The Fact Ledger

Standing under a Manchineel tree during rain can cause your skin to blister.

The tree's sap is highly toxic and mixes with falling raindrops. This liquid causes severe chemical burns when it touches people.

The world's first novel was written in Japan over 1,000 years ago.

A Japanese noblewoman named Murasaki Shikibu wrote 'The Tale of Genji' around the year 1008. It was the first book to focus on the long-term life and feelings of a single character...

Cashew nuts grow on the outside of a fruit called a cashew apple.

Most nuts grow inside a fruit. The cashew is a seed that hangs in a hard shell from the bottom of a fleshy, pear-shaped fruit. This shell contains a toxic oil, so cashews are alway...

African elephants have a specific alarm call that means humans are nearby.

This unique sound tells the rest of the herd to run away immediately. It is different from the sounds they use for other dangers like bees or lions.

Lesotho is the only country on Earth where every part of the land is at least 1,400 meters (4,593 feet) above sea level.

This nation is located entirely inside South Africa and sits high up in the mountains. Its lowest point is higher than the lowest point of any other country in the world.

The first iPhone combined a phone, a music player, and an internet device into one touchscreen tool.

Before this, most phones used physical buttons or plastic pens to work. The iPhone let people use their fingers to zoom and swipe directly on the glass.

Saturn would float if you placed it in a giant bathtub filled with water.

Saturn is made mostly of light gases like hydrogen and helium. It is less dense than water, which means it weighs less than the same amount of water would.

An adult's blood vessels are long enough to wrap around the Earth four times.

The body contains a massive network of tubes called arteries, veins, and capillaries. Most of this length comes from capillaries, which are tiny vessels that reach every cell.

A blue whale's call is louder than a jet engine.

These sounds reach 188 decibels. Because sound travels better in water than in air, other whales can hear these calls from 1,000 miles away.

Charlie Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest and lost.

In 1915, the famous actor entered a competition to see who could best mimic his movie character. The judges did not recognize him and awarded him third place. They thought other pe...

A newborn kangaroo is only the size of a jellybean.

Kangaroos are marsupials with very short pregnancies. The tiny baby is born before it is fully formed and must crawl into its mother's pouch to finish growing.

Veryovkina Cave is the deepest cave on Earth, reaching 2,212 meters (7,257 feet) underground.

This cave is deeper than seven Eiffel Towers stacked on top of each other. It takes professional explorers over a week to travel to the bottom and back to the surface.

In 1923, German money became so worthless that one U.S. dollar was worth 4.2 trillion German marks.

Germany printed too much paper money to pay off debts after World War I. This caused the value of the currency to drop so fast that prices doubled every few days.

Arachibutyrophobia is the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth.

People with this fear worry they will choke or be unable to swallow. The sticky texture of the peanut butter triggers a physical panic response.

Sea stars have no brain and no blood.

They use a system of tubes filled with seawater to move and stay alive. This water carries nutrients and oxygen to their cells instead of blood.

Butterflies taste food by standing on it with their feet.

Special sensors on their feet detect chemicals in plants. This helps a mother butterfly find the right leaf to lay her eggs on so her caterpillars have the correct food to eat.

Koalas sleep or rest for up to 22 hours every day to save energy.

They eat eucalyptus leaves which are poisonous and have very few calories. Their bodies use most of their energy just to digest this tough food and remove the toxins.

George Washington owned the largest whiskey distillery in America by 1799.

His farm manager convinced him to build the facility at his Mount Vernon estate after his presidency. It produced 11,000 gallons of whiskey in a single year.

The sentence 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' contains every letter of the English alphabet.

This type of sentence is called a pangram. People use it to test fonts, keyboards, and printers because it shows all 26 letters in a short space.

Mario jumps higher the longer you hold down the button.

In early video games, characters always jumped the same height. Super Mario Bros. changed this by checking if the player was still pressing the button 60 times every second.

Charles Martinet became the voice of Mario by crashing an audition he was not invited to.

He arrived as the producers were leaving and convinced them to let him try out. He spoke in a friendly, high-pitched voice until the camera ran out of film.

The 'Super' in Super Mario refers to the effect of the Super Mushroom power-up.

Mario starts each game as Small Mario. He only becomes Super Mario after eating a mushroom that makes him grow twice his original size.

Mario was a carpenter before he became a plumber.

In his first game, Donkey Kong, Mario worked on a construction site made of steel beams. He changed jobs to a plumber two years later when his next game took place in underground s...

Nintendo named the character Mario after their warehouse landlord because they owed him rent.

In 1981, a man named Mario Segale confronted Nintendo staff about late payments. The team decided to use his name for the main character in the game Donkey Kong.

Antarctica is the only continent on Earth with no native ants.

The freezing temperatures and lack of food make it impossible for ants to live there. They cannot keep their bodies warm enough to move or find food in the ice.

Humans cannot breathe and swallow at the same time.

The throat has one main path for both air and food. A small flap called the epiglottis acts like a trapdoor. It shuts your windpipe when you swallow so food does not enter your lun...

