Asklemmy

Oxford University is older than the Aztec empire.

Oxford University founded in 1326, Aztec empire ~1428-1521

Oh, I have two good ones:

1. Nuclear power causes less deaths (per energy unit produced) than wind (source)

2. You get less radiation when living near a nuclear power plant, than if that nuclear plant hadn't been there.

To explain the second: A major misconception is, that nuclear power plants are dangerous due to their radiation. No they aren't. The effect of radiation from the rocks in the ground and the surroundings is on average 50x more than what you get from the nuclear power plant and it's fuel cells. (source). Our body is very well capable of dealing with the constant background radiation all the time (e.g. DNA repairs). Near a power plant, the massive amounts of isolation and concrete will inhibit any background radiation coming from rocks from that direction to you. This means, that you'll actually get slightly less radiation, because the nuclear plant is there.

Regarding the dangers of nuclear disasters. To this day, it's been very hard to find out, if at all any people have even died to Fukushima radiation (ans not other sources such as tsunami/earthquake/etc.) Nuclear radiation causes much more problems by being an emotionally triggering viral meme spreading between people and hindering it's productive use and by distracting from the ironic fact, that the coal burned in coal power plants spew much more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear power plants themselves. (source)

Your car keys have better range if you press them to your head, since your skull will act as an antenna. It sounds like some made up pseudoscience that would never work in practice or have a negligible effect, but it actually works.

Lighters were invented before matches! 1823 vs 1826

There are people still alive who remember a world before "splinter-free" toilet paper.

The manufacturing of this product had a long period of refinement, considering that as late as the 1930s, a selling point of the Northern Tissue company was that their toilet paper was "splinter free".

-Wikipedia

The world is running out of sand.

It's one of the most used materials in the world for construction but islands are disappearing because of its limited supply.

General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil, and Phillips Petroleum were convicted of an actual conspiracy related to the monopolization of transit systems, which replaced beloved streetcar (rail) systems with rubber-tired oil-burning buses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy

All the planets in the solar system can fit in the space between the Earth and the Moon

Drinking Water has a 100% fatality rate. Everyone who drinks it eventually dies.

(also a good example of why correlation =/= causation)

Moose kill more people than bears every year.

Also Donald Trump was the president of the United States.

• Wombat feces are cube shaped.
• Bananas are berries and strawberries are not.
• Oxford university is older than the Aztec empire.
• Humans share 50% of our DNA with bananas.

Ice is a mineral. Just unstable at room temperature.

Air is a fluid.

Every Rubik's Cube, no matter how scrambled, can be solved in at most 20 rotations.

Tiffany was a really common name in Ancient Rome.

Almost every atom in your body has been part of other living organisms thousands if not millions of times before.

Cleopatra was born closer to the invention of cellphones than the building of the pyramids

The USA is not a true democracy in the academic sense of the word.

An elephant is the only mammal with 4 forward facing knees.

if you scramble a rubiks cube up there is a good chance that it is the first cube to be in that state. there are 43,252,003,247,489,856,000 possible states that a cube(3x3) can be scrambled up in to.

“This sentence is a lie” sounds false but is actually true. I think?

Hand sanitizer is ~120 proof alcohol. (Not a recommendation to drink it, since it's usually spiked with bad-tasting additives to keep people from doing just that. Some commercial hand sanitizers swap out ethanol for isopropyl alcohol, i.e. rubbing alcohol, which is more toxic when ingested.)

Russia is actually pretty small and it almost fits inside Africa. Try it out: https://www.thetruesize.com/

EDIT: Ok I expressed myself in the wrong way. What I meant was, Russia is not as big as I thought it was. Of course, it's still really huge.

550/2 is not 225 and 77+33 is not 100

The source for most of these are confounding statistics. My favorite being that a deck of cards can shuffle into such a vast number of options, more than grains of sand on earth.

Another good one I like is that there are about ten times more bacteria cells in your body than human cells. But they are so much smaller they are only about 5 pounds of your total mass.

Also one most people get wrong and makes me sad. The seasons on Earth are not caused by the rotation of the earth around the sun, nor it's elliptical orbit. They are caused by the tilt of the earth's axis and the time of year the Earth is closest to the Sun it is actually winter in the northern hemisphere.

In future space travel spaghettification will be a serious concern.

Gary Numan is two weeks older than Gary Oldman.

Regardless which lossless compression algorithm you prefer, it makes most files bigger.

*where "files" includes all bitstrings of a given length, whether or not they've ever existed

The world's two largest cities by area are both on Greenland.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-city-rankings/largest-city-in-the-world-by-area

I've noticed Americans tend to be surprised that Europe is bigger than the US

Texas is smaller than the state of Western Australia, while the USA is only slightly bigger than Australia.

There are 100 billion bacterial cells in a single gram of poop.