21 Unimportant Facts for Bored People During Lockdown
Boredom can produce the most amusing Google searches. In our most curious and boredom-infused googling, we found some of the most unimportant yet interesting facts you’d be delighted to read while slothing in your home during the lockdown. Here are a few of them.
1| Your nose hair stops growing after six weeks.
Imagine if it continued growing endlessly.
2| Lemons are man-made.
They were initially produced as a hybrid between bitter orange and citron hundreds of years ago.
3| Pineapples, bananas, and eggplants are actually berries.
A berry is a fleshy seedless fruit produced from a single flower containing a single ovary.
4| Raspberries and strawberries are not berries.
Going by that definition, raspberries and strawberries are not berries at all.
5| The philtrum is the dent above your upper lip and below your nose.
Now you know.
6| A fingernail takes six months to replace itself entirely.
If you lose a fingernail, wait six months for it to grow back from its base to its tip.
7| Fingernails grow faster on your dominant hand.
Curiously, your dominant hand will sprout fingernails faster than your weaker hand.
8| Dragonflies can’t walk.
Although they are expert flyers, dragonflies have no use for their legs other than for perching on something or performing sex.
9| Vantablack is the world’s darkest color (and it’s beautiful).
Almost no light bounces off this blackest black color you will ever see. Unfortunately, an artist named Anish Kapoor trademarked it for exclusive use.
10| The opposite of hibernate is estivate.
If some animals have hibernation through winter, some have what is called estivation, which is sleeping through summer. Hopefully, people don’t estivate through summer as the lockdown continues.
11| Metals can fuse together in space without welding.
Two metals of the same kind will fuse together in space even without heat and just a little pressure. This phenomenon is called cold welding.
12| You will probably grow a thousand kilometers of hair in your lifetime.
The average growth rate of hair is 6 inches per year. If you put all your hair together from end to end, that will stretch to a length of more than a thousand kilometers, or about half the length of the entire Philippines.
13| Sloths only poop once a week.
When they do, it leaves them so exhausted they have to regain energy until they have to poop again the following week.
14| A typhoon contains energy equivalent to 10,000 nuclear bombs.
Most of that energy is concentrated near the typhoon’s eye.
15| The letter X was used as a symbol for a kiss way back in 1763.
British naturalist Gilbert White used the x as a symbol for a kiss in his letter in 1763. In the 2000s, the letters XOXO meant hugs and kisses, and White’s letter is probably the original version of this.
16| There is actually a resurrection plant.
If you’ve been following the Korean zombie series Kingdom, you would have heard of the resurrection plant. A plant with the same name actually exists, but instead of reanimating the dead, it simply reanimates itself after being dead for quite some time. The resurrection plant or the Rose of Jericho can actually come back to life after experiencing severe dehydration. It puts real life to the phrase, “Just add water.”
17| Some people can tense a muscle in their ear to block out noise.
Few people who have this ability are unaware that what they can do is a special ability. They can voluntarily tense a muscle to produce a low-frequency roaring sound that blocks out sharp noises. For those who can’t do this, the sound is like a crashing landslide.
18| Honey is actually bee vomit that has been drunk and vomited several times.
After a bee takes nectar from a flower, it stores it in its esophagus where it mixes with the insect’s bodily fluids. When the bee worker comes home, it french kisses honey workers to pass this nectar-infused fluid. The honey workers then mix this fluid within their bodies, and then regurgitate it, ingest it again, and spit it out as honey. Yummy!
19| When you stare at a bright sky, you will see electrical impulses.
These electrical impulses are often described as moving stars, which are depicted in cartoons whenever a character suffers a blow.
20| If you spell out all the numbers, you will only use the letter A after 999.
Try it.
21| Your mouth has more bacteria than a dog’s mouth.
According to this research, a person’s mouth has more bacteria than a dog’s mouth, but a dog’s mouth harbors more types of bacteria, some of which are more dangerous than those found in a human’s mouth.
