Interesting facts for a Monday

Fact: The longest English word is 189,819 letters long

We won’t spell it out here (though you can read it here), but the full name for the protein nicknamed titin would take three and a half hours to say out loud.

Fact: Octopuses lay 56,000 eggs at a time

The mother spends six months so devoted to protecting the eggs that she doesn’t eat. The babies are the size of a grain of rice when they’re born.

Fact: Cats have fewer toes on their back paws

Like most four-legged mammals, they have five toes on the front, but their back paws only have four toes. Scientists think the four-toe back paws might help them run faster. Do you know any other fun facts about cats?

Fact: Blue whales eat half a million calories in one mouthful

These random facts are mindblowing! Those 457,000 calories are more than 240 times the energy the whale uses to scoop those krill into its mouth.

Fact: Only a quarter of the Sahara Desert is sandy

Most of it is covered in gravel, though it also contains mountains and oases. Oh, and it isn’t the world’s largest desert—Antarctica is.

Fact: Giraffe tongues can be 20 inches long

Their dark bluish black color is probably to prevent sunburn.

Fact: Bees can fly higher than Mount Everest

Bees can fly higher than 29,525 feet above sea level, according to National Geographic. That’s higher than Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world.

Fact: Ancient Egyptians used dead mice to ease toothaches

In Ancient Egypt, people put a dead mouse in their mouth if they had a toothache, according to Nathan Belofsky’s book Strange Medicine: A Shocking History of Real Medical Practices Through the Age. Mice were also used as a warts remedy during Elizabethan England.

Fact: Brad Pitt suffered an ironic injury on a film set

During Pitt’s prime acting career, he filmed Troy, based on Homer’s Illiad. He played the brave, and buff, Greek hero Achilles. Legend has it that Achilles could not be defeated unless hit in his Achilles heel. While filming an epic battle scene, Pitt ironically hurt his Achilles tendon that put him back two months.

Fact: Pregnancy tests date back to 1350 BCE

Based on an ancient papyrus document, Egyptian women urinated on wheat and barley seeds to determine if they were pregnant or not, according to the Office of History in the National Institutes of Health. If wheat grew, it predicted a female baby. If barley grew, it predicted a male baby. The woman was not pregnant if nothing grew. Experimenting with this seed theory in 1963 proved it was accurate 70 percent of the time.

Fact: Wimbledon tennis balls are kept at 68 degrees Fahrenheit

The temperature of tennis balls affects how the ball bounces. At warmer temperatures, the gas molecules inside the ball expand making the ball bounce higher. A tennis ball at lower temperatures causes the molecules to shrink and the ball bounces lower. To make sure the best tennis balls are used, Wimbledon goes through over 50,000 tennis balls.

Fact: Albert Einstein’s eyeballs are in New York City

They were given to Henry Abrams and preserved in a safety deposit box. Abrams was Einstein’s eye doctor. He received the eyeballs from Thomas Harvey, the man who performed the autopsy on Einstein and illegally took the scientist’s brain for himself.

Author:  Trace Mann