17 Facts You Might Not Be Able to Forget

Curiosities
2 years ago

Think about the thoughts you have before you fall asleep — especially when you need to fall asleep very quickly. At moments like these, your brain starts wondering about different things that you never think about on a regular day like, how much does a cloud weigh? Can a person sense smells while they sleep? How much energy does a human body produce? Luckily for you, we found the answers to all of these questions!

Bright Side has prepared 17 interesting facts that you can think about before you go to sleep.

  • You can know the degrees of an angle using just your hand. Spread your fingers as much as possible, and put your palm on a surface of the angle of which you want to measure. The little finger should lie on the bottom side and represents 0°. The angle between the thumb and the little finger will be 90°, the angles between the little finger and the other fingers are 30°, 45°, and 60°, respectively.
  • Every time you shuffle a deck of cards, probability says you might just be the first person in history to have the cards in this specific order.
  • The oxygen atoms that are now in our lungs, the carbon in our muscles, the calcium in our bones, and the iron in our blood were born inside stars and scattered around the universe when they exploded. This means that all of us are part alien and made of stardust.
  • You can find out the number of days in each month using your knuckles. Make a fist and start counting the months by knuckles. Each knuckle bump and gap is a separate month. Start to count on one hand, then, after reaching the end, start again with the knuckles of the index finger. If the month is on the knuckle bump, there are 31 days, if it’s on the gap, the month contains 30 days or less.
  • One 43 cm pizza is bigger than two 30 cm pizzas.
  • The person sitting the closest to you on the left is the furthest from you on the right.
  • Human saliva contains a natural painkiller called opiorphin which is six times more effective than morphine. Additionally, opiorphin can have both an anti-panic and an anti-depressive effect.
  • There are “prohibited” colors that our brain can’t imagine. They consist of shades which compensate for each other in human eyes, for example, red-green or yellow-blue. If someone asks you to imagine the yellow-blue color, you will think about green while in fact, there is a color that exists of both yellow and blue at the same time but we can’t imagine it.
  • Every year, 98% of you becomes a new person. This is how many new atoms you get in a year.
  • By the time you are 60, you will lose half of your taste buds and the ability to tell the difference between sweet, salty, sour, and bitter products.
  • Most people have no idea that street lights are actually much bigger than they seem and the lines on the road are much thicker than they seem. There is an explanation for this phenomena called size perception.
  • During pregnancy, if a woman damages her internal organs, the baby sends its stem cells to the damaged spot to speed up the healing process.
  • Your age is just the number of circles you’ve made around the sun.
  • An average cloud weighs around 500 tons (100 elephants) and a storm cloud weighs the same as 200,000 elephants. Scientists were able to “weigh” a cloud by knowing its size and the approximate amount of water in it.
  • In 1991, Sociologist Scott Feld counted the average number of friends that one person has and compared it to the number of friends of the friends of that person. The second number was always bigger than the first one, which means that your friends always have more friends than you do. This is where the friendship paradox comes from.
  • The people who were born in the 1990s lived in two millenniums, two centuries and three decades — and they’re not even 30 years old yet.

Do you know any interesting facts like these? Share them in the comment section below!

Please note: This article was updated in August 2022 to correct source material and factual inaccuracies.

Comments

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I actually made an account just to say how stupid the angle of the fingers trick is. It is in no way accurate at all. My hand span is over 110* from thumb to pinkie, and my middle and ring fingers are not spaced evenly from my index and pinkie. Some of these are the dumbest things I have ever read.

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The one about the cards isn't necessarily true. When you shuffle a deck you change the cards from their original order, yes, but it is entirely possible to shuffle it into an order that someone else has already shuffled it. Furthermore, there has always been 52 cards in a deck (according to Wikipedia, bear with me) so there are only so many combinations of a shuffled deck since it was invented. Assuming no two people have shuffled a deck in the same exact way, it is possible that you may still be the first person to put the cards in that order but it won't be that way much longer seeing as the world population continues to grow. It would have been more accurate to say, "it is likely that you are the first person to put the cards in that order".

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