Get all your news in one place.

100’s of premium titles.
One app.

Start reading

Get all your news in one place.

100’s of premium titles. One news app.

Start reading

Bored Panda

Entertainment

Gabija Palšytė

49 Facts That Sound Made Up But Are Actually True

Vatican Universe (Location) Earth Internet NZ

Don't believe everything you read on the internet. By now, we can all agree that it's full of fake stuff and AI isn't helping the situation. Misinformation spreads like wildfire and often, it's disguised so well that you might be none the wiser. But sometimes, fact is indeed stranger than fiction and the things that sound like complete and utter rubbish turn out to be true.

Humans glow. The universe is beige. Per capita, the Vatican has the highest crime rate in the world. Those were just some of the statements that popped up when someone recently asked, "What sounds like complete nonsense, but has been proven to be true?"

Bored Panda has put together a captivating and surprising list of the best answers. From biology to geography, psychology to history, and everything under the sun, there's enough here for anyone looking to sound a little more clued up at that next social gathering. Don't forget to upvote your favorites and feel free to share your own "nonsense-sounding" gems in the comments section below.

#1

Per capita, the Vatican City has the highest crime rate in the world.

Some of the statements on this list are so wild that we did a double-take... and then a deep dive into a world of fascinating but fake-sounding facts.

Many of us have heard of auras, but who knew that humans actually glow? The light we emit apparently fades when we take our last breath. The fact that we glow was already discovered back in 2009. But a new study conducted by scientists from the University of Calgary and published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, looked into what happens to that light at the end of the tunnel we call life.

#2

Tall people are more likely to get cancer than short people because having more cells increases the chance that any one of them will mutate.

They're basically just bigger targets.

#3

There are more stars in the observable universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world.

The phenomenon of glowing comes down to the emission of something called biophotons, and it doesn't only occur in humans. The researchers studied mice and revealed that all living things, including plants, emit a faint light up until their last minutes.

“The fact that ultraweak photon emission is a real thing is undeniable at this point,” said the study’s senior author, Dan Oblak. “This really shows that this is not just an imperfection or caused by other biological processes. It’s really something that comes from all living things.”

As the New Scientist reported, monitoring this signal could one day help track forest health or even detect diseases in people.

#4

Oxford University is older than Machu Picchu in Peru.

#5

Placebos show positive effect even when you know you're being given a placebo.

#6

One aspect that makes memory unreliable in detail is that you only remember an event one time. After that, each time you recall it, you're only remembering the last time you remembered it, not the event itself. Memory is a game of telephone we play with ourselves.

Another mind-blowing and potentially unbelievable fact on the list was the one about shuffling a deck of cards. Specifically that there are more ways to shuffle a deck of cards than there are atoms in the solar system.

It sounds wild but this has been backed up by experts at McGill University who report that "there are somewhere in the range of 8x1067 ways to sort a deck of cards. That’s an 8 followed by 67 zeros."

According to the university's site, "even if someone could rearrange a deck of cards every second of the universe’s total existence, the universe would end before they would get even one billionth of the way to finding a repeat."

It adds that no matter how many card games you've played, even if you're a professional blackjack dealer, there are too many ways to arrange 52 cards for any randomly organized set of cards to repeat itself in your lifetime.

#7

That time literally runs at different speeds depending on where you are. Because of gravity and relativity a clock on the floor ticks a tiny bit slower than a clock on a shelf and scientists have actually measured the difference with insanely precise atomic clocks.

#8

If you take a tiny bit of weakened virus, or just the part of it that says "hey I'm such and such virus," and put it in your body it will later protect you (and those around you) from said virus.

#9

Tumbleweeds are not native to North America. They are invasive.

What about someone saying we should google "cosmic latte"? Well, okay then. Challenge accepted.

One of the articles that came up was published on the BBC's Science Focus. The title, The Universe has an average colour – and it’s called cosmic latte, says it all. What might have been dismissed as nonsense, is in fact, fact.

#10

Sometimes when you move your eyes to look at a clock the second hand appears stuck for a moment because your brain retroactively edits your memory of the time your eyes were moving so you believe you've been looking at the clock longer than you have.

#11

There are more castles in Germany than McDonald's in USA.

#12

The platypus.

According to the site, a 2002 study found that "the light coming from galaxies (and the stars within them) – alongside all the visible clouds of gas and dust in the Universe – when averaged, would produce an ivory color very close to white." And this color is called... you guessed it: ‘cosmic latte’.

Apparently the Universe's ‘beigeness’ is due to the fact that there are a few more regions that produce red, yellow and green light than those that produce blue.

"Averaged over the entire sky, however, this beige colour is diluted and appears almost, but not entirely, black," explains Science Focus.

#13

Most of the cells in your body don't belong to you. We are a superorganism. We evolved a symbiotic relationship with good gut bacteria.

You literally need and depend on bacteria inside your body to perform functions your body cannot perform on its own. .

#14

A full head of healthy Human hair has enough tensile strength to lift and support a full grown elephant.

#15

There are more ways to shuffle a standard deck of cards than there are atoms in the solar system. By a lot. It’s not even remotely close.

