Wieke's Facts: Facts that sound fake, but aren't
Today I will once again delight you with my favorite category of fun facts: those that spark a discussion. That you come up with a fact after which people always say they absolutely do not believe it. That there is googling and that you are right. Wonderful feeling. Therefore, here are ten facts with which you can make an impression.
1. Horses are deadlier to humans in Australia than any other animal
Yes, you might have thought that Australia was mainly dangerous because of snakes, spiders, and other poisonous creatures or maybe even the kangaroo, but nothing could be further from the truth: the horse is the most dangerous.
2. The color orange is named after the fruit
For me, this has always been a bit of a chicken-and-egg story, but in English, ‘orange’ is indeed named after the fruit. Before that, the color orange was seen as a shade of red, which is why ‘gingers’ are also called ‘redheads’, even though they often have orange hair and not red.
3. Sharks have existed longer than trees and the rings of Saturn
Just imagine that Earth: a tree-less Earth, but with waters, seas, and oceans full of sharks. What on earth would that look like? To know that, you would have to go back 450 million years, because that’s when the first sharks appeared on Earth, as far as we know. And those rings of Saturn? They were only formed in the last 100 million years.
4. Grasshoppers are older than grass
And that is really strange when you consider that they are called ‘grasshoppers’ in English. How is that possible? Grass is still relatively young; it has only existed for 66 million years, while grasshoppers have been around for 250 million years.
5. Let’s stay with the sharks: we humans smell petrichor better and stronger than sharks smell blood in water
And what is petrichor? The (fine) scent you smell when it first rains again after a long, dry period.
6. Dinosaurs never walked on grass
This has a bit to do with point number 4, but I find it so bizarre to imagine: grass simply did not exist. You would think that they would be quite thrown off by all that green in Jurassic Park, but well, that movie isn’t that realistic anyway.
7. The Earth fits about 1.3 million times in the sun
Okay, but you might have known that the sun is that big. It gets even worse: the sun is a ‘yellow dwarf star’. For example, you also have Aldebaran, which we call a ‘red giant star’. The sun would fit into that about 86,000 times, and the Earth would fit into it 111.8 TRILLION times. But it gets even worse. You also have VY Canis Majoris, which is a ‘red hypergiant star’. The sun fits into that 3.2 trillion times, or… 416 quadrillion times the Earth. Space is just so bizarre?
8. A million seconds is 12 days, a billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds… 31,688 years
Just to emphasize how bizarrely large space is: the difference between a million and a billion is truly gigantic.
9. Barcodes scan the white part, not the black stripes
Never knew that and it sounds like nonsense, but no.
10. If you were to take the entire population of India and China and remove one billion inhabitants from each, they would still be the most populated countries in the world
And if you now have a bit of an idea of how much a billion is… Crazy, right?
