SO YOU THINK YOU KNOW EVERYTHING?
A friend on Facebook posted a list of interesting facts with the admission that "I haven't fact checked these but for those of you wanting to spend the holiday time doing something" which I took as a challenge...
Challenge accepted! What follows is a list of each claim, its truthiness rating, a brief discussion and - in most cases - a credible-appearing online source.
A dime has 118 ridges around the edge. TRUE: yacenter.org
A cat has 32 muscles in each ear. TRUE: source
A crocodile cannot stick out its tongue. TRUE: dawn.com
A dragonfly has a life span of 24 hours.
FALSE: "How long do Dragonflies live? Is it true that they only live for one day? ... No insect has a lifespan of only one day – even mayflies (not closely related to dragonflies) live for several months underwater as larvae before emerging as winged adults. Adult mayflies may only live for a day or so as they are dedicated 'breeding machines'. They cannot feed as adults as most species don’t have any functional mouthparts." - British Dragonflies.org
A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds. FALSE: https://www.livescience.com/goldfish-memory.html....
A "jiffy" is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
TRUE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiffy_(time)....
A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
NOT SURE: no fish blinks in the way we do but sharks have protective membranes that can cover their eyes when attacking prey. https://brainly.in/question/25827598....
A snail can sleep for three years.
TRUE: https://naplab.com/guides/how-long-do-snails-sleep/....
Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer.
TRUE (or certainly repeated often across multiple websites): factsbee
All 50 states are listed across the top of the Lincoln Memorial on the back of the $5 bill.
FALSE: Only 26 states are listed on the $5 bill. "When the Lincoln Memorial was constructed the names of 48 states were engraved on it. The picture of the Lincoln Memorial on the $5 bill only contains the names of 26 states. These are the 26 states that can be seen on the front side of the Lincoln memorial which is what is pictured on the $5 bill." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_five-dollar_bill
Almonds are a member of the peach family.
FALSE: "A nut is defined (among other things) as being the seed of a fruit. The almond is frequently, but incorrectly, said to be a member of the peach family. The almond is not a member of the peach family, but rather it is a member of the Rosaceae (Rose) family. The peach also is a member of the Rosaceae (Rose) family." - Quora
They belong to the same genus, however: https://www.isaaa.org/.../cropbiot.../article/default.asp....
An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
TRUE: https://homework.study.com/.../is-an-ostrich-s-eye-bigger...
Babies are born without kneecaps. They don't appear until the child reaches 2 to 6 years of age.
TRUE: https://www.encyclopedia.com/.../is-it-true-that-babies.../
Butterflies taste with their feet.
TRUE: https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/.../butterfly.../....
Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds. Dogs only have about 10.
TRUE: https://www.annexvet.com/fun-facts-feline-companions/...
"Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt".
TRUISH: there are 5 words ending in mt but all of them are variations of the "dreamt" theme: outdreamt, daydreamt, redreamt, undreamt, and dreamt
- https://www.thefreedictionary.com/words-that-end-in-mt
February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.
- FALSE on 2 counts: February 10, 1865, had a full moon and there are other months that had no full moon, including February 2018. -https://www.wral.com/story/4470081/
In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.
FALSE: the timeline of domesticated animals on this webpage shows many examples of domesticated animals more recently than 4 thousand years ago: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-domestication-of.../.
If the population of China walked past you, in single file, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.
TRUE: although I could only find repeats of this claim, it can be demonstrated mathematically. 1.43 billion people live in China as of 2023. If a line of people is shuffling forward at 2 miles per hour (a good clip for a line) with a distance of 1 foot between each person, then 1 person will pass you every second, 60 in 1 minute, and 3,600 every hour. It would take over 397,000 hours for the entire population of China to pass you, or 16,541 days, or 45 years.
So if there were no births or deaths among anyone in line, it would take 45 years for everyone in China alive today to walk past you.
But the population is growing at about 0.5% a year - some in line will die, others will drop out to have a baby then get back in line, but the line will grow by over 7 million a year. This adds 81 days to the length of the line when converted from people to time needed to count them. But remember that this is just one year. Because it takes 45 years to count those in line now, even if we ignore compounding and simply add 81 days every year, by the time we get to what would have been the end of the original line, we will have a line requiring 3,645 additional days to count (81 days per year × 45 years), or another decade, during which additional people would be born. Throw in compounding and your task of counting everyone would never end because the population would grow faster than you can count them all.
If you are an average American, in your whole life, you will spend an average of 6 months waiting at red lights.
TRUISH: AAA estimates 4.7 months for someone who commutes regularly from age 15 to 75. https://finance.yahoo.com/.../ll-spend-much-life-waiting...
It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.
FALSE: this seems based on the incorrect idea that if you sneeze with your eyes open, you will pop your eyeballs out of your head. You won't and you can easily train yourself to sneeze with your eyes open if you desire. There are other reasons to keep your eyes shut when sneezing but none involve popping eyeballs. - https://www.self.com/story/sneeze-eyes-open
Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors. FALSE: he may have improved the scissors but didn't invent them. https://homework.study.com/.../did-leonardo-da-vinci....
Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable. TRUE: Maine is also the only state with a single state neighboring it and it produces 90% of all toothpicks.
https://www.visitmaine.net/maine-facts-trivia/....
No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple. TRUE: "There are many words that have no rhyme in the English language. "Orange" is only the most famous. Other words that have no rhyme include: silver, purple, month, ninth, pint, wolf, opus, dangerous, marathon and discombobulated." - https://www.flocabulary.com/rhymeswithorange/....
Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing. TRUE with a caveat: https://www.flushinghospital.org/.../truth-or-myth-our.../
Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite. TRUISH: peanuts make glycerol, used in dynamite, but peanuts aren't essential to making dynamite. - https://www.irishtimes.com/.../peanuts-can-be-explosive....
Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated. TRUE: https://www.j-flex.com/why-do-rubber-bands-last.../....
"Stewardesses" is the longest word typed with only the left hand and "lollipop" with your right. TRUE: "'Stewardesses,' 'reverberated,' and 'lollipop' are the longest words that can be typed using only one hand on a keyboard. 'Skepticisms' is the longest word that alternates hands. The longest word that can be typed using the top row only is 'typewriter.'" - https://www.ocala.com/.../09/playing-with-words/31222392007/
The average person's left hand does 56% of the typing. TRUE: https://www.discovermagazine.com/tech.../the-curse-of-qwerty
The cruise liner, QE2, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.
FALSE: The QE2 at 20 knots, her average cruising speed, covered about 125 feet per gallon, which works out to an average 45 mpg fuel efficiency for each of the 1900 souls on board.
https://www.roblightbody.com/qe2-fuel-economy.html....
The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket. TRUE: his name was Percy Spencer and the year was 1945. https://invention.si.edu/.../431-percy-spencer-microwave....
The sentence: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter of the alphabet. TRUE: https://www.nycgovparks.org/.../quick-brown.../history....
The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid. FALSE: it froze but not completely. Water always flowed. https://www.niagarafallshotels.com/.../does-niagara.../....
The words 'racecar,' 'kayak' and 'level' are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left (palindromes). TRUE: no source needed - can be verified through inspection, but here you go: https://rtac.org/Strange.html....
There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar. TRUE: https://maa.org/frank-morgans-math-chat-293-ways-to-make...
There are more chickens than people in the world. TRUE: 19 billion chickens outnumber us 3:1. That's not that surprising - people are large, complex organisms, apex predators thanks to technology and our huge brains and opposable thumbs. As a rule, apex predators are outnumbered by smaller organisms on which they feed, usually by many orders of magnitude, increasing as the organism in question shrinks in size. There are far more insects of just about any variety than there are people and the mass of all those insects is similarly larger. https://www.hgtv.com/.../13-fascinating-facts-about...
There are only four words in the English language which end in "dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous. FALSE: although this claim is repeated often on the Internet, a simple query of a Scrabble word finder disproves it by generating other examples:
palladous, uropodous, amadous, molybdous, apodous, decapodous, and vanadous.
- https://wordfind.com/ends-with/dous/
There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: "abstemious" and "facetious." FALSE: there are actually 32 such words, according to a list given in Wikipedia. https://en.wiktionary.org/.../Category:English_words_that...
There's no Betty Rubble in the Flintstones Chewables Vitamins. FALSE: after a grassroots campaign, Betty Rubble was added in 1995. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flintstones_Chewable_Vitamins
Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur. TRUE: https://www.nathab.com/blog/why-do-tigers-have-stripes/
TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard. FALSE: the solution using Python is quite interesting. At least 3 other words are longer: rupturewort, proprietory, and proterotype.. https://jasonstitt.com/longest-top-row-word-not-typewriter
Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance.
FALSE: Winston Churchill himself dodged some rumors about his birth with the quip, "Although present on the occasion, I have no clear recollection of the events leading up to it." But Snopes concludes:
Winston's mother may have been attending a dance when she went into labor and delivered him in the palace where the dance was held, but he wasn't actually born until more than 24 hours later, long after the dance had ended and all the guests had departed. And the room where the birth took place wasn't a ladies' bathroom at all but ordinary living quarters temporarily pressed into service as a place to store coats, as can be seen in photographs of Blenheim Palace. The confusion may stem from the fact that 'cloakroom' is sometimes employed as a euphemism for 'lavatory' in the UK, but in this case 'cloakroom' was clearly used in its literal sense.
https://www.snopes.com/fact.../winston-churchill-born-dance/
Women blink nearly twice as much as men. TRUE: "Spontaneous blink rate was significantly larger in women than in men (19 vs 11 blinks per minute)." - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18565090/
Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks; otherwise it will digest itself. TRUE but misleading: your stomach is essentially a bag of acid used to begin the process of breaking down food and killing any bacteria that came along for the ride. It produced a gallon of hydrochloric acid a day to accomplish this task. Yes, the mucus lining the stomach protects the epithelium from caustic burns from the acid but it isn't literally true that the stomach would digest itself if the mucus layer wasn't replenished. It could be damaged, even destroyed, but this isn't what most of us think of when someone says "digest itself." - https://biologydictionary.net/digestive-system-fun-facts/
You're welcome!
