30 Crazy Facts About Life That May Freak You Out a Little
THESE ARE THE FACTS YOU MIGHT WISH YOU NEVER READ.
It’s good to get a little freaked out every now and then. And in many ways, the best way to freak yourself out is by learning something totally, shockingly, and bizarrely new—something that completely upends your view of the world and what you think you know about it. For instance, what if you discovered that a vegetable known for its coloring turned out to not always have been that color? Or what if you learned that a particularly inhumane execution method from the Middle Ages stuck around until the late 20th century? With that in mind, we’ve cobbled together 30 interesting facts about life that are sure to make you raise an eyebrow.
This isopod, Cymothoa exigua, is pretty much the creepiest creature ever. It enters a fish through its gills and attaches to its tongue. From there it severs the blood vessels connecting to the tongue (which causes it to fall off) and attaches itself to the stub that’s left, taking over the food consumption from that point forward.
That fish you just bought is probably a fake. According to researchers at Oceana, mislabeling of fish runs rampant, with about a quarter of fish being sold as something that they are not—yellowtail sold as mahi-mahi, shark that’s actually perch, and everything else that’s actually tilapia.
We think of this beheading instrument as something from the distant past, but the French were using the guillotine up until the same year Saturday Night Fever and Star Wars were released. The last person to be executed by guillotine was Tunisian agricultural worker Hamida Djandoubi, convicted of the kidnapping, torture, and the murder of a woman. He lost his head on February 24, 1977.
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It’s very rare, but it has been known to happen. Called “Coffin Birth,” it’s a phenomenon that occurs when a pregnant woman delivers a child spontaneously after her death—due to gases that built up in the abdominal area, putting pressure on the mother’s uterus and forcing the baby out the birth passageway. One example of this was discovered in 2010 in the grave of a medieval woman who was buried in Italy, according to Smithsonian. (With modern embalming techniques, this doesn’t really happen anymore.)
Yep, these creatures eat and discard waste from the same opening, according to National Geographic. Ew.
A scientist at Oxford discoveredthat the size of a person’s “orbitomedial prefrontal cortex” (the part of a brain that identifies other people’s moods and personalities) can predict the size of that person’s social circle. The average prefrontal cortex averages out to around 147.8 friends in a social network.
Don’t freak out, but your face is crawling with eight-legged, spider-like creatures. Fortunately, they are microscopic and impossible to see—but, according to the BBC, they’re mites with long, worm-like bodies residing in hair follicles and pores or sebaceous glands.
“This is because the food and fluids we swallow and the air we breathe in both travel down the same part of our throat,” according to registered psychiatric nurse James Steinmetz.
Bottled water ads might promote how fresh their water is, but don’t believe them: Anything you’re drinking today has been around for millions of years, recycled repeatedly through precipitation and, yes, evacuation. According to the science YouTube channel Curious Minds, “This means that in every glass of water you drink, there is a lot of water which has already passed through a dinosaur and come out the other end.”
You’d think a celestial body would be bigger than any country on Earth (even if that country is also a continent). But it turns out that’s not the case. Pluto measures 2,370 km across, compared to Australia’s 4,000-km diameter. That means Australia is almost twice as big!
There’s a type of Costa Rican wasp called the Reclinervellus nielseni that attacks a local org spider and paralyzes it. From there, it lays eggs in the spider’s abdomen. The spider wakes back up, until about two weeks later, when the larvae that are growing in the spider’s belly take over the spider’s brain, causing it to create a strange web. They then burst out of the spider and use the web to create their own wasp nest.
It turns out, a couple of distant planets sport some serious bling. Atmospheric data indicates that the gaseous planets of Saturn and Jupiter experience hail storms of diamonds, due to lighting storms that turn methane into soot, which hardens into graphite then diamonds as it falls. One scientist told the BBC that the biggest diamonds would be about a centimeter in diameter—or “big enough to put on a ring.”
It’s crazy but it’s true: Alaska is the most western state, with the Aleutian Islands stretching to the edge of the Western Hemisphere at the 180-degree line Longitude. But the islands also stretch past the 180-degree line of Longitude toward the Russian Federation into the Eastern Hemisphere.
No wonder the Queen loves corgis. In Welsh legend, a pair of corgis were said to tow the carts and carriages of fairies and also help them ride into battle.
