• NASA’s Curiosity Rover on Mars ‘sings’ Happy Birthday to itself on the 5th of every August.

  • Hugging someone releases the hormone ‘oxytocin’, making us trust them more.

     

  • Before 2011, beer was considered as a soft drink in Russia.

  • Otters sleep holding hands so they don’t drift away from each other.

  • The name ‘Jessica’ was created by William Shakespeare for his play ‘The Merchant of Venice’.

  • Ostriches have the largest eyes among land animals.

  • In China, it is considered rude to eat everything on your plate, because your hosts will think that they did not feed you enough.

  • Mark Twain’s birth and death occurred in the same years when Halley’s Comet crossed the earth.

  • The Olympic torch relay was introduced by the Nazis, not the Greek.

  • Sweden recycles so well that it has run out of native garbage to recycle.

  • There is a ‘Crater Varma’ on planet Mercury, named after the famous Indian artist Raja Ravi Varma.

  • Flamingos eat upside-down.

  • Steve Jobs had a tendency to eat only a few food items, like carrots and apples, for weeks at a time.

  • ‘Rock Paper Scissors’ is played as a professional sport and has international championships.

  • Beavers constantly gnaw on objects to ‘chisel’ their ever growing teeth.

  • Play-Doh was originally invented as wallpaper cleaner.

  • Dominos Pizza delivers to a few remote islands by aeroplane.

  • Due to the effect of gravity, our nose and ears never stop growing.

  • A ‘semordnilap’ is a word or a sentence that has meaning when read forward and backward. For example, the word ‘diaper’.

  • As of 2016, Okinawa Island in Japan has the most number of inhabitants aged above 100 years. 

  • Crocodiles swallow stones to help them keep their bodies under water and only eyes and nose above water, as they hunt.

  • Some hydrangea flowers turn pink in alkaline soil and blue in acidic soil.

  • Since 1945, all British tanks come with kettles to make tea.

  • ‘Gamomania’ is the obsession with issuing odd marriage proposals.

  • There are libraries around the world where people can ‘borrow’ other people as ‘living books’ to listen to their inspirational stories.

  • The initial 74-minute capacity of music CDs was standardised in order to fit Beethoven’s 72-minute-long ninth symphony.

  • NASA’s Curiosity Rover on Mars ‘sings’ Happy Birthday to itself on the 5th of every August.

  • Contrary to popular belief, you don't sense different tastes in different areas of the tongue.

  • The National Anthems of Spain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and San Marino have no official lyrics.

  • Mawlynnong village in Meghalaya, India, is reputed to be Asia’s cleanest village.

  • Earth is the only planet not named after a God. 

  • One can tell a turtle’s gender by the noise it makes. Males grunt and females hiss.

  • The Guinness Book of World Records holds the record for being the most frequently stolen book from public libraries in the US.

  • Barbie’s full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts.

  • Elvis Presley got a 'C’ in his 8th grade music class.

  • According to the FDA, the stickers on fruits are edible.

  • Actress Halle Berry is named after a department store.

  • ‘Arachibutyrophobia’ is the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of one’s mouth.

  • The longest word in English, as recognized by dictionaries, is a lung disease called ‘pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis’. It contains 45 letters.

  • In Hawaii, a flower worn on the left ear by a woman indicates that she is no longer single.

  • Gorillas can catch human cold, and vice versa.

  • If you Google ‘askew’, the page shifts slightly to the left and the search results appear blurred. 

  • ‘Grammar Pedantry Syndrome’ is an obsessive compulsive urge to correct every grammatical error.

  • The Japanese National Anthem ‘Kimigayo’ is one of the shortest in the world, consisting of less than 25 words!

  •  ‘Googol’ is the name for the digit ‘1’ followed by 100 zeroes. A ‘Googolplex’ is ‘1’ followed by a googol zeros!

  • Before the 21st Century, some stamps distributed in various parts of the world had advertisements of products printed behind them.

  • Contrary to popular belief, magpies don’t ‘steal’ things, nor are they attracted to shiny things in particular.

  • The word ‘data’ is plural. Its singular form is ‘datum’.

  • Charlie Chaplin received the longest standing ovation in Oscar history, lasting 12 minutes.

  • ‘Fugu’ is a Japanese delicacy made with the poisonous puffer fish, which is considered to be deadlier than cyanide.

  • Potato chips were invented after a chef lost his temper with a customer who kept demanding for his potatoes to be thinner and more fried.

  • A ‘Baobab’ tree can store up to 32,000 gallon of water in its trunk.

  • Kodinhi village in Kerala, India, is famous for its high rate of twin births, with around 500 pairs of twins in a population of just about 2000 families!

  • YouTube’s San Bruno Office offers a giant, three-person slide travelling two stories, to move around the building!

  • The ‘M’ on M&M candies stands for Forrest Mars Sr. of the Mars Company and Bruce Murrie, the son of then-President of Hershey’s.

  • The ‘Ketchup and Fries Plant’, or the ‘TomTato Plant’, can simultaneously produce potatoes and tomatoes. 

