Fun facts and random facts

What counts as a fun fact here

A good fun fact is surprising, short enough to repeat, and true. That last part is where most lists fail: the Great Wall of China is not visible from the Moon, and glass is not a slow-moving liquid. We include both, the right way round, because myth-busting facts are some of the best ones to share.

Every fact below has a source in small print. Where a fact depends on a definition, like why bananas count as berries or why Antarctica is a desert, the explanation gives the definition.

Fun facts about animals

• Octopuses have three hearts and blue blood. Two hearts pump blood through the gills and one through the body. The blood is blue because it carries oxygen with copper-based hemocyanin instead of iron-based hemoglobin. Source: Smithsonian Ocean
• Wombats produce cube-shaped droppings. A 2021 study found that the last part of the wombat's intestine has stiffer and softer bands of tissue that shape the droppings into cubes. Wombats use them to mark territory. Source: Soft Matter (2021), Georgia Tech study
• Sharks are older than trees. The earliest shark fossils are about 450 million years old. The first trees appeared roughly 385 million years ago. Source: Natural History Museum, London
• A group of flamingos is called a flamboyance. Flamingos are pink because of carotenoid pigments in the algae and shrimp they eat; chicks are born gray. Source: National Geographic
• Butterflies taste with their feet. Taste receptors on their legs let a butterfly check whether a leaf is the right plant to lay eggs on. Source: Smithsonian
• Sea otters hold paws while they sleep so they don't drift apart. Groups of resting otters, called rafts, also wrap themselves in kelp to stay in place. Source: Monterey Bay Aquarium
• Koala fingerprints are so like human ones that they could confuse a crime scene. Australian researchers reported in the 1990s that koala prints are very hard to tell apart from ours, even under a microscope. Source: Nature (1996)
• Hippos can't swim. They are too dense to float. Instead they walk or gallop along the bottom and push off to come up for air. Source: San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance
• Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur. Shave a tiger and the stripes are still visible on its skin. No two tigers have the same pattern. Source: Smithsonian's National Zoo
• Polar bears have black skin under their white-looking fur. Their hair is actually transparent and hollow; it scatters light and looks white. Source: Polar Bears International
• Cows have four stomach compartments. They are the rumen, reticulum, omasum and abomasum. Cows chew their food twice, bringing it back up as cud. Source: USDA
• Owls can't move their eyes, so they turn their heads instead. Their eyes are tube-shaped and fixed in place, but extra neck bones let them turn their heads about 270 degrees. Source: Johns Hopkins Medicine

Fun facts about space

• A day on Venus is longer than its year. Venus takes about 243 Earth days to spin once but only about 225 days to orbit the Sun. Source: NASA
• The Moon is drifting away from Earth by about 3.8 cm a year. Apollo astronauts left mirrors on the Moon, and lasers bounced off them measure the distance precisely. Source: NASA
• The Great Wall of China is not visible to the naked eye from the Moon. It is long but narrow, and similar in color to the land around it. Astronauts say it is hard to spot even from low Earth orbit. Source: NASA
• Saturn is less dense than water. Its average density is about 0.69 g/cm³, lower than water's 1 g/cm³. In a big enough bathtub, it would float. Source: NASA
• Pluto hasn't finished a single orbit since it was discovered. It was found in 1930 and takes about 248 Earth years to go around the Sun, so its first full orbit since discovery will end around 2178. Source: NASA
• The tallest volcano in the solar system is on Mars. Olympus Mons rises about 22 km, roughly two and a half times the height of Everest above sea level. Source: NASA
• Earth isn't a perfect sphere. It bulges at the equator. Its diameter there is about 43 km greater than from pole to pole. Source: NASA

Fun facts about places

• The Eiffel Tower grows taller in summer. Iron expands in heat, so the tower can stand up to about 15 cm taller on a hot day than on a cold one. Source: Eiffel Tower operating company (SETE)
• Scotland's national animal is the unicorn. The unicorn has been a Scottish royal symbol since the 1300s and appears on the royal coat of arms of Scotland. Source: VisitScotland
• The Statue of Liberty was originally copper-brown. Its copper skin slowly oxidized into the green patina we see today; the change took place over the decades after its 1886 dedication. Source: National Park Service
• Alaska is the northernmost, westernmost and easternmost US state. The Aleutian Islands cross the 180° meridian, so some of them lie in the Eastern Hemisphere. Source: US Geological Survey
• The Sahara was green grassland a few thousand years ago. During the African Humid Period, roughly 11,000 to 5,000 years ago, rains supported lakes, grasses and animals such as hippos. Source: NOAA
• The largest desert in the world is Antarctica. A desert is defined by low precipitation, not heat. Antarctica gets very little snow each year, making it larger than the Sahara. Source: US Geological Survey
• Most of the ocean floor has not been mapped in high detail. Less than a third of the seafloor had been mapped with modern sonar as of the early 2020s. Source: NOAA; Seabed 2030
• The Empire State Building is struck by lightning about 20 times a year. Its height and steel frame make it a natural lightning rod, which protects the people inside. Source: National Weather Service (NOAA)
• The Canary Islands are named after dogs, not birds. Roman writers called one island Canaria, from the Latin canis, dog. The birds were named after the islands. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica
• The world's shortest scheduled flight lasts about a minute and a half. Loganair flies between Westray and Papa Westray in Scotland's Orkney Islands, a distance of about 2.7 km. Source: Loganair
• The Golden Gate Bridge's color has a name: International Orange. It was chosen partly because it stays visible in San Francisco's fog. Source: Golden Gate Bridge District
• There is a village in Norway called Hell. Hell is near Trondheim. Its old railway station sign, "Hell Gods-expedition," means "Hell freight handling." Source: Visit Norway
• The Leaning Tower of Pisa started leaning while it was still being built. Construction began in 1173. The soft soil sank after the third floor was added, and work paused for nearly a century. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Russia spans 11 time zones. When it's 9 a.m. in Kaliningrad on the Baltic, it's already 7 p.m. in Kamchatka in the Far East. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica

