Fact-based Weird Facts
Flamingos Are Not Born Pink
A baby flamingo hatches fluffy and pale grey, and it only turns that famous pink because of what it eats, a colour its parents can lose again while feeding it.
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Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Do Your Fingers Wrinkle in the Bath?
It looks like your skin has simply soaked up too much water, but the wrinkles are made on purpose by your nervous system, and they may be there to help you hold on.
Fiction Made-Up Words
Yawnrelay
(n.) The single yawn that sets off at one end of a meeting table and travels, person by person, all the way to the other end, where the dog lying under it yawns too.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Do We Get Goosebumps?
A cold breeze, a scary film and a favourite song can all raise the same tiny bumps on your arms, which is a lot of effort for hair we barely have.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Can't You Tickle Yourself?
The same finger that makes a friend squeal does nothing at all on your own ribs, because a part of your brain reads the script before the tickle arrives.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Tardigrades Spent Ten Days in Open Space and Lived
Three thousand microscopic animals were bolted to the outside of a spacecraft, the lids were opened, and most of them came back perfectly fine.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does Your Own Voice Sound So Strange on a Recording?
Hearing yourself played back is like meeting a stranger who has borrowed your words, and part of the reason is that you have spent your whole life listening from inside your own head.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Sloths Are Secretly Excellent Swimmers
Slow on the ground, sloths float thanks to gas from digesting leaves, keep their noses up like a snorkel and swim about three times faster than they walk.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Koalas Have Fingerprints Almost Identical to Ours
Under a microscope a koala's fingertip carries the same loops and whorls a human one does, close enough that specialists have struggled to tell the two apart.
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.