I'm certain I've mentioned this before, but did you know that Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza? If that doesn't do your head in, I don't know what will.
What if I told you that we were once this close to nuclear proliferation but that a courageous Soviet officer stopped things before they got too out of control? (That one really makes you realize how fleeting life is, doesn't it?
After Redditor Uwusnapmyneck (oh dear) asked the online community, "What fact sounds like BS but is actually true?" people shared the best ones that came to their minds.
"There is a fence in Australia..."
There is a fence in Australia that is longer than the distance from NYC to London.
And thats not like a 'trick statement'. It's a long fence.
"For 40 years..."
For 40 years, hundreds of children were sent by their parents to a "boarding school" in Maine, USA that cost $50,000 a year.
It was actually an abusive cult that psychologically tortured them, including an actual fight club where staff would demand that one child be beaten by multiple other children, this was called "the Ring" and was called a therapeutic tool by the drug addicts who ran the place.
This "school" was only closed down in 2011.
"It's nearly impossible..."
It's nearly impossible to wipe out coyotes from an area. If you kill them the females will begin to have bigger litters to balance it out. In some instances even killing 70% of an area coyote population wasn't enough to stop them repopulating.
"This is especially noteworthy..."
One of the earliest humans we know of by name, Ea-Nasir, is known because he was a shady merchant who sold low quality copper... and had a special room in his house where he kept hate mail sent by people he'd swindled.
This is especially noteworthy since they were written on clay tablets, which were valuable at the time and therefore were usually wiped clean and reused by the recipient. He went out of his way to keep and store records of how hated he was.
"The great Danish astronomer..."
The great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe died in 1601 from being too polite. He tried to hold in his pee for a long dinner one night and his bladder burst. He died from bladder poisoning a few days later.
"If you see a picture..."
If you see a picture of a starving kid with a disproportionately large belly, it doesn't mean the kid's been recently fed or overfed or anything like that - most of the time it's abdominal edema caused by low protein intake.
"This is because in most creatures..."
Giraffes can only make low bleating sounds, because the path of evolution made it so that the vagus nerve (which controls the larynx) has to make a trip as long as 15 feet (!) from their brain, down around their heart, and back up again to the larynx.
This is because in most creatures with short or no necks the nerve only makes a very short detour to the heart and back. Evolution kept this setup, just lengthened the nerves, and now (it is believed) the trip is so long for giraffes that they have a small but noticeable delay in controlling parts of their head. So, even if they can make more sounds, they wouldn't be very good at it since intricate vocalizations require good muscle control.
"There are more iterations..."
There are more iterations in a game of chess than there are atoms in the observable universe.
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