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11,491 facts. Click any fact to see its full page.
All 11,491
📜 History 1,991
🔬 Science 1,964
🐾 Animals 1,525
🚀 Space 977
🧠 Psychology 893
🌿 Nature 759
💻 Technology 735
🌍 Geography 599
🎭 Culture 581
🫀 Human Body 572
🌊 Ocean 373
💬 Language 245
🍕 Food 199
✨ General 68
✨ Dinosaur 10
The tradition of shaking hands originated as a way to show that neither person was carrying a weapon.
The most translated book in the world after the Bible is 'The Little Prince' by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
The Voynich Manuscript is a 600-year-old book written in an unknown language that no one has ever been able to decipher.
The modern marathon distance of 26.2 miles was established at the 1908 London Olympics so the race could finish in front of the royal box.
The Academy Awards ceremony was first held in 1929 and lasted only 15 minutes.
There are over 350 different shapes of pasta.
The first Olympic gold medals were actually made of silver — solid gold medals have not been awarded since 1912.
The painting 'Starry Night' by Vincent van Gogh was created while he was in an asylum in Saint-Remy-de-Provence.
Chess was invented in India around the 6th century and was originally called chaturanga.
The Great Wall of China is not actually visible from space with the naked eye.
The Nobel Prize was established by Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, partly to improve his legacy.
The first novel ever written is often considered to be 'The Tale of Genji,' written by Murasaki Shikibu in Japan around 1010 AD.
The first feature-length animated film was 'El Apostol,' made in Argentina in 1917.
The word 'soccer' originated in England as an abbreviation of 'Association Football.'
The Guinness Book of World Records was created in 1955 to settle arguments in pubs.
The longest running TV show in history is the Japanese drama 'Sazae-san,' which has aired since 1969.
Lake Hillier in Australia is bright pink, and scientists believe the color comes from a combination of algae and bacteria.
The Atacama Desert in Chile has regions that have not received any recorded rainfall in over 500 years.
Certain species of bamboo can grow over 3 feet in a single day under ideal conditions.
The world's largest cave, Hang Son Doong in Vietnam, is so large it has its own weather system.
Some caves contain formations called soda straws — hollow stalactites that form one drop of water at a time.
The aurora borealis and aurora australis occur simultaneously at both poles of the Earth.
Soil is one of the most biodiverse habitats on Earth, containing millions of species of microorganisms per gram.
The heaviest organism on Earth is a grove of quaking aspen trees in Utah that share a single root system and weigh about 6,600 tons.
Petrified wood forms when minerals gradually replace organic material over millions of years, turning wood into stone.
The pitcher plant can digest not just insects but also small mammals and reptiles that fall into its trap.
A lightning bolt can reach temperatures of 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit — five times hotter than the surface of the Sun.
The Northern Lights are caused by charged particles from the Sun interacting with gases in the Earth's atmosphere.
The oldest living organism is a colony of seagrass in the Mediterranean estimated to be 100,000 years old.
The Darvaza Gas Crater in Turkmenistan, nicknamed the Door to Hell, has been burning continuously since 1971.
Earthquakes can permanently shorten the length of a day by shifting the Earth's mass distribution.
The largest flower cluster in the world belongs to the talipot palm, which blooms only once every 30 to 80 years before dying.
Ball lightning is a rare atmospheric phenomenon that appears as glowing, spherical objects during thunderstorms and remains unexplained by science.
The roots of a fig tree in South Africa extend more than 400 feet underground.
A single mature tree can produce enough oxygen for two people for an entire year.
The manchineel tree is so toxic that standing under it during rain can cause blistering on exposed skin.
Wildfires can create their own weather, including fire tornadoes and pyrocumulonimbus clouds.
The world's oldest known seed to germinate was a 2,000-year-old date palm seed found at Masada in Israel.
Some species of orchids can mimic the appearance and scent of female insects to trick males into pollinating them.
The baobab tree can store up to 32,000 gallons of water in its trunk to survive droughts.
A single oak tree can produce about 70,000 acorns in a single year.
The average lifespan of a smartphone is about 2.7 years before it is replaced.
Virtual assistants like Siri use natural language processing and machine learning to understand and respond to voice commands.
The first alarm clock could only ring at 4 AM because it was designed for its inventor's own schedule.
The world generates about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day.
Netflix was originally a DVD rental-by-mail service launched in 1997.
There are more than 2 billion gamers worldwide.
The first 1-gigabyte hard drive was released in 1980, weighed 550 pounds, and cost $40,000.
Bluetooth technology is named after Harald Bluetooth, a 10th-century Danish king who united warring factions.
The internet weighs about the same as a strawberry — roughly 50 grams — based on the electrons that carry all its data.