  • Marie Curie’s research papers are highly radioactive even to this day. One must sign a waiver and wear protective clothing to access them.

  • French fries apparently originated in Belgium, not in France.

  • The word ‘personality’ comes from the Latin word ‘persona’, meaning ‘mask’.

  • A restaurant named ‘Heart Attack Grill’ in Las Vegas produces only high calorie and high cholesterol meals.

  • Japanese law has a ‘waistline limit’ to prevent obesity.

  • Contrary to popular belief, cows do not have 4 stomachs, but 4 chambers in their stomach.

  • The time on Apple products is set as 9:41am in all their advertisements to denote the time when Steve Jobs launched the first iPhone in 2007.

  • US dollar bills are not made of paper, but of a combination of cotton and linen.

  • A prairie dog is not a dog, but a rabbit-sized rodent.

  • The world’s biggest family as of 2016, has 181 members and lives together in Mizoram, India.

  • The arrow connecting ‘a’ and ‘z’ in the Amazon.com logo indicates that everything from ‘a’ to ‘z’ is available on their website.

  • Russian chess legend Garry Kasparov had ranked World No.1 for around 20 years- almost as long as his professional chess career!

  • A group of crows is called a ‘murder’.

  • The Falaknuma Palace in Hyderabad, India is home to the world’s longest permanent dining table, seating 101 people.

  • The chemical reaction which makes browned food taste good is called ‘Maillard Reaction’.

  • Microsoft employees traditionally celebrate their joining dates by taking one pound of M&Ms to work, for every year they have worked there. 

  • Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, apparently got the entire algorithm which became the basis for the search engine, in a dream.

  • ‘Oneirology’ is the scientific study of dreams and their interpretation.

  • The word ‘tamarind’ is derived from the Arabic word ‘tamr hind’, meaning ‘Indian Date’.

  • ‘Devil’s Kettle’ is a mysterious waterfall in Minnesota, USA. Half of its water disappears after flowing into a nearby hole.

  • The Jeep got its name from the abbreviation ‘G.P.’, which was used in the army to refer to the vehicle.

  • There’s a place called ‘Y’ in France.

  • The Hawaiian alphabet has 13 letters.

  • Most birds have such few taste buds that they cannot feel spice!

  • Steve Jobs once said that the ‘i’ in Apple products stands for internet, individual, instruct, inform and inspire.

  • BMW had to recall their original GPS system because male German drivers refused to receive directions from a female voice.

  • The creators of Powerpuff Girls, Johnny Bravo and Dexter’s Laboratory were roommates in college.

  • In a German village named ‘Fuggerei’, the rent has not been increased since 1520. 

  • The longest record of someone having the hiccups is 68 years, as of 2016.

  • The United States does not have an official language.

  • China owns all the pandas in the world. Any pandas outside China are leased.

  • The cigarette lighter was invented before the modern matchstick.

  • Facebook is designed in the colour blue because Mark Zuckerberg has red-green colour blindness and sees blue the best. 

  • Jellyfish are almost 98% water and will ‘evaporate’ if left in the sun.

  • Additional sounds like ‘na na na’ and ‘la la la’ in song lyrics which don’t have any meaning are called ‘vocables’.

  • The lights and patterns you see when you close your eyes and press your hands to them are called ‘phosphenes’

  • The non-gender-specific term for a nephew or niece is ‘nibling’. 

  • A person with poor memory is said to have ‘goldfish memory’. Ironically, goldfish have good memory.

  • The average mouthwash contains twice the alcohol content of wine.

  • Scientists claim to have finally found out that the chicken came before the egg, as the protein which builds egg shells can only be produced by hens!

  • Driving barefoot or with flip flops is illegal in Spain.

  • During Nepal’s Tihar Festival, a day is devoted to celebrating and thanking dogs for their friendship and service.

  • An Indian village named ‘Piplantri’ plants 111 trees to celebrate every girl child’s birth in the community. 

  • Bhutan is the only country in the world to have zero carbon emissions.

  • Gierthoon, a village in Netherlands, has no roads and forbids cars. People there mostly travel by boat.

  • A building in which silence is enforced, like a library or school room, is referred to as a ‘silentium’.

  • Mosquito repellents do not repel, they hide your presence. It blocks the mosquitoes’ sensors so they don't know you're there.

  • ‘Lachanophobia’ is the fear of vegetables.

  • There are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos.

  • Ketchup was sold in the 1830s as a medicine.

  • 315 entries in Webster's 1996 Dictionary were misspelled.

  • ‘Anatidaephobia’ is a fear that somewhere a duck is watching you.

  • Hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly backwards.

  • The area of the Pacific Ocean is greater than all of the land surfaces on Earth combined.

  • In 2000, Baskin Robbins created a Guinness World Record for the ‘World's Largest Ice Cream Scoop Pyramid’ by using 3,100 scoops.

  • The act of yawning and stretching is called ‘pandiculation’.

  • The Banyan tree is part of the coat of arms of Indonesia. It symbolises the unity of Indonesia - one country with many far-flung roots.

