11+ Refreshing Facts About Everything

In a supermarket, you pass by a shelf with eggs and try to decide which ones are better, the white ones or the brown ones. There’s practically no difference between them. The eggs’ color depends on the breed of chicken. These birds produce two different color pigments. You can take eggs of any color because the nutritional components of the eggs are almost the same. So what came first — the brown egg or the white egg? Never mind...

It’s enough to use a small amount of toothpaste to brush your teeth, the size of a pea. But the ads show that you have to cover the entire toothbrush with paste as a marketing ploy. Manufacturers want you to buy a new tube faster.

A plane leaves white lines behind in the blue sky thanks to the condensation of carbon dioxide, steam, and burning fuel. In winter, heated air visibly comes out of your mouth. The same principle works here. It’s always icy at the altitude where planes are flying. Exhaust and hot air comes out of the turbines. When it collides with cold air, it creates thick lines of steam.

Almost all hotels have white bedsheets. They choose this color specifically to show how high their standards of cleanliness are. The whiter and brighter the sheets are, the more luxurious the hotel seems. It’s much easier to see dirt and stains on white linen. It’s like proof that you’ve checked into a cleaned room.

Gasoline looks like a rainbow in a puddle because it can’t mix with water. It forms a thin membrane over it. When light reflects from it and the water at the same time, you’ve got a rainbow.

The “DO NOT DISTURB” sign on your hotel room door is not a requirement but just a suggestion. Maids and staff have the right to go there if they suspect something’s wrong, especially if you don’t remove the sign for 24 hours.

Why do clocks go to the right? The sun is the main reason. In ancient times, when people invented the sundial, the sun’s shadow was moving to the right in the northern hemisphere and to the left in the southern one. Mechanical clocks were first invented in the northern hemisphere, so it always goes right. Or as we now say, clockwise.

Why are the cups at parties colored red? Because it helps you quickly find your drink on the table among snacks and drinks, and all those other Red Cups. Here’s a hint — write your name on your cup. Also, red is considered a color that provokes action. At the psychological level, it seems the red cup is commanding you: “Drink me up”!

They believe yellow taxis have their roots in 15th century Italy. One postal businessman used yellow cabins for delivering mail. He wanted everyone to recognize his carts.

About 60 to 80% of people, mostly aged 15 to 25, occasionally have goosebump-inducing déjà vu moments. It’s fleeting and unpredictable, and scientists are still not 100% sure why it happens and can’t control it. To understand it better, they tried to create memories for patients under hypnosis. Then, they asked them to forget or remember the memory, and it made them experience déjà vu later. Other scientists tried to recreate it in virtual reality with scenes in games that looked alike.

The experiments made them believe déjà vu is your memory playing tricks on you. You get into a situation that’s similar to a real memory that you have but you can’t remember it completely. Your brain notices the similarities and leaves you with a strange feeling of “already seen”. That’s how déjà vu translates from French. Another version is that it’s a memory glitch. It’s more likely to happen when you’re stressed. When you’re under pressure or have a lot of information to process at once, some of it can end up in long-term memory instead of short-term memory.

So you take your best friend Max to doggy park. He meets the labradoodle of his dreams, and they start playing together. Peaceful tail wagging quickly grows into biting each other. Oh no — they’re going for the necks. You grab Max and rush back home. Well, in fact, there was no need to rush home. Playing with open mouths is called mouth-wrestling or jaw-sparring. It’s a healthy way of interaction between dogs. They inherited this habit from their wolf ancestors. When a dog is a puppy, it has to learn some important skills including fighting. Mouthing is just an imitation of it. When a puppy matures, it will know how to protect itself and respect boundaries of other doggos. All the chasing, wrestling, growling, and face-biting is a way to socialize with others and have fun in dog world. It’s something like sibling rivalry and playful fights in the human world.

Cute kittens and cats under the age of 2 also practice mouthing. They often tumble over each other and bite one another’s necks to let their hunter instincts out. In the wild, cats are fast and merciless, and they can’t hide it behind all the purrs in the world. Play biting with other kitties can also teach your little Mister Biscuit to be more gentle when it plays with you and other humans, so it’s all good. Cats like to sharpen their claws on your furniture to leave a visual mark on their territory. They also do it to let their claws renew and stretch their back and shoulders. The couch seems perfect for it because it’s not too short and is sturdy enough. Well, you gotta find a good replacement with the same qualities to let your kitty scratch and release its emotions.

Cats freak out when they see a cucumber because it looks too much like their long-time enemy — snakes. They’re naturally programmed to jump up in the air to protect themselves from a bite. Anything that looks similar, from toys to eggplants, causes a similar reaction. It’s never a good idea to show them things like that for fun. It can really mess up their mental health.

Fish have gills and fins, but they don’t have necks. Instead, they have a series of bones that connect their skull and shoulder girdle. One of the reasons for that is it would be really hard to be fast while swimming if they had a neck wagging back and forth. Plus, the moment a creature similar to fish developed a neck, science automatically classified it as another group of animals. That means the official definition says if a creature has a neck, we can’t call it a fish. The oldest neck scientists have on record belongs to one unusual creature that lived 375 million years ago. It was part fish and part tetrapod, which is a term for an animal with 4 limbs.

Rain won’t always make the ground wet. There are very hot and dry areas where rain can evaporate even before it gets to the ground. It’s something called “phantom rain.” You can see dense curtains of drops coming from above, but at the same time, nothing’s on the ground, and none of the water reaches the living beings.

Rats laugh when you tickle them. They mostly giggle when being tickled, and, during one experiment where researchers tickled them, they even chased after their hands in a playful manner. All of the great apes — which is a group that includes gorillas, orangutans, bonobos, and chimpanzees — are ticklish, too, and generally, respond to tickling with a pretty distinctive human-like laugh. Penguins, dogs, meerkats, and many others also seem to pretty much like it.

Different nations have different systems when it comes to vehicle registration, including license plate color. Australia goes with an unlimited palette when it comes to plates. They include many different motifs and designs. In the UK, cars have two possible number plate colors — yellow at the back of a vehicle and white at the front. Both have black characters. It wasn’t always like this — number plates in this country used to have either white or silver characters. But starting from 1979, all vehicles must have the exact plates we see today for a reason. Every registration plate must be made from reflective material. So, if the number plate at the back of your car is white, it might reflect white light — which is not legal.

Elephants have enormous ears, and normally they hold them out to scan noise back and forth. But there are sometimes distant vocalizations and noise they can “hear” with their feet. When they detect something that’s far away, elephants freeze and lean forward. They transfer weight to their front legs and may even lift up a front foot. Hmm, Hearing with your toes — that’s quite a feat! Ha.