The Fact Ledger

An ostrich's eyes are bigger than its whole brain.

Each eye is about 50 millimeters (2 inches) wide, about the size of a billiard ball. The eyes take up most of the space inside the skull. That leaves the brain much smaller by weig...

Ants don't have lungs and breathe through tiny holes on the sides of their bodies.

These tiny holes are called spiracles. They connect to a web of tubes that carry oxygen directly to every part of the ant's body.

Millions of trees grow every year because squirrels forget where they hid their snacks.

Squirrels bury nuts like acorns in the ground to save food for winter. When they can't find them later, those buried nuts sprout and grow into brand-new trees.

You share about half of your DNA with a banana.

Even though you don't look like a piece of fruit, your cells work in a very similar way. You and bananas both use the same genetic instructions to grow, divide cells, and turn food...

The world's most expensive pizza costs $12,000 and takes three full days to make in your own kitchen.

This tiny pizza is topped with three types of rare caviar and lobster from Norway. A team of three experts comes to your house to cook it using special tools and fancy ingredients...

Jellyfish are 95% water and have no brain, heart, or bones.

Because they are mostly water, they can float easily and drift with ocean currents. The water inside their bodies actually acts like a skeleton to help them keep their shape.

Before erasers were invented, people used rolled-up pieces of white bread to wipe away pencil marks.

The soft, squishy middle of a fresh bread loaf is naturally sticky. When you rub it on paper, it picks up the pencil lead just like a modern eraser does.

Neptune is the only planet in our solar system found using math before anyone ever saw it through a telescope.

Astronomers noticed Uranus was being pulled off its path by something invisible. They used math to figure out exactly where this mystery planet was hiding, and they were right!

The Sahara Desert sometimes gets covered in thick, white snow.

Cold air from Europe occasionally blows far enough south to reach the desert. When this freezing air meets moisture in the sky, snow falls and settles on the giant orange sand dune...

Sea otters hold hands while they sleep so they don't drift away from each other.

They form giant groups called rafts to stay safe. By grabbing paws or wrapping themselves in seaweed, they make sure the ocean waves don't pull them apart while they nap.

The Beatles were so popular that guitar sales in America doubled in just one year.

After the band played on TV in 1964, millions of kids wanted to be just like them. This caused a massive rush to music stores as teenagers everywhere started their own bands.

The 'Brown Note' is a total myth—there is no sound frequency that can make you lose control of your bowels.

While super low sounds can make your body vibrate or feel weird, they won't force you to run to the bathroom. Scientists have tested this with giant speakers and found it just does...

The famous 'Marshall Stack' was invented because a rock star wanted to be louder than a screaming crowd.

In 1965, Pete Townshend of "The Who" asked for a massive amplifier that could drown out his fans. Jim Marshall solved this by stacking two big speaker boxes on top of each other to...

A vinyl record has only one single groove that spirals for about 1,500 feet on each side.

A needle travels along this long, bumpy path from the edge to the center. As the needle hits tiny bumps in the groove, it vibrates to create the music you hear.

The famous 'rock on' hand gesture was actually a secret trick used by Ronnie James Dio’s grandmother to scare away bad luck and ward off the "evil eye."

Heavy metal singer Ronnie James Dio started using the sign in 1979 to give fans a special way to connect. He learned it from his grandma, who used it to protect people from the 'ev...

Queen recorded so many voices for 'Bohemian Rhapsody' that the recording tape brown coating wore off

The band sang their parts over and over to sound like a giant choir. They used the same piece of tape so many times that the brown coating wore off, making the tape transparent.

The term 'Heavy Metal' was first used in a rock song to describe the sound of a motorcycle.

The band Steppenwolf used the phrase 'heavy metal thunder' in their 1968 hit 'Born to Be Wild.' People loved the name so much they started using it to describe loud, powerful rock...

The famous '27 Club' is a myth because rock stars don't actually die more often at age 27 than at any other age.

Many people believe musicians are cursed to die at 27, but data shows this isn't true. While some famous stars did pass away at that age, researchers found it was just a coincidenc...

Music producers once crammed 30 musicians into a tiny room to make songs sound like a giant orchestra.

This 'Wall of Sound' technique layered dozens of instruments playing the same notes at once. It made rock songs sound massive and powerful even on tiny, cheap radios.

The Beatles played a concert so loud that they had to use the stadium's baseball announcement speakers just to be heard.

In 1965, concert speakers were too small for big crowds. When 55,000 fans started screaming, the band's music was completely drowned out.

Heavy metal music's scary sound comes from a 'forbidden' musical note combo once called the Devil in Music.

This sound is called a tritone and it sounds super tense and creepy. For hundreds of years, musicians avoided it because it sounded too evil, but the band Black Sabbath used it in...

Your brain runs on 20 watts of power, which is enough to light up a single dim LED light bulb.

Even though it is small, your brain is a power-hungry organ. It uses this tiny bit of electricity to send messages between billions of cells so you can think, move, and breathe.

A single bolt of lightning is five times hotter than the surface of the sun.

When lightning shoots through the sky, it heats the air to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit in a split second. This happens because the air tries to block the electricity, creating massiv...

Every last Thursday of February is National Toast Day, started in 2014 by UK bread experts to celebrate crunchy, golden toast.

UK bread experts created the day in 2014 to celebrate how heat turns bread into a tasty, crunchy treat and to help bakeries during a quiet month.

