All 59 odd truths

Is a day on Venus longer than a year on Venus?

Yes. Venus takes about 243 Earth days to spin once on its axis, but only about 225 Earth days to travel all the way around the Sun. A Venusian day is longer than a Venusian year.

Would Saturn float in water?

On average, yes. Saturn's mean density is about 0.69 grams per cubic centimetre, lower than water's 1.0, making it the only planet in the solar system less dense than water. Given a big enough bathtub, it would float.

Is the Moon moving away from Earth?

Yes. The Moon drifts about 3.8 centimetres further from Earth every year — roughly the rate your fingernails grow. It is a direct measurement, not a model, taken by bouncing lasers off reflectors the Apollo astronauts left behind.

Are there more trees on Earth than stars in the Milky Way?

Yes, by a wide margin. A 2015 study in Nature put the global tree count at roughly 3.04 trillion. The Milky Way is generally estimated to hold somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars — around ten times fewer.

Are there more possible chess games than atoms in the universe?

Yes. The number of possible chess games is estimated at around 10^120, known as the Shannon number. The observable universe contains roughly 10^80 atoms. Chess outruns it by about forty orders of magnitude.

Do octopuses really have three hearts?

Yes. An octopus has three hearts: two branchial hearts that push blood through the gills, and one systemic heart that sends it around the body. The systemic heart stops beating when the octopus swims, which is part of why they would rather walk.

Why is wombat poop cube-shaped?

Because their intestines are not uniformly stiff. Research published in Soft Matter found regions of the wombat's gut are twice as thick and four times as stiff as neighbouring regions, so contractions mould corners into the faeces over the final stretch of intestine.

Are sharks older than trees?

Yes. Sharks appear in the fossil record around 450 million years ago; the first true trees show up around 385 million years ago. Sharks predate forests by roughly 65 million years — about the same gap that separates us from the last dinosaurs.

How hard does a mantis shrimp punch?

Fast enough to boil water. A 2004 Nature study clocked the peacock mantis shrimp's club at around 23 metres per second, accelerating like a bullet. The strike drops the water pressure so sharply that vapour bubbles form and violently collapse — so prey gets hit twice.

Can turtles really breathe through their butts?

Some can. Several freshwater turtles absorb oxygen through the lining of the cloaca. The Fitzroy River turtle of Australia does it well enough to meet effectively all of its oxygen needs this way, letting it stay submerged for extraordinarily long stretches.

Do sea otters hold hands while they sleep?

Sometimes, genuinely. Resting sea otters do link paws so they don't drift apart from their raft. It is real behaviour and not a myth — but it is less frequent than the internet implies, and rafts mostly stay together by watching and listening to each other.

Can bees recognise human faces?

Yes. In a 2005 study, honeybees were trained on photographs from a standard human face-recognition test and picked the target face out from a similar distractor with better than 80 percent accuracy — and still remembered it two days later.

Have tardigrades survived in open space?

Yes. In 2007 the European Space Agency exposed dried tardigrades to the vacuum of low Earth orbit for ten days. Those shielded from solar UV revived at rates comparable to controls on the ground, and went on to lay eggs that hatched normally.

Can sloths hold their breath longer than dolphins?

Yes. Sloths can stay underwater for up to about 40 minutes by slowing their heart rate dramatically. Most dolphins manage roughly 10 to 15 minutes. The animal built for water loses to the animal built for hanging in a tree.

Do any birds have contagious laughter?

Yes. New Zealand's kea has a distinct play call, and researchers found that simply playing a recording of it puts other kea in the mood to play. It is the first known case of emotionally contagious vocalisation in a non-mammal.

Do human beings glow in the dark?

Yes, faintly. Human bodies emit a small amount of visible light as a by-product of metabolism. Researchers imaged it with ultra-sensitive cameras in 2009. It is roughly a thousand times weaker than the human eye can detect, so nobody has ever seen it.

Why can't I see the blind spot in my own eye?

Because your brain fills it in. Each eye has a patch of retina with no photoreceptors, where the optic nerve exits. You never notice the gap because your visual system invents plausible content to cover it, using whatever surrounds the hole.

Did Cleopatra live closer in time to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid?

Yes. The Great Pyramid was built around 2560 BC. Cleopatra died in 30 BC — about 2,500 years later. The Apollo 11 Moon landing was in 1969, roughly 2,000 years after her death. She is nearer to us than to the pyramids by about 500 years.

Is Oxford University older than the Aztec Empire?

Yes. There is evidence of teaching at Oxford as early as 1096. Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, was founded in 1325 — 229 years later. The empire proper dates from an alliance in 1428, by which time Oxford had had colleges for over 150 years.

What was the shortest war in history?

The Anglo-Zanzibar War, fought on 27 August 1896 between the United Kingdom and the Sultanate of Zanzibar. It lasted somewhere between 38 and 45 minutes. Around 500 people died in that time, almost all of them Zanzibari.

How old is Nintendo?

Nintendo was founded in 1889, making playing cards. It is older than sliced bread, the Ottoman Empire's collapse, and both world wars. The company spent its first seventy years in paper before it ever touched an electronic anything.

