The internet is filled with millions of facts, that are both true and very hard to believe. While they sound unbelievably false or questionable, we took time to find out whether they are indeed what true. Here, we have gathered a list of facts that are hard to believe. At times, you might feel like you won’t be able to get through this list without doing some research of your own, but we have already done that for you. Without further ado, here are 18 of them.
1. In 2012, a missing woman was unexpectedly found during a vacation in Iceland when it turned out that she was on the search team searching for herself. According to the woman, she did not realize that she herself was the person they were looking for, and decided to tag along.
2. If you go to Gibraltar, a foreign territory of Great Britain located on the Iberian peninsula, you can easily see Africa from the shores of Spain.
3. A mantis shrimp can swing its claw so fast it boils the water around it and creates a flash of light.
4. Once Enzo Ferrari told a man, “You may be able to drive a tractor, but you’ll never be able to handle a Ferrari”. The man became extremely agitated by Enzo Ferrari’s words, and decided to create the perfect car. His name was Ferruccio Lamborghini.
5. Nutella was invented during WWII, when an Italian pastry maker mixed hazelnuts into chocolate to extend his chocolate ration.
6. T-shirts were originally made for men with no wives and no sewing skills.
Called the “bachelor undershirt”, one of the first ads for t-shirt’s read, “No safety pins — no buttons — no needle — no thread”, the slogan aimed at men with no wives and no sewing skills. Within a year, the t-shirt became extremely popular with thousands of bachelors as well as married men favoring them over any other garment.
7. A woman who lost her wedding ring found it 16 years later on a carrot in her garden.
According to experts, the only explanation is that the ring must have been lost in vegetable peelings that were turned into compost.
8. Try to breathe and swallow at the same time. You can’t.
It’s also impossible to hum while holding your nose.
9. Every two minutes, we take more pictures than all of humanity did throughout the entire 19th century.
10. Pineapples were so expensive in the 1700’s, that people once rented them as fancy decorations.
During that time period, pineapples were imported from the Caribbean islands, with one pineapple costing as much as $8,000 in today’s money.
11. There’s an almost 100% probability that the glass from which you drink contains at least one molecule of water that once passed through the body of a dinosaur.
12. Both the skin and fur of a tiger are striped. Moreover, you won’t find any 2 tigers in the world with identical stripes.
13. You wouldn’t be able to tolerate the earth’s quietest place for more than 45 minutes.
Not only can you hear your heart beating and sometimes hear your lungs, but those who have entered the space have trouble standing up due to the fact that humans use sounds to orient themselves.
14. Before alarm clocks, there were human alarms.
A knocker-upper’s job was to literally take a wooden stick and knock on the door to make sure you’d wake up.
15. Every day we breathe about 22,000 times.
According to the Lung Foundation Australia, the average person breathes around 22,000 times each day. Also, women have a higher breathing rate, which means that they breathe more times than men.
16. In Japan, napping on the job is honorable.
In Japan, napping on the job is seen as a sign of diligence—it’s seen as though you’re working yourself to exhaustion. There’s even a word for it: inemuri, which roughly translates to “present while sleeping.”
17. It would take 22.7 years to eat at every NYC restaurant.
According to data from Open Table, it would take a total 22.7 years of going to one spot a day to eat at every restaurant in NYC.
18. Déjà vu is just a brain-processing lag.
Déjà vu results when there is a split-second delay in transferring information from one side of the brain to the other, so your brain, overall, gets the information twice; making you feel as if the event has happened before.