31 People Share The One Interesting, Random Fact They Know
I know the the ocean covers 71% of the earth's surface and contains 97% of all water on this planet. What these people have shared are far more interesting than what I know!
By 
Michael Koh
1. Swapnil Bokade
We don’t know for sure who invented the fire hydrant because the patent for it was lost in the fire at patent office in Washington DC in 1836.
2. Joel Aguero
Cement is the most widely produced material today, but for ~1300 years we forgot the recipe.
The formula for making cement that would harden after being mixed with water was lost during the descent into the Dark Ages, only to be rediscovered during the 1700s by British engineer, John Smeaton.
image – Myrabella
3. Neeharika Palaka
The tiny island-nation of Tuvalu, located somewhere between Australia and Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean, receives a yearly payment of almost $4 million for doing nothing at all.
The reason? This is the money that the Tuvalu government receives from royalties from the country’s domain name, .tv!
image – mrlins
4. Neal Wu
Until the mid-1800s, lobster was considered a terrible, low-class food. It was frequently served to prison inmates, and servants often had conditions in their employment contracts stating that they refused to eat lobster more than twice a week.
Some states even had laws against serving lobsters to prisoners more than a few times per week, since it was considered a cruel punishment, similar to being forced to eat rats.
image – Roberto Rodríguez
5. Luqman Adam
After WWII, Hiroo Onada who is a Japanese officer, didn’t surrender in 1945 and continued the war for 29 years because he didn’t know the war was over.
6. Tom Allen
The water from a freshly opened coconut can be safely injected into human veins in place of sterilized water-for-injection.
7. Anonymous
From Space, you can still see the division between East and West Germany due to different light bulbs!
8. Mohit Mahawar
Marie Curie’s research papers are still highly radioactive and to access them you must sign a waiver and wear protective clothing.
9. Gareth Evans
The time difference between when Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus lived is greater than the time difference between Tyrannosaurus and now.
10. Jon Squires
Russia is bigger than Pluto.
Pluto’s surface area is about 16,650,000 sq. km. and Russia is 17,075,400 sq. km.
11. Abhisek Pattnaik
A can of regular Coke sinks in water, whereas a can of diet Coke does not!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR0b4QRhfU0&w=584&h=390]
12. Anonymous
Gravity budget : 100 million dollars.
Indian Mars mission : 72.9 million dollars.
13. Kerry Champion
You have more bacterial cells living in and on your body than you have human cells.
If you judge based on cell count or DNA diversity your physical being is more bacteria than human. (If you go based on weight, human cells still predominate.)
14. Balaji Subramanian
More than 95% of all Wikipedia articles (that are not dead-ends) lead to Philosophy, which forms a loop with the Reality article. Try this yourself. Click on any random article, and keep clicking on the first link you see on each page. You should get to Philosophy pretty soon. The first link on Reality takes you to Being which brings you to Objectivity (philosophy) from where you get back to the Philosophy page.
15. Dermot Brennan
In the 1980s, Pablo Escobar‘s Medellin Cartel was spending $2,500 a month on rubber bands just to hold all their cash.
16. Nick Layon
Charlie Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin look alike contest and lost.
17. Ashwani Roy
CAPTCHA or Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart serves more than just preventing spam. By entering the words in the box, you are also helping to digitize texts that were written before the computer age. The words that you see are taken directly from old texts that are being scanned and stored in digital format in order to preserve them and make them more accessible to the world. Since some of the words in these texts are difficult for computers to process, it uses the results of our efforts to help decipher them. That’s why the sign says “Stop spam, read books.”
So, it wasn’t a waste of your precious time after all.
18. Penkey Suresh
When Steven Spielberg dropped out of college in 1968, he was only a few credits short of a diploma. So in 2002, after winning 3 Oscars, 5 honorary doctorates, and 2 lifetime achievement awards, he returned to California State University, long beach, to complete a degree in film and electronic arts. He placed out of FEA 309, the advanced film-making class.
He did this to show gratitude to his parents for giving him the opportunity for an education and a career.