Fun facts about history

• The shortest war in recorded history lasted under an hour. The Anglo-Zanzibar War of August 27, 1896, ended after roughly 38 to 45 minutes of British naval bombardment. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid. The Great Pyramid was finished around 2560 BC. Cleopatra died in 30 BC, about 2,500 years later, and about 2,000 years before Apollo 11 in 1969. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica; NASA
• Oxford University is older than the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan. Teaching was taking place at Oxford by 1096. The Mexica founded Tenochtitlan around 1325. Source: University of Oxford; Encyclopaedia Britannica
• The first computer "bug" was a real moth. In 1947, operators of the Harvard Mark II found a moth stuck in a relay and taped it in the logbook: "First actual case of bug being found." Source: Smithsonian National Museum of American History
• The oldest surviving camera photograph took hours to expose. Nicéphore Niépce made "View from the Window at Le Gras" in France around 1826–27, probably with an exposure of eight hours or more. Source: Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas
• Abraham Lincoln is in the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. He was a skilled wrestler as a young man and reportedly lost only one match in about 300. Source: National Wrestling Hall of Fame
• The White House has 132 rooms. It also has 35 bathrooms, 412 doors and 28 fireplaces spread over six levels. Source: White House Historical Association

Fun facts about food

• Bananas are berries, but strawberries aren't. Botanists define a berry as a fleshy fruit grown from a single ovary with seeds inside. Bananas fit; strawberries grow from a flower's receptacle, with their seeds outside. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Peanuts aren't nuts. They are legumes, related to peas and beans, and grow underground in pods. Source: USDA
• The Popsicle was invented by an 11-year-old. Frank Epperson left a cup of soda with a stirring stick outside on a cold night in 1905. He patented the idea in 1924. Source: Smithsonian
• Ketchup was once sold as medicine. In the 1830s, tomato ketchup was promoted as a cure for indigestion and other ailments and sold in pill form. Source: Smithsonian Magazine
• Honey can last thousands of years. Archaeologists have found pots of honey in ancient Egyptian tombs. Its low moisture and acidity keep bacteria from growing. Source: Smithsonian Magazine

Fun facts about science

• A lightning bolt is about five times hotter than the surface of the Sun. Lightning can heat the air to around 27,000°C (50,000°F). The Sun's surface is about 5,500°C. Source: National Weather Service (NOAA)
• There are more possible games of chess than atoms in the observable universe. Claude Shannon estimated about 10^120 possible games in 1950. The observable universe has roughly 10^80 atoms. Source: Claude Shannon, Programming a Computer for Playing Chess (1950)
• A typical cumulus cloud weighs about a million pounds. The water droplets are spread over a huge volume, so the cloud floats on rising air even though the total weight is enormous. Source: US Geological Survey
• Glass is not a slow-flowing liquid. Old church windows are thicker at the bottom because of how they were made and installed, not because the glass has flowed. Source: American Chemical Society

Fun facts about people and companies

• The man who designed the Pringles can was buried in one. Fredric Baur died in 2008, and his family placed part of his ashes in a Pringles can, as he had asked. Source: Associated Press, 2008
• Nintendo was founded in 1889, as a playing-card company. Fusajiro Yamauchi started it in Kyoto making hanafuda cards. It moved into video games in the 1970s. Source: Nintendo
• Google's first name was BackRub. Larry Page and Sergey Brin used the name in 1996 for a search engine that ranked pages by their backlinks. Source: Google
• The inventor of the World Wide Web gave it away for free. CERN put the web's software in the public domain in April 1993, which let anyone build on it without paying fees. Source: CERN

Fun facts about words

• The dot over a lowercase i or j is called a tittle. The word dates back to at least the 1300s and is related to the phrase "to a T," according to some etymologists. Source: Merriam-Webster
• The Hawaiian alphabet has only 13 letters. Five vowels and eight consonants, counting the ʻokina, a glottal stop. Hawaiian words always end in a vowel. Source: University of Hawaiʻi
• The word robot comes from a 1920 Czech play. Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. introduced it, from the Czech robota, meaning forced labor. His brother Josef suggested the word. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica
• "Run" has more meanings than almost any other English word. When the Oxford English Dictionary revised the verb for its third edition, it listed 645 senses, overtaking "set." Source: Oxford English Dictionary
• The longest common English word without the vowels a, e, i, o or u is "rhythms." It is seven letters long and uses y as its only vowel sound. Source: Merriam-Webster

Facts about countries

Separate pages collect facts about single countries, each with sources: Japan, Mexico and Canada.

Using facts at a trivia night

Facts make good tiebreakers if you turn them into a number question: how many hearts does an octopus have, how long did the Anglo-Zanzibar War last, how many rooms are in the White House? Closest answer wins. For full rounds of questions, see general knowledge trivia or today's trivia questions.

Questions people ask

Where do these fun facts come from?

Each fact names the source it was checked against, such as NASA, NOAA, the Smithsonian or Encyclopaedia Britannica. If we couldn't confirm a popular 'fact', it isn't here.

How is the fun fact of the day chosen?

The 58 facts are shuffled once and shown one a day in that order, so the same fact won't come round again until all of them have been shown. It changes at midnight UTC.

Can I use these facts at work or in a newsletter?

Yes. They're short, work-safe and sourced, which makes them a good fit for a 'fun fact of the day' in a team meeting, a classroom or an email. A link back is appreciated.

Sources

• NASA Science
• NOAA
• Smithsonian Institution
• Encyclopaedia Britannica