Imagine getting 90% in a test for which you never prepared. How bogus that may sound? Similarly our science, history and geography has many such facts that you may never find palpable but are actually true.
Did you know that Cashews are poisonous in their original form? Or that they grow outside the fruit known as Cashew Apple? In this article, we present you 15 of such innumerable facts that can blow your mind.
Also known as the ‘Birthday Problem’, this fact is based on the principles of permutation and combination. If we assume that there is an equal chance of birth every day of the year, keeping aside 29th February, there is a 50% chance that you share a common birthday with someone else.
If the group increases to 70 people, there is almost cent percent (99.9% precisely) chance of the same fact. In that case you can always keep a gift with you(LOL)!
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As per data available for the year 2017, Samsung’s revenue was 17% of South Korea’s GDP which stood at $1082 Billion. And the fact holds true for a number of years. Its affiliates also hold almost a fifth of countries total exports.
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The first reaction after reading the heading, how can it be? But the fact is true. A crook, Count Victor Lustig, managed to convince some dealers to bid for the Eiffel Tower.
It is said that he read an article about the rusting of the tower and the high cost that is being spent on its maintenance. Many Paris people wanted the tower destroyed, so as to reduce these costs. Dressed as Government Director who was given this task to sell the tower, he started giving tours of the tower to interested dealers.
He managed to convince a dealer who paid $20,000 for the tower and $50,000 in bribe so that he gets the tower. Lustig ran away from Paris and came back years later and tried to repeat the act but he could not fool the police this time around.
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Yes, you heard it right! During 1890s, Heroin was used by Bayer, the German Pharmaceutical Company as a remedy for cough and cold. They even marketed Heroin as an ingredient in children medicines and it was later banned in the year 1924 from being used in medicines.
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The crust of the earth is around 35 km. The radius of the earth is a whopping 6500 km. There are layers of hard rock at high temperatures below the crust which makes digging below impossible. Therefore the maximum you can drill into the earth is 35km/6500km which is about 0.5% of the earth’s radius.
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The fact may surprise you, but we are almost 25 times more vulnerable to death by coconut than from sharks. Sharks account for 5 kills on an average per year whereas coconuts kill 150 persons. The fear of being killed from coconut is so high in Australia that coconut trees are taken down from the shores of cities like Queensland.
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Throughout its lifespan, a cloud can weigh 1.1 million pounds. That’s heavy! The water density of the cloud is tiny but the size of the cloud is so huge that it can collectively be pretty heavy. You never thought that it is that heavy, did you?
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Born in 1970s, Koko was a western lowland gorilla. When she was a year old, she started learning an American sign language, designed specifically for apes. She had a pet kitten and loved to paint. After the death of her pet, she expressed words like sad, cry and frown. She could communicate like a normal human being and express emotions likewise. She left us a few days back, in the year 2018.
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Alaska has its stretch up to the edge of Western Hemisphere where it lies at the 180 degrees of longitude and it also lies across into the Eastern Hemisphere. Also, it is pretty obvious that it is the most northern state in the US. The state of Hawaii is the only exempt one. It is the most southern state in the US.
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Talking about water, you would be amazed to know that water covers 71% of the Earth’s surface. Out of which 97% is salty and is present in the seas, oceans or even as salty groundwater. The rest i.e. only 3%, is actually fresh water. Out of the 3% available, approximately 2% lies frozen i.e. as snow or glaciers. Around 0.75% lies in the soil as moisture and as fresh groundwater. Less than 0.01% lies in swamps, rivers, and lakes.
Of the relatively small percentage of freshwater when compared to the total water available in the world, 23% of it lies in a single lake, The Lake Baikal. Mind-blowing, isn’t it? The water content is even more than the Great Lakes in North America combined. Stunning!
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Honey has a perfect chemical composition which makes it good for consumption throughout its lifespan. The structure of honey is such that no organisms can live in it. And even a 1000-year-old honey bottle is perfectly edible today.
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Deoxyribonucleic Acid, commonly known as DNA has genes for the growth and functioning of a human being. It is a spiral coiled thread that is present in the nucleus of every human being. We have about 10 trillion cells in our body and when stretched, they can reach as far as 744 million miles. Moon is only 0.25 million miles away from us and DNA can stretch to the moon and back almost 1500 times. Terrific.
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The above fact may not sound exaggerated yet. But continue reading to know why it is mind-blowing. The Iron Age started around 1000 BCE whereas the Bronze Age began around 3500 BCE. It took us 2500 years to reach from bronze to iron. The reasons for the same are many, like the non-availability of good quality iron or the limitations in temperatures that we could reach or the design issues in the furnaces of that era.
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Around 1200 BCE, men started making steel weapons but due to the use of low-quality iron for making weapons, bronze weapons were still the superior one. Gradually, the furnace designs were improved and steel weapons started becoming stronger.
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We got nuclear weapons around 1500 AD which means we took almost the same time to reach to nuclear weapons from steel weapons.
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In the year 2008, International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), in their IUCN Red List assessed that 5,488 species of mammals are present in Earth. Surprisingly, 1240 of these species are of bats. It suggests that 20% of all the mammal species are of bats.
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At the beginning of the 18th century, the city of Chicago was suffering from mud related issues. The people were suffering from diseases like dysentery, cholera and typhoid fever, all because of the mud.
The newly found, Chicago Board of Sewerage Commissioners, then came up with a unique plan. They hired an engineer who suggested storm sewers but it would require them to increase the city level. So the board decided to raise the city, somewhere between four to fourteen feet.
It took twenty long years to accomplish the task but it was done without disturbing the normal life. Tourists, too came to watch that phenomenon.
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You must be knowing that distance for planets is measured in light years. So in the same way, it takes 8 minutes for sunlight to reach our Earth. Now, if a huge telescope is constructed and viewed from approximately 65 million light-years away at another planet, you might possibly be seeing dinosaurs still running around the Earth which used to be alive 65 million years before. Surprising, no?