Is the fax machine older than the telephone?

Yes, by 33 years. Scottish clockmaker Alexander Bain patented the first fax device — an Electric Printing Telegraph — on 27 May 1843. Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876. We could send a picture before we could send a voice.

Was bubble wrap invented as wallpaper?

Yes. In 1957 Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes sealed two shower curtains together, trapping air bubbles between them, and tried to sell it as textured three-dimensional wallpaper. Nobody wanted it. Packaging was the third idea, not the first.

How much does a cloud weigh?

An average cumulus cloud holds roughly 500,000 kilograms of water — about 1.1 million pounds, or 550 tons. It floats because the air underneath it is denser than the cloud is, not because the cloud is light.

Does it ever snow in the Sahara desert?

Yes. The town of Ain Sefra in Algeria, known as the gateway to the desert, has had snow settle on its red dunes repeatedly — most famously in December 2016, the first snowfall there since 1979, and several times since.

Is there an ATM in Antarctica?

Yes — one. There is a working ATM at McMurdo Station, at 77 degrees south, operated by Wells Fargo. It is the only cash machine on the continent, it dispenses US dollars, and a technician flies down to service it roughly every two years.

Does honey ever go bad?

Sealed honey does not spoil. Archaeologists have recovered pots of honey from ancient Egyptian tombs, sealed for over 3,000 years, still edible. Three things do it: almost no water, an acidic pH, and hydrogen peroxide produced by an enzyme from the bees.

Is a banana a berry, and is a strawberry not one?

Botanically, yes on both counts. A berry develops from a single flower with a single ovary and contains seeds inside its flesh — which describes a banana. A strawberry grows from a flower with many ovaries, making it an aggregate accessory fruit.

What is the dot over the letter i called?

It is called a tittle. The word comes from the Latin titulus, meaning a heading or inscription, and it describes the small distinguishing dot over a lowercase i or j. Scribes added it so the letters wouldn't get lost in dense handwriting.

What is Scotland's national animal?

The unicorn. It is not a joke or a tourist-board invention: the unicorn has appeared on the Scottish royal coat of arms since the twelfth century, and in heraldry it is always shown bound in a gold chain.

Does the Eiffel Tower change height?

Yes. The tower is made of iron, and iron expands when it warms. Across the seasons the Eiffel Tower's height varies by up to about 15 centimetres, and in strong wind the top can sway around 6 to 7 centimetres.

Do babies have more bones than adults?

Yes. A newborn has roughly 275 to 300 bones, while most adults have 206. Nothing goes missing. As a child grows, many small bones and pieces of soft cartilage fuse into single larger bones, so the count drops even as the skeleton gets bigger.

Why do your fingers wrinkle in water?

Because your nervous system is doing it on purpose. Wrinkling is an active response, not skin soaking up water: blood vessels under the fingertips constrict and pull the skin into ridges. A 2013 Newcastle University study found people moved wet marbles faster with wrinkled fingers, like tyre treads channelling water away for grip.

Do astronauts get taller in space?

Yes. NASA reports that crew members grow up to three percent taller during long missions on the International Space Station, about five centimetres for a six-foot person. Without gravity squashing the spine, the discs between the vertebrae expand. Height returns to normal after coming home.

How many times does your heart beat in a day?

About 100,000 times. At a typical resting rate of around 70 beats a minute, that is roughly 100,000 beats a day, 35 million a year, and well over two billion in a lifetime. It never takes a break, and it does the whole job with a muscle about the size of your fist.

Is Mount Everest the tallest mountain on Earth?

Only if you measure from sea level. Measured from base to summit, Mauna Kea in Hawaii is taller: about 10,210 metres from the sea floor to its peak, against Everest's 8,849 metres above the sea. And measured from the centre of the Earth, Ecuador's Chimborazo is the farthest point out, because the planet bulges at the equator.

How many times does lightning strike Earth every second?

About 44 times a second, give or take five. NASA satellites counted roughly 1.4 billion lightning flashes a year across the whole planet. By the time you finish reading this sentence, lightning has flashed around 200 times.

Is Antarctica a desert?

Yes. A desert is defined by how little precipitation falls, not by heat or sand, and the usual threshold is under 250 millimetres a year. Antarctica's high interior gets less than 50 millimetres, drier than much of the Sahara, which makes it the largest desert on the planet.

Does dust from the Sahara feed the Amazon rainforest?

Yes. A NASA satellite measured about 27.7 million tons of Saharan dust blowing across the Atlantic to the Amazon basin each year, carrying roughly 22,000 tons of phosphorus. That is about the amount of phosphorus the rainforest loses every year to rain and floods, so the desert is topping up the jungle.

Is Australia moving?

Yes, about 7 centimetres a year to the north-east, faster than any other continent. The drift is quick enough that in 2017 Geoscience Australia officially shifted the country's map coordinates 1.8 metres to catch up, so that GPS would keep pointing at the right spot.

Is the water on Earth older than the Sun?

