Fact-based Weird Facts
Goldfish Do Not Have a Three-Second Memory
The famously forgetful goldfish can remember things for months, learn to press a lever for food, work out what time dinner is served and tell its owner apart from other people.
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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
Some Bamboo Can Grow Almost a Metre in a Single Day
Certain bamboos have been measured growing about 91 centimetres in 24 hours, roughly a millimetre every ninety seconds, which is fast enough that you could almost watch it happen.
Fact-based Weird Facts
A Teaspoon of Neutron Star Would Weigh a Billion Tons
Squeeze more than the mass of our Sun into a ball the size of a city and you get a neutron star, where a single teaspoonful of matter would weigh about a billion tons on Earth.
Fact-based Weird Facts
You Cannot See the Great Wall of China From the Moon
It is one of the most repeated facts in the world, and it is wrong: from the Moon the wall is invisible, and even from orbit it is so hard to spot that astronauts argue about it.
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.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Oxford University Is Older Than the Aztec Empire
Students were being taught in Oxford more than two hundred years before the city of Tenochtitlan was founded, and over three centuries before the Aztec Empire took shape.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Scotland's National Animal Is the Unicorn
Other countries picked eagles, bears and lions, and Scotland chose a creature nobody has ever seen, then kept it in golden chains just to be on the safe side.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Lightning Does Strike the Same Place Twice
The old saying is wrong: tall, pointy, isolated things are struck again and again, and New York's Empire State Building takes an average of 23 hits a year.
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 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.