  • Marie Curie won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics & the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. She is the only woman to receive the award twice.

  • Hippopotamus means ‘river horse’ in ancient Greek.

  • The company Mattel gets its name from its two founders. They took ‘Matt’ from Harold Matson and ‘El’ from Elliot Handler and formed Mattel.

  • The blink of an eye equals about two-fifths of a second.

  • The forward slash character on your keyboard is also known as a ‘slant’, ‘virgule’ or ‘solidu’. 

  • Hamburgers are named after Hamburg, Germany, where serving of Hamburgers became popular.

  • A goat’s eyes have rectangular pupils.

  • Every person is colour blind at birth.

  • The flag of Nepal is the only national flag in the world which is Neither rectangular nor square.

  • A ‘Funambulist’ is a tight-rope walker.

  • Coca-Cola was so named back in 1885 for its two ‘medical’ ingredients – extract of coca leaves and kola nuts.

  • Bulls are colour blind. It is the movement of the cape or the cloth that angers them.

  • Amazon ants steal the larvae of other ants to keep as slaves. The slave ants build homes and feed the Amazon ants.

  •  A ‘Spremologer’ is a person who collects facts.

  • A mark twain is a nautical measurement of depth which equals 12 feet.

  • Like retina and finger print, every individual also has a unique tongue print.

  • ‘Glabella’ is the name used to refer to the space between your eyebrows.

  • The coconut is the largest seed in the world.

  • A peanut is not a nut; it belongs to the legume or bean family.

  • The word ‘diastema’ is the word for having a gap between your teeth.

  • There is a small village in Norway called ‘Hell’.

  • The loop on a belt that holds the loose-end is called a ‘keeper’.

  • Lady Bugs are not really bugs. They are actually beetles and their correct name is The Ladybird Beetle.

  • A newly hatched fish is called a ‘fry’.

  • Charlie Chaplin once lost a contest for a Charlie Chaplin look-alike.

  •  A group of people that are hired to clap at a performance are called a ‘claque’.

  •  The unique characteristics of Barbie dolls in Japan are that they have their lips closed with no teeth showing.

  • The word checkmate comes from the Persian word ‘shah-mat’ which means ‘the king is dead’.

  • The palms of your hands and the soles of your feet cannot tan, or grow hair.

  • ‘Lethologica’ is the inability to remember a word or put your finger on the right word.

  • The right lung of a human is larger than the left one. This is because of the space and placement of the heart.

  • Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.

  • The raised reflective dots in the middle of highways are called ‘botts dots’.

  • The Anglo Zanzibar war is the shortest in history, lasting 38 minutes.

    It was fought between United Kingdom and the Zanzibar sultanate.

  • The word ‘comet’ comes from the Greek word ‘kometes’ meaning ‘long hair’ and refers to the comet’s tail.

  • The Koala Bear is not really a bear. It is only called a bear because its appearance resembles one.

  • The little bits of paper left over when holes are punched in paper are called ‘chad’.

  • Scallops (a type of shellfish) have up to 100 eyes.

  • In 1873, Colgate made toothpaste that was available in a jar.

  • Baby squirrels are called kittens.

  • Istanbul, Turkey is the only city in the world to be located in two continents – Asia and Europe.

  • Cats have 32 muscles in each ear.

  • ‘Petrichor’ is the name for the scent of rain on dry earth.

  •  You can’t hum while holding your nose closed.

  • Emus cannot walk backwards.

  •  97% of the world’s water is salt water.

  • The word ‘tattoo’ comes from the Tahitian word ‘tattau’, which means ‘to mark’. 

  • Penguins live in large groups called colonies or rookery.

  • The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel was the first building in Bombay to be lit by electricity.

  • In Windows XP operating system, XP is short for ‘Experience’.

  • Jataka Tales are the previous birth stories of Gautam Buddha.

  • The word ‘listen’ contains the same letters as the word ‘silent’.

  • The first newspaper crossword puzzle was published in a Sunday supplement to the New York World in 1913.

  • The Balalaika is a stringed instrument from Russia.

  • The same steel used to build the Eiffel Tower was imported by J. N. Tata to build the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai.

  • The spots on dice are called ‘pips’. 

  • The Statue of Liberty was shipped from France to America in hundreds of pieces. It was then re-assembled in New York.

  • Eating Strawberries and Cream is a tradition at the Wimbledon.

  • In German, Tintin is called Tim; in Turkish, he is called Tenten and In Latin, he is known as Titinus.

  • The Bhut Jolokia chilli grown in north-eastern India was accepted by the Guinness World Records in 2007 as the World’s Spiciest Chilli.

  • Komodo dragons get their name from the Komodo Island in Indonesia where they were first discovered.

  • The psychological term for fear of garlic is ‘Alliumphobia’.

  • The metal striker that hangs inside a bell and makes a sound by hitting the side is called a ‘clapper’.

  • Time Magazine named the computer its "Man of the year" in 1982

  • Mickey Mouse has four fingers on each hand

  • Tennis Balls were once refrigerated before the Wimbledon tournament to keep them in perfect condition