Fun Fact of the Day

Day 1

Take a deck of cards that is not in new deck order and then give then a generic/random shuffle. You just created a brand new combination of 52 cards that has literally never happened before in all of history since cards were invented. Go ahead and shuffle them again and as many times as you like. Every single time you will have created a unique set of cards that has NEVER existed before in history. No person has ever shuffled a deck of cards and created the same set of 52 cards in the order you just created.

Day 2

When it is raining outside you will actually get LESS wet if you walk at a normal pace through the rain than if you run through the rain. You will spend overall more time in the rain by walking, however there will be measurably less water on you.

Day 3

The placebo effect is the phenomenon of a person’s physical or mental health improving after taking a treatment with no pharmacological therapeutic benefit. For instance a sugar pill, or a syringe full of saline.

How our brains have such power over our physical health is still largely unknown. However placebos have been proven to help with gastic ulcers, hypertension, pain of any kind, cough (one study showed 85% of the effectiveness of cough medicene is placebo, and only 15% is from the medicene), depression, anxiety, erictile dysfunction, IBD, Parkinsons, and epilepsy.

Bonus Fact:
This also means there is real and scientific reasoning to why and how prayer can actually work and physically improve your life and well-being.

Day 4

The placebo effect still works even if from the very beginning you tell the person they are getting a placebo and not a real drug.

Day 5

There are more trees on earth than there are stars in the milkyway. NASA has estimated there are around 400 billion stars in the milkyway while the estimate for number of trees is around 3 trillion.

Day 6

There are at least 17 distinctly different kinds of ice. You likely have only ever seen one type call Type I ice. The rest of the types of ice form under different pressures and temperatures. One of the types occurs when water freezes and it has absolutely no room to expand, which is EXTREMELY difficult to do, and not even Niel Degrassi Tyson knows this type of ice exists!

Day 7

Two factors go into water freezing. The first one is temperature that everyone knows about, but the second is pressure. Water only freezes at 32°F at sea level and under Earth’s atmospheric pressure. If you put water into a vacuum chamber it can actually simultaneously freeze and boil at the same time.

Day 8

We have yet to actually discover why humans need sleep. We do know many benefits of sleep, but it is not known why it is 100% necessary to live. You will die if you manage to go too long without sleep. There is even a rare genetic disease called fatal familial insomnia (FFI) that has always ended in death.

Day 9

Recently in history bad eye sight has increased far faster than genetics can account for. After looking into it, science has determined the best way to drastically increase the odds children do not need glasses is to ensure their eyes get exposed to a proper amount of sunlight. Children who get inadequate amounts of sunlight are much more likely to need glasses.

Bonus fact:
Sitting close to the tv does not hurt or help your eyesight, unless TV time is the reason you have less sunlight exposure.

Day 10

Pure H²0 is actually bad for you and dangerous to drink. It will kill your cells that come into direct contact with it and after it can no longer kill your cells it will still drain out nutrients from your remaining cells and then you will pee those nutrients out. Osmosis can be a bitch.

Bonus fact:
You can die from drinking too much water. Unfortunately people unaware of this have had water drinking competitions and people have died from this.

Day 11

Honey is the only food we currently know of that is capable of never spoiling. We have found 3,000+ year old honey in egyptian tombs that was still edible.

Bonus “fact”
Well that and old French fries that you droped in your car and fell under your seat. Those will be there forever, never grow mold, and never decompose. Why do we eat these things…?

Day 12

If there are two cars of mostly equal size/weight both going 60mph have a head on collison, the force and damage done to both cars is the exact same damage that would have been done if those cars instead hit a nonmoving brick wall.

The speeds do not get added together or anything of that sort. Hitting the other car going 60mph towards you is the same thing as hitting a stationary brick wall.

Day 13

Antibacterial soap has never been shown to clean better in any significant way compared to regular soap. However antibacterial soap has been proven to accelerate the rate at which bacteria development resistance to antibiotics.

Please dont buy antibacterial soap.

Day 14

Due to human poaching, male tuskless elephants are becoming more and more common. These elephants never grow tusks at any point in their life.

