1. If the Earth doubled in size, trees would immediately fall over.

This is because surface

2. Mercury, not Venus, is the closest planet to Earth on average. On average, Mercury is
1.04 astronomical units (AU) away from Earth compared to the 1.14 AU average distance
between Earth and Venus. One AU is equal to the average distance between the Earth
and the Sun. Venus still comes closest to Earth as part of its orbit around the Sun,
however.

3. Flamingoes aren’t born pink. They actually come into the world with grey/white
feathers and only develop a pinkish hue after starting a diet of brine shrimp and blue-
green algae.

4. You can smell ants. Many species of ants release strong-smelling chemicals when
they’re angry, threatened or being squished. Trap-jaw ants release a chocolatey smell
when annoyed, while citronella ants earn their name from the lemony odour they give
off.

5. People who eat whatever they want and stay slim have a slow metabolism, not fast. A
skinny person tends to have less muscle mass than others, meaning their basal
metabolic rate (BMR) is lower than those of a high muscle mass – this gives them a slow
metabolism, not a fast one.

6. There’s a scientist who willingly let insects sting him to find out which hurt the
most. Justin Schmidt turned his own body into a research tool to create the Schmidt
Pain Scale – and discovered the South American bullet ant delivers the most excruciating
sting of all, describing it as like being shot.

7. Earth is 4.54 billion years old. Using radiometric dating, scientists have discovered
that the Earth is 4.54 billion years old (give or take 50 million years). This makes our
planet half the age of the Milky Way Galaxy (11-13 billion years old) and around a third
of the age of the Universe (10-15 billion years old).

8. It’s actually fine to drink alcohol on (most) antibiotics. It’s unlikely that drinking alcohol
in moderation will cause a big problem if you’re taking a common antibiotic (although
there are exceptions, particularly metronidazole).

9. Electrons might live forever. Scientists have estimated the minimum lifetime of the
electron is about 6.6 × 1028 years – this is 66,000 ‘yottayears’. Since this is about 5
quintillion times the age of the Universe, even if electrons don’t live forever, they may as
well do!
10. Beavers don't actually live in dams. Technically, beavers live in a lodge that they
build behind a dam, within a deep pool of water.

11. The average dinosaur lifespan was surprisingly small. The Tyrannosaurus rex, for
example, reached full size between 16-22 years old and lived up until 27-33. The largest
dinosaurs such as the Brontosaurus and Diplodocus tended to live up to between 39-53
years old, maybe reaching the heights of 70.

12. Someone left a family photo on the Moon. When Apollo 16 astronaut Charles Duke
landed on the Moon in 1972, he decided to leave behind a photo of him, his two sons
and his wife. The photo remains on the Moon to this day.

13. It rains methane on Saturn’s largest moon. Titan is the only moon in our Solar System
with a dense atmosphere and the only body except Earth with liquid rivers, lakes and
seas fed by rainfall. This rainfall isn’t water, though; it's liquid methane.

14. Giraffes hum to communicate with each other. It’s thought that the low-frequency
humming could be a form of ‘contact call’ between individuals who have been separated
from their herd, helping them to find each other in the dark. Some researchers think
they sleep talk too.

15. Glass sponges can live for 15,000 years. This makes them one of the longest-living
organisms on Earth. The immortal jellyfish, however, could theoretically live forever (but
scientists aren’t sure)

16. You have a 50 per cent chance of sharing a birthday with a friend. In any group of 23
people, two people will share a birthday, according to the maths. To find the probability
of everyone in the group having a unique birthday, multiply all 23 probabilities together,
giving 0.493. So the probability of a shared birthday is 1 - 0.493 = 0.507, or 50.7 per cent.

17. Murder rates rise in summer. Ever feel angry or in a bad mood when the weather is hot?
Well, you’re not alone. Violent crime goes up in hotter weather, and in the US, murder
rates reportedly rise by 2.7 per cent over the summer.

18. 'New car smell' is a mix of over 200 chemicals. These include the sickly-sweet, toxic
hydrocarbons benzene and toluene.