To demonstrate his proficiency, he submitted Schindler’s List.
19. Liam Gorman
Austro-Hungarian man Adam Rainer was the only person in recorded world history to be both a giant and a dwarf.
At age 18 Rainer fit into the category of adult dwarfism at the height of 122.5 cm which was 14.5 cm below the cut-off height for dwarfism. He was 4 feet tall.
Soon after this he had one of the largest recorded growth spurts in any human. By 1931 he was 218 cm (7 feet 2). He then became bedridden and at the time of his death in 1950 he was 237 cm (7 feet 8), his feet were 33.3 cm and his hands were 23.9 cm despite the fact he weighed only 109 kg.
20. Bofin Babu
Turritopsis dohrnii, a species of jellyfish is immortal.
21. Natalia Romano
The flag of Paraguay is the only national flag in the world that’s different in the front and in the back.
21. Piyush Santwani
There is mobile phone reception from the summit of Mount Everest.
Everest has a permanent 3G connection to the summit.
Ncell, the Nepalese subsidiary of Swedish carrier TeliaSonera installed a high-altitude 3G base station at 5,200 meters. The station provides a signal even at the highest point of 8,848 meters.Although the introduction of phone communication all the way up to the summit is a great achievement, it must take a bit of the magic out of making it up there. Imagine you are standing on the peak admiring the view and the sounds, only to have it interrupted by a ringtone in your pocket or from one of the other climbers.
23. Abhishek Lamba
New Zealand is one of the few big cluster of islands in the world which did not break out of a bigger land mass or continent. It rose from the ocean. Now, because it was surrounded by water from all around there was no access for land animals to get there and get a piece of the action.
Only a few birds flew over to this new land full of life. These birds had a really good time and as they did not find any predators on the ground, they gradually forgot about flying. They forgot about getting scared of anything. They were not being hunted or killed.
Population grew faster and faster, so they forgot about reproduction too. Let me put it this way – they forgot about sex!
Their ways to find each other and mate are extremely difficult and almost impossible.
There’s this bird called kakapo which will stand still if you approach it. Pick it up and wear it as a hat. It just doesn’t give a shit.
Explains the Kiwis.
24. Shrey Goyal
More books are written, published and sold per person per year in Iceland than anywhere else on the planet. One in ten Icelanders will become a published author in their lifetime.
Now, isn’t that something.
25. Sajal Jain
That the dictators Benito Mussolini (1935), Adolf Hitler (1939) and Joseph Stalin (1945, 1948) were all nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
26. Ankit Pat
If you think that a little alone time at an absolutely calm and quiet spot would help restore your peace of mind and do you good, think again!
The anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories holds the current Guinness World Record as the quietest place on the planet, and can absorb almost 99.99% of all sound waves incident on its carefully crafted walls.
With all outside noise shut out, test subjects who spent time inside the chamber, started hearing the sounds of their own organs(e.g. their heart, lungs, stomach etc.) functioning, at volumes slightly louder than what they would’ve preferred. Staying in for long enough, caused them to lose their hold on things and hallucinate. The longest anyone has ever lasted in there is 45 minutes!
27. Spandana Nakka
The fingerprints of koala bears are virtually indistinguishable from those of humans – so much so, they could be confused at a crime scene!
image – Vintuitive
28. Rahul Nagar
The bushes in Super Mario were just recolored clouds.
29. Akhilesh Pillalamarri
Fath Ali Shah Qajar, Shah of Persia was gifted a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica around 1800. After reading the whole thing, he extended his royal title to include “Most Formidable Lord and Master of the Encyclopedia Britannica.” I don’t know of any other ruler who had such a bookworm-y official royal title.
30. Raphael Augusto Saavedra
The “black swallower” (Chiasmodon niger) is a fish known for eating bony fish up to 10x its mass and 2x its length.
31. Vikas Yadav
You can use a Fibonacci sequence to convert from miles to kilometres and vice-versa. e.g. 1,1,2,3,5,8,13… 5 miles is 8 kilometres, 3 kilometres is 2 miles.
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