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.
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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.
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 Cosmic Questions
Do Plants Get Bored?
A houseplant spends its life in one pot, but it is far from idle: plants sense light, gravity and even touch, and can switch on touch-response genes within minutes.
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
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.
Fact-based Weird Facts
That Fresh Rain Smell? You're Actually Sniffing Bacteria
The earthy smell of rain has a name, petrichor, and a key ingredient is geosmin, made by soil bacteria, which the human nose can detect at about one hundred parts per trillion.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Octopuses Have Three Hearts and Blue Blood
Two hearts serve the gills, one serves the body, and that one stops when the octopus jets away.