#16

The average color of the universe is a shade of beige.

Google "cosmic latte".

#17

We have little crystals in our inner ear. If they get out of place, it can upset your sense of balance. It’s sometimes possible to get them back into place by moving your head a certain way. I’m a speech pathologist. I studied audiology and the anatomy of the speech and hearing mechanisms, but that was over 25 years ago and I never heard about these crystals. Apparently they were discovered before that time so I don’t know why we were never taught about them. My mom told me the doctor had her move her head to get her crystals back in place and I thought it was a total hoax until I looked it up. .

#18

HUMANS GLOW! We glow an infrared light from biochemical reactions. it's just too weak for your eyes.

#19

Quantum entanglement. Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance”.

#20

In an experiment where ground-breeding bird nests where observed, deer raided more of the nests than foxes and wildcats.

#21

Transmutation

It's what scientists do with supercolliders, basically. A substudy of nuclear chemistry.

#22

Dragonflies experience up to 9Gs when cornering, they are the most efficient preditor catching up to 95% of the prey they go after, they breath through their bums and most varieties (not sure if that's the correct word) can't walk.

#23

You are mostly made of empty space between atomic particles.

#24

The closest planet to Earth is... *usually Mercury*.

Because Venus has a longer orbit and spends more time the other side of the Sun, while Mercury has far less of an orbit and does it quicker.

#25

You can survive without a significant portion of your brain.

#26

Carrots make you see better in the dark.

A lie created by the British in WWII so the Germans didn't realise the radar the British pilots had.

Later it was discovered the keratin in carrots actually *does* help you see at night.

#27

A woodpeckers tongue wraps around its skull.

#28

In my area (linguistics), the idea that languages can't be correct or incorrect. We grow up in such policed language environments in school that we normalise this entirely.

"Correct" language is quite literally what people want it to be, same with "incorrect" or "bad" language.

#29

The Banach-Tarski Paradox. It's a mathematical theorem that essentially states, if you have a solid ball, you can break it up into five disjoint sets of points, move them and rotate them, and end up with two separate solid balls of the same size as the original. In effect, duplicating a ball by cutting it up and rearranging it.

I love me my weird math facts, but this is one that I have trouble accepting sometimes.

#30

There used to be blue people in the US.

Seems like the sort of thing they should’ve taught us in history class.

#31

Humans have stripes, they're called blaschko lines, they only normally appear visible if you have specific skin conditions/syndromes.

There are theories though that some animals can see them visibily even without those presenting conditions, which would be funny, if our pets are just thinking we're goofy striped animals.

#32

Sharks existed on Earth long before trees did.

#33

It's possible to turn Peanut Butter into a diamond.

#34

Today, I learned about left-handed anger!
If you have an angry impulse, act it out with your left hand instead cause you look so weak and stupid doing it, It's automatically funny and you deescalate yourself.

#35

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a grammatically correct English sentence.

#36

Light is both a particle and a wave, and one or the other when you look at it. Something like that .

#37

You share 50% of your DNA with bananas.

Not 'similar genes.' Literally half your genetic code is the same as a banana's.

We're all fruit. Existence is a joke.

#38

My personal favorite: you'll find more genetic diversity in a room full of 50 chimpanzees than in the entire human species.

#39

Most people stop working due to declining health or death, not financial security or advanced age. Retirement is abnormal.

#40

Earth’s atmosphere goes past the moon.

#41

If you were able to fold a piece of paper in half 103 times, it would be thicker than the known universe.

#42

If you push your tongue to the roof of your mouth and hold it there, you can substantially reduce the pain from sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia, and enjoy ice cream again.

#43

Whales have hands.

#44

The French Secret Service placed a limpet mine on a Greenpeace ship and sunk it to stop it protesting French Nuclear Testing in the Pacific.
They were so incompetent 2 were caught in days and the others only just managed to escape via submarine after sinking their yacht.

Using trade, the French Govt then blackmailed the New Zealand Government into releasing the captives.

England (NZ’s founder) refused to support them and then the USA turned against NZ because of NZ’s no nuks stand. All this drove NZ to have an independent foreign policy so they no-longer automatically follow anybody else’s lead.

So much for relying your friends and allies and history now repeating with the US giving the finger to the whole world except former enemies!

#45

With our current classification methods, either: Birds are reptiles, or Crocodiles are not reptiles, as they share a common ancestor more recently than everything else we normally consider a reptile, also the whole birds are dinosaurs and dinosaurs were reptiles.

#46

As a population, the people of the USA average less than 2 arms.

#47

That a woman's skin when wet has a higher coefficient of friction than a man's. And not by a small margin.

#48

The Sun accounts for 98% of the mass of the solar system. All the planets in the solar system can fit into the Sun 600 times.

#49

"The old man the boat"

That is a perfectly grammatically correct and complete sentence. They're called garden path sentences and are plays on how we typically encounter words and our biases in how we interpret them.

If you want a crazy one: "The rat the cat the dog bit chased escaped."

That is a perfectly grammatically correct and complete sentence.

Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.

Already a member? Sign in here