It turns out that faking happinesscan hurt your health. For one 2011 study published in the Academy of Management Journal, researchers looked at the behavior of bus drivers—a profession where people are required to have many friendly interactions throughout the day—and discovered that these people withdraw from their work while putting on a smile for show, and that that could have long-term deleterious health effects.
Though the root vegetable is as closely identified with the color orange as anything else (including oranges), carrots were originally purple. This variety originated in the region of what is now Afghanistan and spread throughout the Persian Empire until the 16th century when, according to the Carrot Museum, “the western, orange carrot probably arose in Europe or in the western Mediterranean region through gradual selection within yellow carrot populations.”
Well, not real vampires, but close: One 1994 experiment by Norwegian scientists found that leeches attach themselves to a hand smeared with garlic in 14.9 seconds, compared to 44.9 seconds to a hand without.
If you like crunching ice after you finish your soda, you might be suffering from anemia. Also known as “pagophagia,” the compulsive eating of ice may not just be a nervous tick, but a way of cooling inflammation in the mouth caused by a lack of iron, according to the Mayo Clinic. So if you like chomping down on those cubes, get thee to a doctor, stat.
Two of their hearts work just to circulate blood past the octopus’ gills, with a third to keep the blood moving through its organs. (The third heart stops beating while the animal is swimming, which is why they tend to crawl rather than swim).
For 18 months in the early 1940s, Mike the Headless Chicken lived with most of his head cut off. As it happens, his owner, farmer Frank Lloyd, was looking to cook some chicken the night of his half-decapitation. Lloyd ended up missing the jugular vein and brain stem, allowing the bird to survive. The death-defying chicken is still the pride and joy of his hometown, Fruita, Colorado, where they hold an annual festival in his honor.
Well, it can’t be proven that he invented it, per se. But the first written instance of the name is found in the Bard’s 1596 play The Merchant of Venice: Shylock’s daughter, an Anglicization of the biblical name Iscah, is named Jessica.
That’s every time they feed. Dracula’s favorite friends slurp up an ounce of blood every meal, which takes about 20 to 30 minutes, according to National Geographic. Quite impressive for a creature that weighs only two ounces. Their stomach linings absorb the liquid as fast as possible to avoid weighing them down too much when they take flight.
You might think these bright birds are born that color, but it turns out flamingos are a living adage: They are what they eat—and they eat pink shrimp. “Flamingos are born with gray plumage. They get their rosy hue pink by ingesting a type of organic pigment called a carotenoid. They obtain this through their main food source, brine shrimp, which feast on microscopic algae that naturally produce carotenoids,” according to Smithsonian. “Enzymes in the flamingos’ liver break down the compounds into pink and orange pigment molecules, which are then deposited into the birds’ feathers, legs, and beaks.”
Image via Wikimedia Commons
Though closely identified as a female fashion staple today, high heels were first designed for men. At the end of the 16th century, Persian-inspired style was all the rage in Europe, according to the J. Paul Getty Museum, and heels were seen as being virile and masculine—and a great way to boost your height a few inches.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
Based on the book by William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist, released in 1973, stirred up quite a bit of controversy in the years surrounding its release. For starters, the set used as the home of Regan MacNeil burned to the ground when a bird flew into a circuit box. The only room left standing was the one used for the exorcism.
Even creepier, not only did actors suffer multiple injuries during the filming of the movie, two of them actually died shortly after filming wrapped—actors that played characters who died onscreen. To make matters worse, according to CBS News, when the film premiered in Rome, lightning struck a 400-year-old cross atop a nearby church.
The Red Planet has no known alien life, but there’s plenty of action happening up there, with a population made up entirely of robots. These include robots such as NASA’s Curiosity rover, Odyssey, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
The brewery, Sankt Gallen, produces a beer called Un Kono Kuro, made with coffee beans that have passed through an elephant. It’s a huge hit, according to Fox News.
They can also ejaculate. Called priapism, it’s most often seen in the corpses of men who have died by hanging and it’s due to the pressure on the cerebellum created by the noose.
An effective way to fend off predators is to freak them out, it seems. That’s the strategy of the horned lizard, which will squirt blood from its eyes into the mouth of a coyote or similar predator, according to BBC News. It tastes disgusting and looks pretty gross too, ensuring that the predator retreats.
Called the Troxler Effect, and discovered as long ago as 1804, it causes those who experience it to think they see something fearsome in the mirror just on the periphery of their vision—whether they say “Bloody Mary” three times or not. And for even more facts, check out the 100 Mind-Blowing Facts We Bet You Didn’t Know.
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