50 Incredibly Weird & Wonderful Facts
If you have some spare time and a love of facts, this is the list for you. From animals to gaming, these 50 weird & wonderful facts span some of the most unique topics, and if you aren’t amazed by some of these, I’ve truly failed!
- In total for the ‘The Lego Movie‘, 3,863,484 unique Lego bricks were used. 15,080,330 Lego pieces would be needed to recreate the movie with 183 different types of Lego minifigures.
- The Rancor from smash-hit movie saga Star Wars was based on a cross between a bear and a potato.
- The smallest thing ever photographed is the shadow of an atom. A team at Griffiths University used used a super high-resolution microscope to capture the image.
- Out of the millions of creatures on Earth, humans are only 1 of 3 species capable of laughter, the other 2 being chimpanzees and rats.
- In Sweden, every time a Blood donor’s blood is used to save a life a text message is sent to them.
- Humans can hear the difference between hot and cold water being poured, this is apparently vital for advertising purposes. Cold water doesn’t sell tea I suppose.
- In over 35 British divorce cases in 2012 alone, the video game ‘Football Manager‘ was cited.
- Pantheism is belief that God did not create the universe, but rather the universe is God.
- How many times can you fold a piece of paper? 7? Well the Myth-busters managed to reach 11 folds after using a “football field” sized piece of paper, busting this myth.
- Stephen Hawking once threw a party for time-travelers on June 28, 2009 but he only announced the party the next day. No one showed up.
- Astronaut Ice Cream, a freeze-dried staple in any self-respecting space museum’s gift shop, has never been taken into space. Although commissioned for NASA it never made any journeys.
- As part of a contract, J.K. Rowling (the author of the Harry Potter series) can go to Universal Studios and if anything is deemed incorrect, inaccurate, or she doesn’t like it she can get it changed.
- Albert Einstein was married to his distant cousin; Elsa Einstein.
- A single ant can live up to 29 years.
- The Galop Infernal, composed for an opera as a soundtrack to a man descending into hell, is better known as the “Can-Can” song.
- A Mumbai thief was force-fed 48 bananas after being caught stealing a gold chain, the police ordered in the 48 piece basket and waited until the criminal could excrete the chain.
- The Roman Emperor Caracalla slaughtered 20,000 Egyptians after they made a play mocking him.
- The television smash-hit Breaking Bad was originally turned down by HBO, Showtime and FX.
- The late Steve Irwin and his whole film crew stopped filming in 2003 to aid in a 2 day search and rescue of missing divers.
- In six hours, the world’s deserts receive more energy from the sun than humans consume in a year.
- In 1672, a Prime Minister was consumed by an angry Dutch mob.
- If abandoned, squirrels will adopt other squirrel’s babies.
- Rabbits, apart from the blind sport in front of their nose, have nearly 360° panoramic vision to allow them to detect predators from all directions.
- One man, Drew Struzan, created all the original movie posters for so many hit movies including Blade Runner, Back to the Future, Indiana Jones, Coming to America, Rambo, Harry Potter and E.T.
- The people of Sweden love Donald Duck so much, they had to make voting for him illegal.
- Disney threatened legal action if three daycare centers didn’t remove artwork of Donald, Mickey and Goofy in 1989.
- Diarrhea kills more children than AIDS, malaria, and measles combined with a grand total of 2,195 children every day or 760,000 children a year. With all these deaths, you’d assume it’s a very difficult disease to control but no, a drastic proportion could be controlled through sanitation and hygiene.
- Hitler’s brother; Patrick William Hitler, lived in Liverpool. Patrick’s son later joined the US army during WW2.
- If an object, such as stars or comets, goes to close to a black hole it will be stretched like a membrane, this is known as ‘spaghettification’.
- Dinosaur feathers have been discovered preserved in amber. The feathers back-up a theory that dinosaurs had feathers very similar to birds today, at least in regard to color and transparency.
- The octopus is a very intelligent animal. They have been known to sneak onto fishing boats and even open the holds to eat the bait crabs.
- The female spotted hyena has the largest clitoris, or ‘pseudo-penis’, of all the mammals.
- A plane passenger once played a pirated movie during a flight, only to discover the lead actress Kriti Sanon sat beside him.
- Samsung is also a full time weapons manufacturer, who apparently uses the most up to date technology to support world peace and security. And we all thought the S7 was impressive.
- Every pawn on a chess board was given the name of a commoner’s occupation in medieval chess; these included the likes of Gambler, Innkeeper, Doctor and many others.
- The humble Oreo is, more than likely accidentally, vegan. They contain zero dairy products and this is probably due to preservation and production costs being kept low.
- Russia’s area is larger than the total surface area of Pluto. The country has the largest area on Earth and measures in at 17,098,322 sq. km (6,601,699 sq. miles), Pluto by comparison is just 16,647,940 sq. km (6,430,000 sq. miles).
- Shaggy, or Orville Burrell, was a US Marine serving during operation Desert Storm as a Field Artillery Cannon Crewman.
- The oldest joke of all time is a Sumerian fart joke – “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”
- The tallest land animal is the giraffe. It’s capable of looking into a second-story window with ease. Its neck measures around 6-foot (1.8-meter) and weighs about 600 pounds (272 kilograms).
- We describe people as “red heads” instead of “orange heads” as the word ‘red’ was used way before that of ‘orange’. ‘Orange’ only came around after the fruit first hit the British shores.
- At the beginning of Far Cry 4 an alternate ending is possible. To begin, the main villain leaves, asking the player to stay. If they do so, the real game begins, but if the player stays for 15 minutes, the other character returns and the pair go off together cutting to the end.
- The human eye is so sensitive that, if the Earth were flat and it was a dark night, a candle’s flame could be seen from 30 miles away.
- OJ Simpson’s father, Jimmie, was a well-known San Francisco drag queen.
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is the only film in the series not in the 50 highest-grossing films list. It did however reach 471 in Empire Magazine’s 2008 list of the 500 greatest movies of all time.
- Larry Page, Google’s CEO, has vocal cord nerve strain which is a condition that’s slowly removing his ability to speak.
- Costa Rica’s butterfly species is abundant. The range makes up around 90% of all Central American butterflies and even more impressively, 18% of the world’s total butterfly species.
- In 2011, Australia, South Korea, and Germany banned Mortal Kombat. The Australian Minister for Home Affairs Brendan O’Connor said it was due to “public disquiet on the issue”.
- “Halo” was originally a Mac game. Steve Jobs wanted to use Halo to make Mac a viable gaming platform; this of course wasn’t the case.
- The word “robot” comes from the Slavic word for “slave labor.” and was first used in a 1920 play.