The fastest piano player, Domingos-Antonio Gomes, struck a single piano key 824 times in one minute, averaging 13 hits per second.

This record is only possible because of a special mechanical trick inside grand pianos. It allows the hammer to hit the string again before the key even comes all the way back up.

The most common day for babies to be born in the U.S. is Tuesday, largely due to scheduled births during the workweek.

Doctors often schedule planned births like C-sections and inductions during the workweek. Tuesday is the most popular choice because hospitals have the most staff ready to help.

The 1912 Olympics were the last time winners received medals made of solid gold.

Today, gold medals are actually made of silver and just covered in a thin layer of real gold. This change happened because making hundreds of solid gold medals became way too expen...

Peanuts aren't actually nuts at all—they are part of the bean and pea family.

True nuts grow on trees, but peanuts grow underground in pods. They start as flowers above the ground, then bury themselves in the dirt to grow into the snacks we eat.

A grizzly bear's bite is so strong it can crush a bowling ball.

Grizzly bears have massive jaw muscles and a thick skull built for power. Even though they love eating berries, their jaws can snap heavy bones like they are dry twigs.

Australia is wider than the Moon.

The Moon is about 3,474 kilometers wide, but Australia stretches 4,000 kilometers from coast to coast. This means the entire Moon could fit inside the width of Australia with room...

Your fingernails grow nearly four times faster than your toenails.

Fingernails get more blood and nutrients because they are closer to your heart. They also get bumped and used more often, which tells your body to grow them back quickly.

The Three Gorges Dam contains enough steel to build 63 Eiffel Towers.

This massive dam in China used 463,000 tonnes of steel to stay strong. That is enough metal to recreate the famous Parisian tower over sixty times!

The Three Gorges Dam in China is so powerful that it makes as much electricity as 15 large nuclear power plants combined.

This massive dam uses 32 giant spinning turbines to turn rushing water into clean energy. It creates enough power to run 10 million homes and stops 31 million tons of coal from bei...

The Three Gorges Dam has a giant water elevator that lifts 3,000-ton ships over 100 meters into the air.

This massive ship lift works just like a regular elevator but for boats. It carries huge vessels up a 113-meter drop in only 40 minutes, which is much faster than using traditional...

China's Three Gorges Dam is so massive that it actually slows down the Earth's rotation.

The dam holds 42 billion tons of water high above sea level. Moving all that weight further away from the center of the Earth makes the planet spin a tiny bit slower.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen created a car-counting machine called Traf-O-Data before they started Microsoft.

Their invention used a special computer chip to read paper tapes from road sensors and turn the data into reports. This project taught them how to combine hardware and software, wh...

The Moon is slowly drifting away from Earth at the same speed your fingernails grow.

Every year, the Moon moves about 1.5 inches (3.8 centimeters) further into space. This happens because Earth's ocean tides give the Moon a tiny gravitational push, sending it into...

Abraham Lincoln was a champion wrestler who lost only one out of 300 matches.

Standing 6 feet 4 inches tall, Lincoln used his long arms and legs to pin opponents easily. He was so good at the sport that he is now in the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.

Elephants are the only four-legged mammals that cannot jump.

Their legs are built like heavy pillars to support their massive weight. Because their ankle bones are not bouncy, they can't spring off the ground like other animals.

You can eat pure 24-karat gold because it never dissolves in your stomach.

Gold is a 'noble metal' that does not react with your digestive system. It passes right through your body without being absorbed or changing at all.

Pound cake got its name because the original recipe used exactly one pound each of butter, sugar, eggs, and flour.

This simple one-to-one ratio made the recipe easy to remember hundreds of years ago. Because it used four pounds of ingredients, the finished cake was huge and very heavy.

Hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly backward and hover in one spot like a tiny helicopter.

Their wings move in a figure-eight pattern instead of just flapping up and down. This special movement lets them stay perfectly still in the air or zip in any direction they want.

Your tongue is made of eight different muscles working together without a single bone to lean on.

Most muscles pull on bones to move your body, but the tongue moves by changing its own shape. This unique design lets it twist and turn with amazing speed so you can talk and eat.

A 63-year-old schoolteacher was the first person to survive a trip over Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel.

Annie Edson Taylor wanted to get rich, so she built a special barrel padded with pillows. She survived the 167-foot drop with only a tiny scratch on her head.

Africa is the only continent on Earth that sits in all four hemispheres at once.

The Equator and the Prime Meridian both cut right through Africa. This means parts of the continent are in the North, South, East, and West all at the same time.

A group of crows is called a murder.

This spooky name comes from old stories where people believed crows would gather to put each other on trial. In reality, crows are just very social birds that hang out together to...

The Sun is so heavy that it makes up 99.86% of the entire solar system's mass.

Everything else—including Earth, all the other planets, moons, and asteroids—makes up less than 1% of the total weight. Because the Sun is so massive, its gravity is strong enough...

Sound travels four times faster through ocean water than it does through the air.

Sound moves by bumping molecules into each other. Since water molecules are packed much tighter than air molecules, the sound waves can zip along much more quickly.

Your favorite red candies and lipsticks might be colored with crushed bugs.

Tiny insects called cochineals produce a bright red chemical to protect themselves from predators. Farmers harvest these bugs from cactus plants and grind them up to create a natur...

Your ears and nose never stop getting bigger because gravity and aging stretch them out.

While your bones stop growing after you're a teenager, the cartilage in your ears and nose keeps changing. Over time, the skin loses its stretchiness and gravity pulls these parts...