People Explain Which Things Blew Their Minds Once They Realized Them

Avocados are not vegetables.

They're fruits, berries to be exact.

Like what?!?!

Colleagues

"Sometimes it is more important to like your colleagues than the actual job."

"I had shi**y jobs with the most amazing colleagues and had shi**y colleagues and the most amazing job. I'd pick the first every time."

chr989

Star Trekking

"That you could legitimately travel at warp speed through the center of galaxies and never run any real risk of hitting a star. That’s how spread out space really is."

justanotherguyhere16

"Also, galaxies, stars, and even the Universe is constantly moving. I think time travel has been invented, but they can’t figure out the 'space' part of it.

"Yes, they can travel back in time, but relatively speaking, they can’t figure out how to navigate to the part of the planet they want to reach. So when they travel back in time, it’s relative to where they currently are, and end up not moving through space, thus ending up in the middle of an empty vacuum."

theknights-whosay-Ni

Jaws is Old

"That sharks predated the rings of Saturn."

BeardedDominant

"Sharks also developed the immune system that ended up in both dinosaurs/birds and mammals."

csiz

"We don’t know that. We can’t say for certain that the rings are only 100 million years old. It’s still debated."

The_Kek_5000

"I'm pretty sure that sharks are older than trees."

Cayderent

From the Trees

"One day I sat on a tram, passing a river. There was a duck in a tree. I realized I'd never seen ducks in trees. No one else seemed to notice, but I was puzzled. Now whenever I come across something that seems intuitive but I have never considered I call it a duck in a tree."

Ol_Pasta

"This realization happened to me this past year. We apparently have a family of wood ducks in one of the big trees in our yard. Our neighbor said she has seen a duck walking around on a branch. I made it 37 years without knowing some ducks can roost in trees. My wife caught a video of the mama leading like eight ducks into the field next to our house. We aren't even near water."

jwbourne

Artistic Timeline

"Pablo Picasso and Eminem were both alive at the same time."

leebon427

"I’d bet a lot of people think Picasso is a Renaissance artist."

editormatt

I admit it. I'm one of those people. Pablo and Marshall, in one lifetime.

New facts are fun.

The New World

"They were colonizing the Wild West at the same time as they were building skyscrapers in Manhattan. I always think of them taking place eighty to a hundred years apart. It's wild."

Emilayday

Oh the Power

"Nuclear power plants are just steam power plants that use nuclear reactions to heat the water. There's no fancy magic extracting energy directly from nuclear material. They just boil water and spin a turbine."

RenaKunisaki

"Most electrical generation is spinning a turbine. Photovoltaic solar power is pretty much the only exception, and it's not the only form of solar power. There's solar thermal power, which uses mirrors or lenses to concentrate the heat of the sun to make steam and turn a turbine."

Brawndo91

The Empire

"The Roman Empire fully fell less than 50 years before the discovery of the new world."

South-by-north

"The Romans also had copper wire, magnets, and battery acid. They could have invented electricity hundreds of years before it was actually discovered. But they didn't. The wire was used for jewelry, the magnets as lodestones, and the battery acid was used to clean the rust off of swords."

Kahzgul

"RIP Byzantine Empire. 1453 never forget."

crossbowman44

The Witness

"Owl‘s silent flight. I mean I always knew that but a while ago was the first time I actually witnessed it. Owl came flying towards me and landed only a few feet away and you couldn‘t hear anything. Crazy."

Zealousideal-You-324

"I saw a barn owl swoop down and catch a mouse while hiking at night, and the whole thing happened in complete silence. It gave me a deep sense of unease because it was literally like someone hit the mute button on life."

VulcanVisions

Bad Kermit

"Poison dart frogs aren't poisonous in captivity."

"I own 5 of them and anytime I tell someone I own some I always get 'Do you ever lick them' or 'Can you go kill someone with them.' But yeah they get their poison from what they eat, and all I give them is fruit flies."

JMfury

Poison frogs?

That sounds like something Rose would have a story about on 'The Golden Girls.'