Day 15

Even though there are 365+ days in a year it only takes 23 different people in a room for there to be a ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ chance that two of these people share the same birthday.

With 40 people in a room there would be a 90% chance and with 70 people there would be a 99.9% chance.

Day 16

Humans are capable of using echolocation, the same thing bats use to get around. It is rare but there are documented instances of people who are blind who have developed this amazing ability.

Day 17

Napoleon Bonaparte, history’s most famous short dude, was actually above average height. He was not short at all. The enemies of Napoleon launched a propaganda campaign calling him a short man and it worked.

Day 18

There is a species of moth that has a pattern on it’s wings that resemble flies eating bird poop. What are the chances this could possibly happen via random genetic mutation?

Day 19

The Double Slit experiment is something that legitimately changed my life.

It is, of course, far too complicated for me to do justice to the topic in this one post, but what the Double Slit experiment proves is that if you shoot a single photon of light through a double slit, the single photon actually simultaneously goes through both slits at the same time as if it were a wave. The photon then is still measured as a single photon shortly after it has passed through both slits.

That is however unless you attempt in anyway to observe which slit the photon goes through. If you measure through any means which slit the photon goes through, the photon will actually only go through one slit and not both.

The act of observing the photon changes the physical world. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Day 20

The Quantum Eraser………

Again I strongly encourage you to look into this further, but is possible to set up a contraption so that you can always know which slit the photon goes through in the Double Slit expirament, but give you the ability to erase that information so that aftwerwards you could have no idea which slit the photon went through even though you did measure it. When you do this, it is as if you never measured it in the first place, really solidifying the fact that observation and observation alone is what is changing the photon’s behavior.

Day 21

Trophy hunting exotic or endangered animals actually is greater good more often than it is bad. People pay very large sums of money to be able to legally trophy hunt these animals and this money really is used to protect these animals as a whole and ensures that there will always be more of these animals. After all if the species would go extinct, then these places would lose all the large income generated from it.

Also if you are the people who have to live next to say lions, you don’t actually care very much how cute or cool that lions are. All you care about is feeding your family and not dying because of lions. Providing these people with an income makes the people who actually have to live with these animals want to keep them alive.

Day 22

If you could fold a piece of paper 42 times, the thickness of the folded paper would stretch from earth to the moon.

Day 23

Semi identical twins, also known as sesquizygotic twins, is a rare phenomenon that produces a male and female set of twins that share 50% of their DNA. This is thought to occur when two sperm manage to fertilize an egg.

Day 24

Ball lighting is a mysterious and yet unexplained atmospheric phenomenon. The term describes luminescent, spherical objects that vary from pea size to several meters in diameter. This freak of nature is typically associated with thunderstorms but lasts considerably longer than thunder/lightning.

Day 25

In order to make seedless watermelon you still need to make seeded watermelon. Not just to carry on the plant lineage but actually in order to make seedless watermelon at all. Seedless watermelon plants require the pollen of a seeded watermelon plants to produce it’s fruit, so farmers typically plant 50% seeded watermelon and 50% seedless in order to get as much seedless watermelon as possible

Day 26

It is actually impossible to draw an accurate map of the earth onto paper without some kind of distortion. It’s been proven mathematically that you cannot accurately represent the surface of a 3d ellipsis onto 2d paper.

Day 27

Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt who died 30 years before Jesus was born, lived closer to the invention of the iPhone than to the time when the great pyramids were built.

Day 28

Rainbows as you know them are not real.

Rainbows are only kind of real, as in there is something there, however what you see as a rainbow is only how your eye and your brain interpret what it thinks a rainbow should look like. Two humans can see rainbows differently. This is obvious when you consider color blind or color deficient people, but even “normal” people can see colors/rainbows differently. Other animals will see something entirely different than we do. How you see a rainbow is unique to you, and how we generally describe rainbows as a human is unique to humans.

Day 29

Human sweat can convey the emotions you are feeling. If you are anxious, threatened, or happy these can all be found in your sweat. It has also been shown that dogs definitely are aware of your emotions via the smell of your sweat and will even mimic your emotions because of it.