Fact-based Weird Facts
Are Trees Really Plumbed Into Each Other by Fungi?
Fungi really do live on tree roots and help trees grow. Whether they link whole forests into a sharing network is far less certain than the popular story says.
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Weird Facts
Odd but true trivia that lives rent-free in your head.
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Fact-based Weird Facts
Cats Cannot Taste Sweetness
A gene cats need to build a sweet taste receptor is broken, so the cake your cat is sniffing does not taste sweet to it at all.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Snow Falls in the Sahara
At the desert's edge in Algeria, snow has settled on the dunes more than once, and NASA satellites have photographed it from space.
Fact-based Weird Facts
A Jiffy Is a Real Unit of Time
The word you use for hurry up is also a genuine technical term, and depending on who is using it, a jiffy lasts anything from a fiftieth of a second to a few trillionths of one.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Cows Have Best Friends
Cows build preferred relationships, groom the herd-mates who groomed them, and calves raised with a companion do better at learning.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Butterflies Taste With Their Feet
A butterfly landing on a leaf is not resting — it is drumming the surface with its front legs to find out what the leaf is, because it has taste receptors in its feet.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Crush a Wintergreen Mint in the Dark and It Sparks
Bite a hard wintergreen sweet in a pitch-dark room and your mouth will flash blue — a real, repeatable phenomenon with a properly serious name.
Fact-based Weird Facts
There Is No Such Thing as a Raw Cashew
The bag says raw, the shop says raw, and it is not raw — because the shell it came out of holds an oil that irritates skin much like poison ivy does.
Fact-based Weird Facts
The Eiffel Tower Is Taller in Summer
Iron expands when it warms, so the tower grows by 12 to 15 centimetres between a cold winter day and a hot summer one, and its top leans away from the sun while it does it.
Fact-based Weird Facts
The Real Nemo's Dad Would Have Become His Mom
Every clownfish starts adult life as a male, and when the female who rules an anemone disappears, her partner turns into a female and takes her place, so in a real reef Marlin would have become Nemo's mum.