A good share of it, yes. A 2014 study in the journal Science estimated that between 30 and 50 percent of the water in Earth's oceans formed as ice in the cold cloud between stars, before the Sun existed, and survived the Sun's birth to end up here.

Does it rain diamonds on Neptune?

Very probably, and in 2017 scientists made it happen on Earth. Deep inside Neptune and Uranus, pressure and heat are thought to squeeze carbon out of methane and crush it into diamonds that sink toward the core. A team at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory recreated those conditions with a laser and watched diamonds form.

How much would a sugar cube of neutron star weigh?

About a trillion kilograms, according to NASA. A neutron star packs more mass than the Sun into a ball roughly 20 kilometres across, the size of a city. That makes its material so dense that a piece the size of a sugar cube would outweigh every car, truck and bus on Earth put together.

Is there a planet where it rains glass sideways?

Yes. HD 189733b, a gas giant 63 light-years away, is a deep cobalt blue because its clouds are laced with tiny particles of silicate, which is to say glass. The side facing its star is around 1,000 degrees Celsius, and winds of roughly 7,000 kilometres an hour would blow the glass rain sideways.

Are the Apollo astronauts' footprints still on the Moon?

Yes. The Moon has no wind, rain or weather to wear them away, so the bootprints and rover tracks left between 1969 and 1972 are still in the dust. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed the landing sites from orbit, and the astronauts' paths show up as dark trails.

Is the Sun losing weight?

Yes, about four million tons a second. Deep in its core the Sun fuses roughly 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second, and about four million tons of that mass does not come out the other side as matter. It leaves as pure energy, which is the sunlight.

Can a cockroach live without its head?

Yes, for a week or more, and in lab conditions for several weeks. Cockroaches breathe through holes along their body rather than through their mouth, their blood does not need high pressure so the neck seals by clotting, and simple nerve clusters in each segment keep the legs working. A headless roach eventually dies of thirst, not of losing its head.

Do crows remember human faces?

Yes, for years. University of Washington researchers trapped crows while wearing a rubber mask, then found that for years afterwards crows across campus scolded anyone wearing that mask, even crows that had never been caught and crows hatched after the experiment. They recognise individual faces and pass the warning on.

Do dolphins have names for each other?

Yes. Each bottlenose dolphin invents its own signature whistle early in life, and a 2013 study from the University of St Andrews showed that wild dolphins respond when they hear a copy of their own whistle and ignore copies of other dolphins'. It is the closest thing to a name found in any animal other than us.

Do butterflies taste with their feet?

Yes. Butterflies have chemical sensors on their feet, so when one lands on a leaf or a flower it is tasting it. Females use this to check a plant is the right kind before laying eggs on it, since most caterpillars can only eat a few specific plants.

Why are flamingos pink?

Because of their food. Flamingos hatch with white or grey down and turn pink over several years as pigments from the algae and tiny shrimp they eat build up in their feathers. A flamingo on a different diet would slowly fade.

Were woolly mammoths still alive when the pyramids were built?

Yes. The Great Pyramid of Giza was built around 4,500 years ago. A population of woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island, off the coast of Siberia, until about 4,000 years ago. For several centuries there were both mammoths and pyramids on Earth at the same time.

Did the Olympics ever give medals for art?

Yes. From 1912 to 1948 the Olympic Games awarded medals in painting, sculpture, architecture, literature and music, with the rule that every entry had to be inspired by sport. About 150 medals were handed out before the contests were dropped over the question of whether artists were professionals.

Is Harvard older than calculus?

Yes. Harvard was founded in 1636. Isaac Newton worked out the foundations of calculus in 1665 and 1666, and Gottfried Leibniz published the first account of it in 1684. The oldest university in the United States had been teaching for nearly thirty years before the maths existed.

Who was the first computer programmer?

Ada Lovelace, in 1843, nearly a century before the first working computers. In her notes on Charles Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine she wrote out a step-by-step method for the machine to calculate a sequence of numbers, which is widely regarded as the first computer program. The engine itself was never completed.

Where was Hawaiian pizza invented?

Canada. Sam Panopoulos, a Greek-born restaurant owner, first put canned pineapple and ham on a pizza in 1962 at the Satellite Restaurant in Chatham, Ontario. He named it after the brand on the pineapple tin. Hawaii had nothing to do with it.

Why does popcorn pop?

Because each kernel is a sealed pressure vessel. Water inside the kernel turns to steam but cannot escape through the hard shell, so the pressure builds to around ten times normal air pressure until the shell cracks at about 180 degrees Celsius. The starch bursts outward and sets, and the pop sound is the steam rushing out, not the shell breaking.

Can you really hear the ocean in a seashell?

No. The sound is the ordinary background noise around you, caught and amplified by the shell's curved hollow. The louder the room, the louder the ocean. A cupped hand or an empty mug over your ear does the same thing, and in a soundproof room a shell goes silent.

Is a peanut a nut?

No. A peanut is a legume, a relative of peas, beans and lentils, and it grows in a pod underground. After the plant flowers above ground, the fertilised flower sends a stalk called a peg down into the soil, and the peanut develops there in the dark.