If you’re looking to impress your friends, kids and family with random fun facts, and weird and wonderful trivia, you’ve come to the right place. Below you can find 71 interesting facts that will reshape how you see our world – and far far beyond.
So, buckle up and prepare to amuse children, impress (or annoy) your co-workers, dazzle your dinner party guests, and have your own mind blown with our best collection of extraordinary and fun tidbits.
With random facts about everything from animals, space, geography, science, health, biology and much more, welcome to our odyssey of oddities.
71 of the best random fun facts
- A cloud weighs around a million tonnes. A cloud typically has a volume of around 1km3 and a density of around 1.003km per m3 – that’s a density that’s around 0.4 per cent lower than the air surrounding it (this is how they are able to float).
- Giraffes are 30 times more likely to get hit by lightning than people. True, there are only five well-documented fatal lightning strikes on giraffes between 1996 and 2010. But due to the population of the species being just 140,000 during this time, it makes for about 0.003 lightning deaths per thousand giraffes each year. This is 30 times the equivalent fatality rate for humans.
- Identical twins don’t have the same fingerprints. You can’t blame your crimes on your twin, after all. This is because environmental factors during development in the womb (umbilical cord length, position in the womb, and the rate of finger growth) impact your fingerprint.
- Earth’s rotation is changing speed. It’s actually slowing. This means that, on average, the length of a day increases by around 1.8 seconds per century. 600 million years ago a day lasted just 21 hours.
- Your brain is constantly eating itself. This process is called phagocytosis, where cells envelop and consume smaller cells or molecules to remove them from the system. Don’t worry! Phagocytosis isn’t harmful, but actually helps preserve your grey matter.
