rely on Australia to supply them with animals that dominate their landscape.

Australia originally had camels imported to be used for transporting heavy loads or for riding. They were let loose when their work was done, causing an unwanted spike in their population. Australians then sold the camels back to desert-based countries like Saudi Arabia, which use camels at a much higher volume. Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived both nuclear attacks to Japan when the U.

Yamaguchi, sent to Hiroshima on business on August 6th, , saw the U. Miraculously, he survived with burns across his face and arms, but made it home to Nagasaki. Three days later, the second atomic bomb hit, flattening Yamaguchi's home. Because his family was out finding ointments to treat his already existent burns, they were safe in a tunnel and miraculously survived as well. When the show came to an end, the cast of the popular TV show Friends negotiated syndication rights for themselves.

That means they receive a percentage of the revenue two percent from reruns airing across all broadcasting companies. Pluto was discovered on February 18th, It is the farthest dwarf planet from the Sun, requiring it to go a much farther distance than we are used to on Earth.

It takes Earth-years for Pluto to complete one rotation of its own around the sun. This places Pluto's first birthday since its discovery on Monday, March 23, While sharks account for about 53 bites per year, only one of those ends up being fatal. Cows, on the other hand or hoof , kill around 20 people per year. This belief is only a half truth, as babies actually technically do have kneecaps when they are born.

Those knees just aren't hardened yet, and remain soft cartilage throughout their childhood until they eventually turn into bone. You might not want to bring up the popular video game Frogger in Germany. There, they like to protect their frogs , toads, and other amphibians.

In order to save them from harm when crossing the street, conservation organizations installed more than fences along popular roadways. Along these fences are buckets, so when they try to cross, they eventually hop into one. At the end of the day, wildlife conservationists collect the buckets and release frogs across the road into a nearby forest with ponds and lakes.

Cheetahs can't roar , but they can purr, meow, hiss, bark, and growl instead. This type of behavior is much like the domestic cats we keep in our homes. The country with the widest stretch of land, Russia, spans 11 different time zones. France, though, technically has the most, clocking in at 12—but that's due to the fact that its territories are dispersed in various parts of the world.

The U. So, Russia is the only place in the world where one citizen could be waking up at a. We've seen the heartwarming videos of dogs nursing baby squirrels back to health—and that's actually much more common than we think.

It becomes mutually beneficial to have more furry friends in the group to take on other roles in survival—whether that be hunting, gathering, or just simply cute companionship. Though the phenomenon isn't completely understood, it's clear that both humans and animals have an instinct to care for others. The rapper decided it would make sense to have her featured on the song, so he included a clip of her crying before the track ends. Because her dad officially credited her in the song's title, she became the youngest person ever to have a Billboard hit —at a mere two days old.

Dogs have been known for the longest time as man's best friend, but Americans are increasingly taking that to a new level. A study from Rover. The study also found that 94 percent of dog owners consider their dogs to be a part of their family, and 78 percent include their pups in major family moments.

Since one in four people said they bring their cuddly companions on first dates, maybe consider bringing dog treats instead of flowers next time. The Greeks had it right with Prometheus, it turns out. According to Greek mythology, the titan was punished by having an eagle eat his liver day after day.

The liver would regrow at night, leaving Prometheus at the bird's mercy. It turns out, the regenerative properties of this story are partially true: Doctors have found that the liver can regrow in three weeks, not one day. In the early 20th century, those who resided in North Frisia under Prussian rule were not allowed to raise the Danish flag. But some crafty North Frisians took action by breeding a pig, known as the Danish Protest Pig , to be red in color, with a large white stripe around its belly—thus creating an animal version of the flag.

As they technically did not break the law, and because it wouldn't have been feasible to ban the breeding of pigs, the Danes successfully protested Prussia. Chau Smith was always an avid runner, and, in , she decided that for her 70th birthday, she would complete seven marathons in one week across all of the continents. Traveling made it challenging—for example, Smith made the race in Egypt just minutes before the start because her plane to Cairo was delayed. But despite the obstacles, she completed her goal.

