As
we grow older, we tend to accumulate a lot of knowledge, some of which can be quite surprising or even shocking. From the science behind everyday objects to the dark history of human civilization, here are some cold, hard facts that might make you look at the world in a new light:
1. The plastic straw you use for a few minutes can take up to 500 years to decompose.
2. The deadliest war in history was not World War II, but the Taiping Rebellion in 19th-century China, which claimed over 20 million lives.
3. Nearly half of the world's population (around 3.5 billion people) live on less than $2.50 a day.
4. The first computer programmer was not a man, but a woman: Ada Lovelace, who worked with Charles Babbage in the 19th century.
5. The phrase "rule of thumb" comes from an old English law that allowed men to beat their wives with a stick no thicker than their thumb.
6. The Great Barrier Reef, one of the world's natural wonders, is expected to be mostly gone within our lifetimes due to climate change.
7. The average person swallows eight spiders a year in their sleep (just kidding, this one is actually a myth!).
8. The Hiroshima bombing in 1945 killed an estimated 140,000 people, but the subsequent firebombing of Tokyo in 1945 killed over 100,000 more.
9. The Guinness World Record for the most babies born to one woman is held by a 19th-century Russian woman named Feodor Vassilyev, who gave birth to 69 children over her lifetime.
10 The oldest known living tree is a bristlecone pine in California that is over 5,000 years old.
11. The word "mortgage" comes from the French words for "death" and "pledge."
12. The U.S. government once experimented with giving people LSD without their consent as part of a secret Cold War program known as MK-ULTRA.
13. The air inside your home can be up to five times more polluted than the air outside, due to factors like cleaning products, paint, and furniture.
14. The first recorded pandemic in history was the Plague of Athens in 430 BCE, which killed up to one third of the city's population.
15. The fact that humans have five fingers on each hand is not a universal trait - some people are born with extra fingers or toes, while others have them missing.
These are just a few examples of the many cold, hard facts that can challenge our assumptions and expand our knowledge as we grow older. Whether we like it or not, the world is full of surprising facts and unexpected twists and turns - it's up to us to keep learning and exploring in order to make sense of it all.
