Useless trivia and facts

lis

Mount Everest isn't the tallest mountain on Earth. Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa in Hawaii, the twin volcanoes, are taller than Mount Everest as 4.2km of their height is submerged underwater. The twin volcanoes measure a staggering 10.2km in total, compared to Everest’s paltry 8.8km.

lis

Our solar system has a wall. The heliopause – the region of space in which solar wind isn’t hot enough to push back the wind of particles coming from distant stars – is often considered the “boundary wall” of the Solar System and interstellar space.

lis

Octopuses don’t actually have tentacles. They have eight limbs, but they're arms (for most species). Technically, when talking about cephalopods (octopuses, squids etc), sciencotists define tentacles as limbs with suckers at their end. Octopus arms have suckers down most of their length.

lis

Most maps of the world are wrong. On most maps, the Mercator projection – first developed in 1569 – is still used. This method is wildly inaccurate and makes Alaska appear as large as Brazil and Greenland 14 times larger than it actually is. For a map to be completely accurate, it would need to be life-size and round, not flat.

lis

NASA genuinely faked part of the Moon landing. While Neil Armstrong's first steps on the lunar surface were categorically not faked, the astronaut quarantine protocol when the astronauts arrived back on Earth was largely just one big show.

lis

Earth’s poles are moving. This magnetic reversal of the North and South Pole has happened 171 times in the past 71 million years. We’re overdue a flip. It could come soon, as the North Pole is moving at around 55 kilometres per year, an increase over the 15km per year up until 1990.

lis

You can actually die laughing. And a number of people have, typically due to intense laughter causing a heart attack or suffocation. Comedy shows should come with a warning.

lis

You don’t actually lose most of your heat through your head. Your face, head and chest are more sensitive to temperature changes, but this myth isn’t entirely true. In reality, covering any part of the body helps prevent heat loss in the same way.

lis

The T.rex likely had feathers. Scientists in China discovered Early Cretaceous period tyrannosaur skeletons that were covered in feathers. If the ancestors of the T. rex had feathers, the T. rex probably did, too.

lis

Football teams wearing red kits play better. The colour of your clothes can affect how you’re perceived by others and change how you feel. A review of football matches in the last 55 years, for example, showed that teams wearing a red kit consistently played better in home matches than teams in any other colour.