19. ‘Sea level’ isn’t actually level. As the strength of the force generated by the Earth’s spin
is strongest at the equator, the average sea level bulges outward there, putting it further
from the centre of the Earth than at the poles. Differences in the strength of the Earth’s
gravity at different points also cause variation.
20. You inhale 50 potentially harmful bacteria every time you breathe. Thankfully,
your immune system is working hard all the time, so virtually all of these are promptly
destroyed without you feeling a thing. Phew.

21. You can see stars as they were 4,000 years ago with the naked eye. Without a
telescope, all the stars we can see lie within about 4,000 light-years of us. That means at
most you’re seeing stars as they were 4,000 years ago, around when the pyramids were
being built in Egypt.

22. Plants came before seeds. According to the fossil record, early plants resembled
moss and reproduced with single-celled spores. Multicellular seeds didn’t evolve for
another 150 million years.

23. Our dead cells are eaten by other cells in our body. Don’t worry; it’s meant to happen.
When cells inside your body die, they’re scavenged by phagocytes – white blood cells
whose job it is to digest other cells.

24. Smells can pass through liquid. Please don’t try smelling underwater (your nose will not
appreciate it), but smell does protrude through liquid.

25. Bats aren’t blind. Despite the famous idiom, bats can indeed see, but they still use their
even more famous echolocation to find prey.

26. Hibernating animals don’t dream. Sleep is a more physiologically ‘active’ state than
hibernation, which requires animals to substantially reduce all activities to conserve
energy. There’s simply not enough brain activity while an animal is hibernating to enable
dreaming. The only exception to this rule is the fat-tailed lemur.

27. Pine trees can tell if it's about to rain. Next time you see a pine cone, take a close look.
If it’s closed, that’s because the air is humid, which can indicate rain is on its way.

28. You can’t fold a piece of A4 paper more than eight times. As the number of layers
doubles each time, the paper rapidly gets too thick and too small to fold. The current
world paper-folding record belongs to California high school student Britney Gallivan,
who in 2002 managed to fold a 1.2km-long piece of tissue paper 12 times.

29. The sharpest teeth in history didn’t belong to sharks or even dinosaurs. They came
from conodonts – tiny eel-like creatures that lived 500 to 200 million years ago. Their
tooth tips were just two micrometres wide, about 1/20th the width of a human hair,
making them the sharpest ever measured.

30. Laughing came before language. How do we know? Some researchers tickled baby apes,
which, beyond being adorable, showed that they share the same structure as ours and
 likely arose in our common ancestors millions of years ago. Language came about much
later.

31. The fastest jet in the world can fly almost 10 times the speed of sound
(11,854km/h). The fastest jet is NASA’s X-43 experimental plane, three of which were
built in total. The design meant that they had to be dropped from a Boeing B-52 in order
to fly.

32. South Koreans have the lowest bad cholesterol levels in the world (and surprisingly, the
US has one of the lowest). This is down to the Korean diet that’s rich in fermented foods
and legumes, and low in saturated fat.

33. Humans might be able to communicate through dreams. They need some help to do
so, though – a company claims to have made it work while two people were lucid
dreaming.

34. Your cat sits on your laptop because it smells of you, not because it’s warm . More to
the point, it’s trying to replace your smell with its own, because it owns you.

35. Vultures make nests out of sandals and crossbows – or at least bearded vultures who
lived in Spain hundreds of years ago did. They were definitely nature’s weirdest
hoarders.

36. The largest organ in the human body was only discovered in the past 10 years. That’s
according to some scientists, anyway. It’s called the interstitium, and most of us don’t
know we have one.

37. Reptiles’ wee is solid. Or in some cases, a bit like a paste. It’s actually an evolutionary
tactic – and some people think we humans could learn a thing or two from this.

38. Men really do have worse handwriting than women – who also tend to write faster
than men. It’s all to do with how we’re brought up.

39. You shouldn't stop your dog from eating poo. Doing so makes the dog think it’s
important – so it will try to tuck into a turd again, as gross as that is.

40. There’s a 1,200km2 area of France that’s completely sealed off to the public. The First
World War battlefields in the region known as the Zone Rouge are still littered with
ammunition.