15+ Facts That Reveal Even More Mysteries of Our World

Even though information has become easily accessible in modern times, it’s hardly possible to memorize everything. Every day, people all over the world make new discoveries, share the results of their research or experiments, and come across unexpected facts or circumstances. Of course, no one is capable of processing this huge flow of information, but we’ve found the most interesting facts for you and put them together in this article.

• It turns out that not only humans give gifts to each other at the early stage of their romantic relationship. Male dolphins present marine sponges to females when courting them.
• When studying at a university, mathematician George Dantzig was late to his math class. He saw a problem on the blackboard, assumed that this was his homework assignment, and solved it. It turned out that it was the most famous unsolved problem in statistics. This story, though slightly changed, was used in the movie, Good Will Hunting.

• In lions, testosterone directly affects the development of manes, and this is why females and castrated males don’t have one. However, there are exceptions: a few years ago, 5 lionesses were detected in a Botswana national park whose heads were adorned with a mane. However, it wasn’t as voluminous as the ones on males.
• The longest English word consists of 189,819 letters, and this is the chemical name of a protein called “titin.” It takes 3 hours to pronounce this word.
• According to research (its results were published in Science Magazine), the introduction of softer foods to our diet influenced the way we talk. This changed the structure of our teeth and jaws, thanks to which, it became easier for early humans to pronounce the sounds “f” and “v.”

• The platypus is a very weird creature: it lays eggs and its babies feed on their mothers’ milk. But there is another weird thing about this animal — it doesn’t have a stomach. A study showed that platypuses lost most genes responsible for the development of this organ in the process of evolution.
• The purring of domestic cats is not always the same. While monitoring these pets, scientists found out that while begging for food from their owners, cats add sounds to their purr that are similar to a kitten’s meowing or a baby’s crying.

• No one actually knows how to spell William Shakespeare’s name correctly. Moreover, even the playwright didn’t know it himself. Sources from his lifetime spell his last name in more than 80 different ways, ranging from “Shappere” to “Shaxberd.” In the handful of signatures that have survived, he never spelled his own name “William Shakespeare,” using variations such as “Willm Shakspere” and “William Shakspeare” instead.
• When we watch a horror movie, the level of the protein that is responsible for coagulation increases. So, it seems that the word “blood-curdling” has quite a literal meaning.
• When we snap our fingers, the sound comes from the pad of your fingertip smacking against your palm.

• There is a religion called Dudeism, which is based on the philosophy of the Dude, the protagonist of the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski. Its followers, consisting of over 400,000 people around the world, believe that you should always go with the flow and find happiness in simple things, like bowling. In other words, you should lead the lifestyle of Jeff Bridges’ iconic character.
• The Great Wall of China is built from stone blocks that stay together thanks to special mortar made of lime and sticky rice. Moreover, this mortar was also used in other structures built during the Ming era, which helped them survive various cataclysms.

• Children born from identical twins are not cousins. In fact, they are half-siblings, at least genetically, because they share 25% of their DNA instead of the usual 12.5%.
• In March 2019, 20-year-old Arifa Sultana from Bangladesh gave birth to a boy. A month later, she felt pain and was taken to the hospital where it was revealed that she was still pregnant. Doctors performed a C-section, resulting in the birth of twins. Arifa has a condition called uterus didelphys, meaning she has 2 uteruses. Usually, this may cause difficulties with conception, but not in Arifa’s case.
• Our heart makes approximately 2.5 billion beats during our lifetime, pumping about 2,000 gallons of blood daily.

• The food with the longest shelf life is honey. It never spoils. The fact is that honey is actually sugar. No bacteria can survive in the environment with so little moisture, which is why honey will remain edible even after 3,000 years.
• Pluto was discovered in 1930 and lost its planetary status in 2006. Meanwhile, from Pluto’s perspective, there was less than a year between these 2 events. It takes Pluto 248 Earth years to complete one orbit around the sun, which means that it will complete its first full orbit since its discovery in the year 2178.

Do you know any other curious facts about our planet?