The Brain Can’t Feel Pain Despite Its Billions of Neurons and Much More!

1.7K

Here’s our May collection of weird and wonderful facts to impress your mates:

1. The brain can’t feel pain despite its billions of neurons.
2. If you could see as well as the camera on the Hubble Space Telescope, you would be able to read the fine print on a newspaper a mile away.
3. The Earth spins at around 1,000mph and hurtles through space in orbit around the sun at about 67,000mph.
4. Thirteen people died of alcohol poisoning in 1875 in Ireland when a brewery caught fire causing whiskey to flow through the streets.
5. The Solar System is 4.54 billion years old.

An Octopus Has Legs AND Arms?

6. Scientists have been able to modify mosquitos genetically so that they are unable to transmit malaria to humans.
7. A Martian day is about 44 minutes longer than an Earth day.
8. The invention of microwave ovens happened by accident. Percy Spencer was standing in front of an active radar set when he noticed the chocolate bar he had in his pocket had melted.
9. The Mediterranean Sea dried up about 5 million years ago after it became sealed off from the Atlantic Ocean.
10. Strictly speaking, an octopus doesn’t have eight arms, but six arms and two legs.

‘Park It Up, Park It In’

11. North Korea uses a fax machine to send threats to South Korea.
12. The opah, or “moonfish”, is the only known fully warm-blooded fish.
13. A Japanese soldier didn’t surrender until 29 years after World War Two was over.
14. Michael Jordan was fined US$5,000 for every game that he wore Air Jordans as the shoes violated NBA policies. He made an estimated US$90 million in 2013 alone, however, mostly from Nike.
15. Ninety-five percent of a car’s lifetime is spent parked up.

Baa Baa… Pig Sheep?

16. Australia has over 10,000 beaches – you could visit a new beach every day for over 27 years.
17. Like all living things, humans are bio­luminescent: we glow.
18. Someone in the US needs blood every two seconds.
19. The rare Mangalitsa breed of pig looks incredibly like a sheep.
20. In the US in 2014, 218 baby boys were registered with the name “Anakin”.

Viva Las Vegas!

21. In Ancient Rome, the punishment for killing one’s father was to be sewn up in a sack along with a viper, a dog and a cock.
22. The Coca-Cola logo is recognised by 94% of the world’s population.
23. In 2013, PayPal accidentally credited US$92 quadrillion to a man from Pennsylvania.
24. After Google, YouTube is the second largest search engine. It’s bigger than Bing, Yahoo! and Ask combined.
25. The postage stamp of The Statue of Liberty depicts not the real statue in New York, but the replica in Las Vegas.

Get Your Horse Passport at the Ready

26. Apple is the world’s largest IT company by revenue and total assets, and it is the world’s second-largest mobile phone manufacturer after Huawei.
27. Apple headquarter employees earn an average of US$125,000 a year.
28. Ronald Wayne, one of Apple’s original three partners, sold all his shares back to his co-founders for US$800. Today, they would have been worth US$35 billion.
29. The Queen of the UK is the legal owner of one-sixth of the Earth’s land surface.
30. In the UK, all horses, ponies and donkeys must have a “horse passport”.

Brown’s Living in an Upside-Down World

31. In London, it is illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament.
32. Paul Brown invented the upside-down bottle in 1991 and sold his invention to Nasa, Heinz and several shampoo manufacturers. He later sold his company and the rights to the design in 1995 and received US$14 million in return.at a restaurant in New York City and realised he had forgotten his wallet.

Thank you for reading ‘The Brain Can’t Feel Pain Despite Its Billions of Neurons and Much More!’. To read more in our Do You Know series, click here.