Trivia Asylum
Fun Facts
240 facts we are reasonably confident about, across six subjects. Press the button and take your chances.
Fun Facts About Animals
An octopus has three hearts: two pump blood through the gills and one drives it around the rest of the body. That third heart stops beating when the animal swims, which is part of why octopuses would rather crawl.
Source: Smithsonian Ocean
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Fun Facts About Animals
The animal kingdom keeps producing things no committee would have approved. Here are forty facts about the creatures we share the planet with: the sleepers, the swimmers, the ones with too many hearts.
- An octopus has three hearts: two pump blood through the gills and one drives it around the rest of the body. That third heart stops beating when the animal swims, which is part of why octopuses would rather crawl.
- The sperm whale has the largest brain of any animal that has ever been measured, weighing in at around 7.8 kilograms - roughly five times the mass of a human brain.
- The Arctic tern makes the longest migration known in the animal kingdom, tracked at over 70,000 kilometres a year as it commutes between Arctic breeding grounds and Antarctic waters. It effectively lives in perpetual summer.
- The wood frog spends winter frozen solid. Its heart stops, its breathing stops, and up to two-thirds of the water in its body turns to ice, with glucose acting as a cryoprotectant until it thaws in spring.
- The saltwater crocodile holds the highest bite force ever directly measured in a living animal: about 16,460 newtons, or roughly 3,700 pounds of force.
Fun Facts About Space
Space is mostly nothing, and the something is very strange indeed. Forty facts about the planets, the stars and the distances that make the numbers stop meaning anything.
- The Sun holds about 99.8 percent of all the mass in the solar system. Every planet, moon, asteroid and comet put together is essentially rounding error.
- Mercury turns exactly three times on its axis for every two trips around the Sun. The arithmetic of that lock means a single solar day there lasts about 176 Earth days, twice the length of Mercury's 88-day year.
- Venus spins backwards compared with most planets, and it spins slowly: one rotation takes 243 Earth days while one orbit takes only 225. The planet's day outlasts its year.
- Earth is the only planet in the solar system whose English name does not come from Greek or Roman mythology. It derives from old Germanic and Anglo-Saxon words simply meaning ground.
- Olympus Mons on Mars rises roughly 22 kilometres above the surrounding plains, about two and a half times the height of Everest above sea level. Its base would comfortably cover the state of Arizona.
Fun Facts About the Human Body
You have been operating one of these your whole life without a manual. Forty facts about the bones, the bacteria and the several litres of blood currently doing their rounds.
- A newborn arrives with roughly 300 bones, while a typical adult skeleton has about 206. The difference is not loss but fusion: separate pieces of cartilage and bone knit together as the body matures, most obviously in the skull and the sacrum.
- More than half the bones in the human body are in the hands and feet. Each hand and wrist accounts for 27 and each foot and ankle for 26, which is 106 of the adult total of roughly 206.
- The stapes in the middle ear is the smallest bone in the body, at around three millimetres long. It transmits vibration from the eardrum to the fluid of the inner ear, and it is fully grown at birth.
- The femur is the longest and heaviest bone in the body, typically about a quarter of a person's height. It also carries the largest loads, routinely handling several times body weight during running.
- Bone is not inert scaffolding. Adults replace roughly ten percent of their skeleton each year through remodelling, with osteoclasts dissolving old bone and osteoblasts laying down new material.
Fun Facts About Food
Everything on your plate has a history, and quite a lot of it is stranger than the recipe suggests. Forty facts about what we eat, where it came from and what it used to be.
- Botanically, a banana is a berry: a fleshy fruit developed from a single ovary with seeds inside. A strawberry is not, since its seed-like specks are the actual fruits and the red flesh is swollen flower tissue.
- An avocado is a single-seeded berry. The oily green flesh is fruit pulp, which is why avocado behaves less like a vegetable and more like a very rich fruit in the kitchen.
- Fresh pineapple contains bromelain, an enzyme that breaks down protein, so it will stop gelatin from setting. Canned pineapple works fine because the heat of canning destroys the enzyme.
- Apple seeds do not grow into copies of the parent tree; each seedling is a genetic lottery ticket. Every commercial apple variety is therefore propagated by grafting cuttings onto rootstock, which makes a Granny Smith orchard effectively one enormous clone.
- Cranberries have tiny air pockets inside them and float, which is why growers flood their bogs at harvest and skim the fruit off the surface. The berries are not grown underwater the rest of the year.
Fun Facts About History
History is not a straight line and it is rarely dignified. Forty facts about the wars, the inventions and the accidents of timing that turned out to matter.
- Cleopatra lived closer in time to the first Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza. The pyramid was already about 2,500 years old when she was born.
- A small population of woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until roughly 4,000 years ago. The Great Pyramid was standing while they were still alive.
- The first author in history known by name is Enheduanna, a high priestess in Mesopotamia who wrote hymns in Sumerian around 2300 BC. She signed her work, which is why we know her at all.
- The oldest known written customer complaint is a Babylonian clay tablet from about 1750 BC, in which a man named Nanni informs the merchant Ea-nasir that the copper he delivered was of unacceptable quality. It now sits in the British Museum.
- Sudan contains more ancient pyramids than Egypt does. The Kushite rulers of Nubia built over 200 of them, and for about a century starting around 747 BC those same rulers governed Egypt as its 25th Dynasty.
Fun Facts About Geography
The map is stranger than it looks once you check the measurements. Forty facts about borders, oceans, mountains and the places that refuse to behave.
- By the standard definition of a desert - a region receiving very little precipitation - Antarctica is the largest desert on Earth, at roughly 14 million square kilometres. The Sahara, at about 9 million, is the largest hot desert.
- Mount Everest has the highest summit above sea level, at roughly 8,849 metres. Measured from base to peak, Mauna Kea in Hawaii is taller, rising about 10,200 metres from the Pacific seafloor, though only some 4,200 metres of that is above water.
- Russia spans eleven time zones, more than any other country. France, counting its overseas departments and territories scattered across the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans, is spread across twelve.
- Canada has the longest coastline of any country, at roughly 202,000 kilometres - a figure inflated by its tens of thousands of Arctic islands and by the fact that coastline length depends heavily on the scale of the map you measure it on.
- Lesotho, San Marino and Vatican City are the only three countries entirely surrounded by a single other country. Lesotho sits inside South Africa; the other two are enclosed by Italy.
Working through the geography ones? The flags of the world directory has every national flag in one place.