20 fascinating facts that will make you think twice

The world is an interesting place, and it's full of weird and interesting facts that you might have never realized were true

Perhaps a few of the facts will have this effect... (Rex)

The folks over at Reddit have a collection of true facts about life, and we've combed through them to find our favorites.

From a creature that can survive the harsh vacuum of space to the odd state sport of Maryland, you're bound to learn something that makes you think twice.

Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza

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A mantis shrimp can swing its claw so fast it boils the water around it and creates a flash of light

The Spanish national anthem has no words

Honey does not spoil. You could feasibly eat 3000 year old honey

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Dead people can get goose bumps

A small percentage of the static you see on "dead" tv stations is left over radiation from the Big Bang. You're seeing residual effects of the Universe's creation

(Rex)

The state sport of Maryland is jousting

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When we breathe through our nose, we always inhale more air from one nostril than with the other one — and this changes every 15 minutes

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If you were to remove all of the empty space from the atoms that make up every human on earth, the entire world population could fit into an apple

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The woolly mammoth was still around when the pyramids were being built

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There are more possible iterations of a game of chess than there are atoms in the known universe

If you somehow found a way to extract all of the gold from the bubbling core of our lovely little planet, you would be able to cover all of the land in a layer of gold up to your knees

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It would take 1,200,000 mosquitoes, each sucking once, to completely drain the average human of blood

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Written language was invented independently by the Egyptians, Sumerians, Chinese, and Mayans

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To know when to mate, a male giraffe will continuously headbutt the female in the bladder until she urinates. The male then tastes the pee and that helps it determine whether the female is ovulating

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It can take a photon 40,000 years to travel from the core of the sun to the surface, but only 8 minutes to travel the rest of the way to earth.

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Water bears, or Tardigrades, are typically 0.5 mm in length and can survive virtually anything. Even the vacuum of space.

Basically anything that melts can be made into glass. You just have to cool off a molten material before its molecules have time to realign into what they were before being melted

The critically endangered Kakapo bird has a strong, pleasant, musty odour which allows predators to easily locate it. Hence, it is critically endangered

(Creative Commons. Photo: jidanchaomian, via Flickr.)

In 1903 the Wright Brothers flew for the first time. 66 years later, man landed on the Moon in 1969

Note: A shorter version of this article was originally published by Kyle Russell.

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