Whether you're naturally interested in fun facts and trivia or not, it's always nice to know a few that you can pull out of your pocket at a moment's notice as a nice conversation starter.
But there are some fun facts out there that are so weird, people become more preoccupied with how the teller found out that information rather than the information itself.
Redditor Dry_Bus_935 asked:
"What is your 'don't ask me how I know' random fact?"
Nuclear Fail Safe
"You have quite a lot of time, certainly more than ten seconds, to turn back on the main pumps of a nuclear reactor once you have accidentally turned them off."
- egorf
"I'm not surprised. The amount of fail safes, redundancies, and emergency scenario planning for nuclear power plants is insane."
"I toured a nuclear plant and wrote my high school senior thesis on the plans put in place to ensure the Fukushima disaster would not happen at that plant."
"I'm sure the secondary pumps are plenty capable of handling the reactor until the main pumps are repaired or just turned back on."
- Borderlandsman
Happy Cat
"If your cat chews on fresh eucalyptus, they might start hallucinating and fall over repeatedly, leading to a $400 emergency vet bill just to be told she’s just kinda high."
- oddidealstronghold
"And, that's part of why koalas love it. Little stoners."
- littlebluefoxy
Archaeology: Do Not Lick
"Old human bones are very porous, so if you lick them, they’ll stick to your tongue."
- clanculcarius
Sharing is Caring
"A pigeon will only eat a Starburst if you chew it up a little bit first. Just to clarify: chew the Starburst, not the pigeon."
- OhTheHueManatee
"Instructions unclear. Pigeon unhappy."
- Wild-Lychee-3312
Intriguing Anatomy
"Everyone is here with the creepy crime stuff, and I'm just like, 'A soft fur rat has 22 nipples.'"
- horroscoblue
"Okay, so either they have really small nipples, their nipples overlap, or they have nipples in places where there shouldn't be nipples."
"(I've never written the word 'nipples' so many times in a singular sentence before.)"
- GdeGraaf
'Don't Ask Me,' Indeed!
"Turmeric can be used as clothes dye. It is capable of permanently dyeing cotton cloth even after it has passed through the digestive tract of an adult male."
- SlefeMcDichael
"You s**t your pants, didn't you?"
- PMmecrossstitch
"I'd prefer not to answer that question."
- SlefeMcDichael
High-Risk Survival Skills
"If you ever trying to survive in the Arctic, don’t eat polar bear liver. It is so high in vitamin A, it will kill you."
- WrongWayCorrigan-361
"It's also surrounded by a lethal amount of angry polar bear."
- horanc2
Real-Life Spies
"TV shows and movies go out of their way to make military/intelligence officers look bada**."
"But real-life 'spies,' by design and training, are boring. They have regular houses and standard second-hand cars, they dress down, and they have vague, boring job titles (accounts receivable) as cover, and they do not draw attention to themselves. Most come from specialized academia."
- Ok_Worth_1093
Haunting Reality
"Your muscles can keep twitching for several hours after you die."
- JustDave62
"Also, beards can appear to grow. This is however not because the beard itself grows but because the skin shrinks."
- RRautamaa
"I worked at a morgue for over eight years. If you grasp the hand of a dead body to move the arm, the hand will grasp back, but that's just muscles and tendons reacting to the tension."
- goneferalinid
The Sneakiness of Drowning
"When a drowning victim is revived, get them to a hospital as soon as possible. Drowning is the leading cause of death of kids from the age of one to seven and is ruled as accidental drowning when it comes to secondary drowning or dry drowning."
"Basically, your lungs are full of water despite being revived. Your lungs will absorb the liquid, but not before your body acidifies from high levels of carbon dioxide. The only chance to survive is to have the lungs pumped with oxygen via CPAP machine and time."
"Also, drowning is extremely quiet. You don’t hear the victim go under. And if you see flailing, do not attempt to save the victim otherwise you’ll become another drowning victim. Throw them a lifeline and hope their amygdala realizes that a rope or something is floating near them and grabs on it."
- Dfiggsmeister
Not Everyone's Favorite Chocolate
"Hershey’s chocolate has the strong smell of vomit or feces to some people (me), and that’s because they use butyric acid as a preservative. Butyric acid is the compound that makes vomit smell so bad."
"Edit: Digging further into it, there are some claims that they may not be “adding” the butyric acid, but rather it is occurring from essentially spoiling the milk in their milk chocolate. Either way, the butyric acid and putrid smell remains a part of their product."
- hefewiseman1
"That explains the weird aftertaste I always get! I don’t smell it but their chocolate always has this super unpleasant sharp/acidic aftertaste that I find repulsive. I assume this is why!!"
- PomegranateNo975
Do Not Lick the Asbestos
"Asbestos tastes like chalk. And if you lick it, it has the texture of extremely gritty sandpaper. Which is actually the feeling of microscopic asbestos needles piercing your flesh!"
- TooYoungToBeThisOld1
Mapping Out the War
"Beginning in 1911 in anticipation of the outbreak of WW1 in 1914, two statesmen, one from England and one from France, began visiting locations in France that they believed would be the settings for a number of major battles that would occur during the great war."
"Long bike rides through these future battle zones in the countryside and weeks spent building a foundation for a French-Anglo codebook that would later prove important in helping win the war."
- fjordperfect123
Avoiding Lawsuits > Protecting Patients
"Doctors, or surgeons more specifically, that make too many mistakes during surgery, ie, leaving instruments in patients, frequently gets ‘quietly traded’ to other hospitals where they continue their path of destruction with the patients not being aware of their past record. Hospitals tend to keep quiet about the matter to avoid lawsuits."
- Kittytigris
Bonus Points: Do This While Having Lunch in Your Car
"If you overfill a fast food gravy cup and then put a lid on, it will create a pressurized gravy stream that sprays all over your face and uniform while your coworker looks on in horror."
- thechaosjester776
This subReddit thread was so a roller-coaster of random facts, we've surely all walked away learning something.
But the biggest takeaway might just be: Maybe don't lick so many things.