Trees use an underground fungal network to share food and send warning signals to each other.

Tiny fungi connect tree roots together to form a massive web. Older trees use this system to send sugar to younger saplings and alert neighbors about pests.

Pistachios are seeds of a fruit, not true nuts.

Pistachios grow inside a fleshy fruit called a drupe. This makes them relatives of peaches, cherries, and mangoes. The part people eat is the seed found inside the fruit's hard pit...

The name 'Impressionism' started as a mean joke by a critic to mock Claude Monet's painting style.

In 1874, art critics hated Monet's blurry painting of a sunrise because it looked unfinished. One critic used the word 'Impression' to insult the work. Monet and his friends liked...

A group of pugs is called a grumble.

This name comes from the low-pitched snorts and grunts pugs make. When many pugs gather, their combined noises sound like people grumbling.

The inside of your lungs has enough surface area to cover a tennis court.

Your lungs are filled with millions of tiny air sacs called alveoli. If you unfolded all these sacs and laid them flat, they would cover about 70 to 100 square meters.

You cannot sink in the Dead Sea because the water is too salty.

The water contains about 34% salt, making it much heavier than a human body. This high density creates a strong upward force that keeps you floating on the surface.

Oxygen turns into a pale blue liquid or solid when it is frozen.

Oxygen gas has no color. When it gets cold enough to turn into a liquid, its molecules absorb red light and reflect blue light to your eyes.

A tiger has striped skin, not just striped fur.

If you shaved a tiger, the same pattern of stripes would still be visible on its skin. These markings are unique to every tiger, much like human fingerprints.

Your body replaces your entire skeleton about every 10 years.

Special cells constantly break down old bone and build new bone in its place. This process keeps your bones strong and repairs small cracks from daily use.

Tofu contains more protein than ground beef when comparing equal amounts of calories.

Tofu provides about 11 grams of protein for every 100 calories. Ground beef with 20% fat provides about 8 grams of protein for the same number of calories.

William Shakespeare was a professional actor who performed in his own plays and owned part of his theater company.

Shakespeare did not just write plays. He spent most of his career on stage as a member of a group called the Lord Chamberlain's Men. He often played smaller roles so he could watch...

William Shakespeare wrote many of his famous poems because the plague forced London theaters to close.

The bubonic plague made public gatherings illegal in the 1590s. Shakespeare could not perform plays for an audience, so he wrote poetry to earn money from wealthy donors.

The first written record of William Shakespeare as a playwright was a public insult calling him an 'upstart crow'.

In 1592, a rival writer named Robert Greene attacked Shakespeare for being an uneducated actor who dared to write plays. This insult shows that Shakespeare was already successful e...

William Shakespeare wrote at least two plays that are completely lost.

Records from his time list titles like 'Cardenio' and 'Love's Labour's Won'. No copies of these scripts exist today because they were never printed or the original papers were dest...

William Shakespeare's tombstone features a curse to stop people from moving his bones.

During the 1600s, workers often dug up old graves to make room for new ones. Shakespeare had a warning carved on his grave to ensure his body stayed in the ground forever.

William Shakespeare never spelled his own name as 'William Shakespeare' in any of his surviving signatures.

During his life, spelling rules did not exist. People often spelled words and names based on how they sounded at the moment.

William Shakespeare invented or first recorded more than 1,700 English words.

He created new words by changing nouns into verbs and joining separate words together. He also added prefixes and suffixes to existing words to give them new meanings.

National Napping Day was created in 1999 to help people recover from losing an hour of sleep when clocks move forward for Daylight Saving Time.

This day happens every year on the Monday after the spring time change. Losing one hour of sleep makes people more tired and less alert. A short nap helps the body catch up and sta...

The United Nations officially recognized International Women's Day in 1975.

Before this, the day was mostly celebrated by labor groups and socialist countries. The UN's decision turned it into a global event for all 193 member nations to focus on women's r...

International Women's Day is on March 8 because of a calendar difference during a 1917 Russian protest.

Russian women started a massive strike for food and rights on February 23 by their local calendar. Most other countries used a different calendar where that same day was March 8. T...

Goldfish can remember information for at least five months and can learn to recognize colors, sounds, and faces.

The idea that goldfish have a three-second memory is a myth. Their brains allow them to link specific signals, like a light or a sound, with a food reward.

Ancient Romans used pigeon droppings and vinegar to bleach their hair blonde.

Light hair was a sign of high status and youth in Roman society. Since most Romans had dark hair, they used the acid in bird waste to strip away their natural hair color.

A honeybee colony visits 2 million flowers and flies 55,000 miles to make one pound of honey.

Bees collect sugary nectar from flowers and carry it back to their hive. They fan the nectar with their wings to remove water until it becomes thick honey.

Crows can remember a human face for over 10 years and tell their friends which people are dangerous.

Crows use facial recognition to identify people who have threatened them. They use loud alarm calls to warn other crows about these specific individuals. This allows the whole grou...