Facts
Things that are true and hard to believe.
Every one is real, sourced, and says so where the evidence is contested. Tap any card for the full explanation.
A language was born in front of researchers in the 1980s
Deaf Nicaraguan children were brought together, given no sign language, and invented one.
Gallium melts in your hand
A metal with a melting point below body temperature.
Basque is related to no other language on Earth
Surrounded by Romance languages, descended from none of them.
Superfluid helium climbs out of its own container
Cooled far enough, it flows with no viscosity and creeps up the walls.
Shakespeare did not coin as many words as you were told
He is the first recorded use of many words. That is a different claim.
Light has been slowed to the speed of a bicycle
And then stopped entirely, and then released again.
QWERTY was not designed to slow typists down
The jamming story is repeated everywhere and rests on very little.
Bananas are measurably radioactive
So are you, and so is anyone you hug.
One Amazonian language appears to have no exact numbers
Roughly one, roughly two, many. And speakers struggle with exact matching tasks above three.
A second is defined by a caesium atom, not the Earth
Exactly 9,192,631,770 oscillations. The planet turned out to be an unreliable clock.
OK began as a joke about bad spelling
From a fad for comic abbreviations in 1830s Boston newspapers.
Most of Earth’s gold probably came from colliding neutron stars
Ordinary stars cannot make it. Something more violent had to.
Writing was probably invented for accounting
The oldest substantial texts are receipts, not poetry.
Nuclear testing left a timestamp in every living thing
Atmospheric bomb tests doubled carbon-14, and biology recorded the spike.
Zero took centuries to be accepted in Europe
Some Italian cities banned it as an invitation to fraud.
Twenty-three people give you a better than even chance of a shared birthday
It feels like it should take hundreds. It takes a small classroom.
Studying for an exam in the room you will sit it in helps
Divers who learned word lists underwater recalled them better underwater.
Fold a piece of paper 42 times and it reaches the Moon
In principle. In practice you will stop at about seven.
We only use ten per cent of our brains is completely false
Scans show essentially all of it active over the course of a day. Damage anywhere causes deficits.
Switching doors doubles your odds, and almost nobody believes it
Professional mathematicians wrote in to say it was wrong. It was not.
Real-world numbers start with 1 far more often than chance allows
About 30 per cent of the time. Tax authorities use this to catch fraud.
Some infinities are bigger than others
There are more numbers between 0 and 1 than there are whole numbers, and it can be proved in a paragraph.
NASA uses only fifteen decimal places of pi
Enough to calculate a circle the size of the solar system to within a centimetre.
Rice on a chessboard bankrupts a kingdom
One grain on the first square, doubling each time. By square 64 you owe more rice than exists.