21 more things you probably didn’t know (July 2026)
More fun facts for your enjoyment
The CIA dropped billions of poppy seeds from planes to sabotage Afghanistan’s opium as part of the War on Terror between 2004 and 2015. The seeds were designed to sprout early and grow flowers that looked more appealing to farmers, but actually produced less opium than normal poppy plants.
In 2017, four-leaf clover enthusiasts did a survey of millions of clovers and found that one in every 5,000 clovers had four leaves. Five-leaf clovers made up one in every 24,000 clovers, and six-leaf clovers one in every 310,000.
The world record for most leaves on a clover is 63. This record was achieved by a man in Japan who liked to search for four-leaf clovers, bring them back to his garden, and cross-pollinate the plants in the hopes of growing clover with even more leaves.
Around the world, 99% of rabies cases in humans are caused by dog bites or scratches. In countries such as the US where canine rabies has been eliminated, the majority of cases are caused by bats. While rabies is one of the few diseases that can be vaccinated against after being infected, there are less than 40 cases reported in literature of humans surviving a rabies infection after symptoms develop, which is virtually 100% fatality rate.
Centipede bites are not generally considered life-threatening, and there are less than 10 substantiated cases of people ever dying from a centipede bite worldwide.
Researchers this year have found high levels of lead in children’s clothing from multiple fast fashion retailers. The highest levels were identified in brightly colored fabric such as red and yellow, probably from the chemicals used to bind the dye to the fabric. Muted colors were less likely to contain high levels of lead. Higher-end brands and secondhand clothing that has already been washed many times may also be safer options, but this has not yet been confirmed in studies.
A ladybug washup is when a large number of ladybugs, sometimes hundreds of thousands or millions, wash up on the shore of a lake or ocean. The leading explanation is that a coastal breeze blows migrating swarms over open water, where they eventually fall in from exhaustion and float to shore.
Ladybug washup I saw at the Oregon coast this year.
Koalas have four thumbs, two on each hand. They are also the only non-primate animals to have fingerprints, and their fingerprints are nearly identical to a human’s.
In a 2024 data breach, about 60% of all historical social security numbers ever issued by the IRS were exposed to the dark web. Investigators have found that much of the leaked information was inaccurate, but anyone worried about identity theft is encouraged to apply a credit freeze to make it more difficult for scammers to obtain a loan in your name.
Hibernation is not considered a form of sleep. Hibernating ground squirrels wake up from their hibernation around twice a month, raising their body temperature from a very low -3°C back to normal body temperature, then spend a few hours sleeping. Once they have rested, they allow their body temperature to drop again and return to hibernation. Apparently the hibernation suppresses brain activity too much for sleep to do its job, so they have to wake up from hibernation whenever the need for sleep becomes strong enough.
Vitamin A deficiency causes 250,000 to 500,000 children to go blind every year, and many of them die soon after. One third of children worldwide are deficient in vitamin A, with the highest rates in Africa and Southeast Asia. In 1999, scientists created golden rice, a strain of rice enriched with beta-carotene (which the body can convert to vitamin A), by adding genes from daffodils and bacteria. They licensed it for free to any farmers making less than $10,000 annually, and put it through rigorous testing to ensure that it was safe to consume. However, a group of lobbyists led by Greenpeace launched a campaign to ban the crop, largely due to misinformation and distrust of genetically modified crops, and this has ensured that golden rice is not currently grown in any country. This delay may have caused the deaths of over 100,000 children.
One of the astronauts on Apollo 13 forgot to file his taxes. They were able to get him an extension, as he was technically considered “abroad”.
Sensory-specific satiety is the decline in a food’s appeal as you eat it, like how the 10th bite of chocolate is less satisfying than the first. It can also be triggered by smell, which could explain why if you’ve been cooking all day, you might not feel like eating much of the meal. Even imagining eating the food triggers it; study participants who repeatedly imagined eating cheese went on to eat less actual cheese than participants who imagined eating candy.
Most of the water in your body was almost certainly peed out by a dinosaur at some point in time. Dinosaurs likely drank an amount of water equivalent to 10-100x the volume of the oceans over the millions of years they were around. However, we are not entirely sure that dinosaurs peed, in the sense of having separate solid and waste streams (since many reptiles and birds combine the two), though the evidence suggests that at least some of them did.
In Thailand, there are numerous documented cases of migrant workers trapped at sea for years under threat of violence, with no pay and no way to escape. This is often referred to as sea slavery. Among migrant workers from Cambodia and Myanmar on Thai fishing ships, around 3/4 are trapped in forced labor conditions. Sea slavery also occurs in China and Taiwan, as well as other East and Southeast Asian countries.
Every two years, the US government puts out a list that identifies goods and their source countries produced by child labor or forced labor. This list has no legal force and doesn’t block these goods from being imported, but it does serve as a tool for advocates and for companies that are trying to make ethical sourcing decisions. The most common listings (by number of countries) are gold, bricks, sugarcane, coffee, tobacco, cattle, cotton, garments, and fish.
The word “gossamer” means thin and silky like a spiderweb. This word comes from Middle English “goose summer”, meaning a period of late autumn when spiderwebs would sometimes float through the air. It is not entirely known why it was called goose summer, but it might be because this was traditionally when people feasted on fattened geese.
Some of the colors visible to the human eye cannot be displayed on a phone or computer screen. Screens create colors by lighting up red, green, and blue subpixels (or filtering white light into those colors), so they can only produce colors that are mixtures of those three primaries. Many shades of green and cyan cannot be produced in this way, but can be seen regularly in nature in leaves, water, butterflies, and birds.
According to new evidence, the earliest octopuses were the size of a schoolbus, and probably preyed on ocean dinosaurs. (By that I actually mean mosasaurs and plesiosaurs, which are not true dinosaurs, but you get the idea.)
Baby octopuses sometimes ride jellyfish, steering them and angling their tentacles towards predators as a living shield. One species of octopus has even been known to use severed tentacles from a Portuguese Man-of-War as a weapon.
The US military once asked the Hershey company to make a chocolate bar that tasted only “a little better than a boiled potato”. The idea was that having bad-tasting chocolate would prevent the soldiers from eating the emergency food before they needed it. Many soldiers threw it away rather than eating it. The soldiers referred to it as “Hitler’s secret weapon”, because eating it tended to cause severe gastrointestinal distress.
I love this stuff!!!