Ever wonder why your little puppy obsesses over those squeaky toys? Because dogs are descendants of wolves whose instincts include hunting smaller animals. The sound a squeaky toy makes is very similar to the sound a small animal makes when being hunted.

When Ol' Lassie hears that, she gets excited because of these killer survival skills. In , Nolan Bushnell started the gaming company Atari, which gave us the classic arcade game Pong. Bushnell sold the company just four years later and the following year, he opened Chuck E. In fact, there is one game in Chuck E.

Cheese that actually is called Ping , a knockoff of his original arcade game, which he couldn't use since he no longer owned it. In , year-old Angus Barbieri , who weighed pounds, was put on a fasting program. It wouldn't be ethical to conduct a study like this today, but at the time, things were different, allowing Barbieri's doctor, William Stewart , to experiment. On a strict regimen of multivitamins and minerals, Barbieri got his nutrients without eating a scrap of food, which resulted in nearly two months of constipation.

By the end of the year, Barbieri was pounds. Note: Fasting to this degree is not recommended, as it can lead to serious health conditions. Searching through public Facebook data , Lee Byron and David McCandless found that relationships statuses changed for the worse two weeks before Christmas, around Easter, and on Mondays. Though this data may be somewhat misleading, as people might not be live-updating their breakups, it shows an obvious trend.

Thomas Hargrove has been archiving homicides for years through his Murder Accountability Project. Through his experience, he came up with an algorithm that found patterns in recent unsolved murders linked to at least one other murder through DNA.

This allowed him to estimate the number of unsolved cases in the U. According to The New Yorker , he believes that the number of active serial killers in the U. Upon going deaf, Beethoven discovered that if he bit onto a metal pole that connected to the piano he was playing, he could hear almost perfectly well.

This process is called bone conduction , and while technology has evolved, the science is the same: Vibrations are transferred from the conductive metal into our bones. The place that has more caves than any other way on earth? Surprising, right? The Sahara Desert can reach up to degrees. Australia is wider than the moon. Vatican City is actually the smallest country in the world. There are more people in California than Canada. The closest state in the United States to Africa is Maine.

Russia has more surface area than Pluto. The heart of a shrimp is located in its head. Weird, yet kind of cool. Slugs have not one, not two, not three It takes a sloth two weeks to digest food. Just like human babies suck their thumbs, baby elephants sometimes suck on their trunks. Crows can recognize human faces — and remember them for their entire lives. There is only one country on earth without mosquitoes: Iceland. The name of a group of lemurs is wait for it a "conspiracy. Believe it or not, wombats' poop is cube-shaped.

A little gross, but also kind of funny: Lobsters pee out of their faces. Ready to have your mind blown? A blind chameleon can still adjust to the colors of its environment. The way it changes colors is because of its special cells, not eyesight. Freddie Mercury has a pretty memorable smile. But did you know it's because he had four extra teeth in his upper jaw?

Clocking in at 1, words, "Rap God" by Eminem is the song with the most words. The world's longest concert lasted hours.

All clownfish are born male. That explains Marlin and Nemo. A group of porcupines is called a prickle. How fitting. Abraham Lincoln was a successful competitive wrestler. Finland has more saunas than cars. Sounds like a pretty great place. Gatorade was invented at the University of Florida , named after the mascot of the school, the Gators.

Volleyball and basketball were invented in Massachusetts. The heaviest onion ever grown was 17 pounds. Contrary to what you might think, Canada eats more macaroni and cheese than any other place. If you play tennis at Wimbledon, swearing is not allowed. Therefore, judges have to learn swearwords in different languages. Mushrooms can glow in the dark. In fact, there are more than 70 varieties of mushrooms that do this.

The official sport of Maryland is jousting. According to the Guinness World Records, the world's heaviest watermelon weighed pounds!