150 Useless Facts You Won’t Believe Are True

Knowledge is power! But, does that adage hold true for useless facts? Although some facts don’t really have any real-world applications, knowing random facts is always fun. You can bust one out as an icebreaker or find one coming in handy on trivia night. You can bug your kids with them when they’re annoying you. Conversely, you can entertain your kids with the good ones when they’re bored.

We wanted to share with you some weird, funny, and random useless facts to showcase just how little we know about the world around us. These facts range from trivia about animals and nature to history and geography. We’re taking a no-holds-barred approach to bring you a diverse set of facts about a variety of topics. You will be shocked to learn some of the truths on this list and we hope the excitement of learning something new makes you feel a little more knowledgeable. Now, let’s learn some random stuff!

Let’s get Cracking with Some Random Useless Facts You Won’t Believe Are Actually True!

Useless Facts About the Human Body

• It’s impossible to lick your own elbow.
• Your thumb has its own pulse.
• The acid in our stomachs is strong enough to dissolve metal. Anyone with acid reflux can attest to this fact!
• If you were to render all of the fat out of the average human body, you could make 6 bars of soap.
• Without gravity, astronauts can grow two inches taller while in space.
• The vessels in a blue whale are so large that a human could swim through one.

Random Useless Facts About Being Human

• At the end of an average life, you will have spent around a year of your time on earth sitting on your toilet.
• A tomato has more genes than a human.
• The longest spell of the hiccups recorded lasted nearly 70 years!
• A human adult can produce enough saliva to fill a bathtub not once but twice in one year. Gross!
• Your eyes blink about 20 times each minute.
• Astronauts discovered that it’s impossible to burp in space.

Useless Facts About Your Silly Body

• One out of every 20 people is born with an extra rib. It’s more common for men than women.
• Your skin is home to over 1000 different species of bacteria.
• Eyelashes live for about 150 days before falling out. 
• The human body contains over 600 muscles.
• Each human body has between 2 to 5 million sweat glands.
• The strongest and longest bone in the human body is the femur.

Useless Facts About Countries

• The height of the Eiffel Tower varies by as much as six inches depending on the temperature outside.
• Sticky rice was used to build parts of the Great Wall of China.
• There are approximately 3 million lakes in the world. Canada is home to 60% of them.
• The average person living in Sweden consumes about 22 pounds of chocolate each year. Who wants to hop on a flight?
• There are three cows for every one human in the state of Montana.
• In Finland, you’ll find that saunas outnumber cars.

Useless Facts About Countries Around the World

• The Archipelago of the Philippines is made up of a total of 7,641 islands.
• Damascus is the world’s oldest, continuously inhabited city in the world. People have lived together in the area for over 11,000 years.
• In terms of landmass, not population, Alaska houses the largest cities in the US.
• It’s estimated that there’s enough gold in our planet’s core to cover the entire earth in a 1.5-foot layer of shiny stuff.
• Iceland, a country that is uniquely situated over two separate tectonic plates, is currently growing at a rate of 5 centimeters per year as these plates move apart.
• Mexico City is sinking by about a foot a year. The city has dropped 32 feet over the last 60 years!

Useless Facts About Sports

• Tennis was originally played with bare hands.
• China did not win its first Olympic medal until 1984.
• Greece is the only country to have participated in every Olympic Games under its own flag.
• Major League Baseball umpires are required to wear black underwear in the event that their pants split.
• Your average golfball has around 333 dimples in it.
• More than 100 baseballs are typically used during a professional baseball game.

Random Useless Facts About Art

• Pablo Picasso’s first word as a child was “pencil.”
• Tennessee Williams died by choking on a bottle cap.
• Edvard Munch painted four different versions of his famous painting The Scream.
• The Starry Night depicts Vincent Van Gogh’s view from the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum.
• Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
• Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait, Mona Lisa, was not famous until it was stolen.

Random Useless Facts About Cats

• Meowing is a talent that cats developed to communicate exclusively with people.
• A cat can spend a third of his/her waking lifetime grooming.
• Cats have 230 bones. That’s 24 more bones in their bodies than humans do.
• Cats have the largest eyes relative to the size of their heads than any other mammals.
• A group of kittens is called a “kindle.”
• Research suggests that domesticated cats first appeared around 3600 BCE.

Useless Facts About Dogs

• All puppies are born deaf.
• A dog’s sense of smell is some 40 times better than humans.
• A greyhound can reach speeds of over 40mph.
• Dogs can sniff and breathe at the same time.
• Dogs are not colorblind. They can see blue and yellow.
• Dogs’ noses can detect heat which means that blind or deaf dogs can still hunt.

Useless Facts About Weather

• In the US, approximately 1200 tornadoes touchdown each year.
• A tornado can travel faster than a Formula One racecar.
• A bolt of lightning is five times as hot as the sun!
• Yuma, Arizona gets more than 4000 hours of sunshine each year, making it the sunniest place on earth.
• Contrary to popular belief, it can never be too cold to snow.
• At any given moment, there are about 2000 thunderstorms on Earth.

Useless Facts About Space That Are Really Cool

• The sun is so big it could contain 1 million Earths.
• The “Great Red Spot” on Jupiter is a visible storm that’s been raging on the planet for over 200 years.
• The first animals we sent to space were fruit flies. They were launched into space in 1947 and were recovered unharmed.
• Days on Neptune last 16 hours compared to our 24.
• One small teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh six billion tons.
• One of Jupiter’s moons, Europa, has saltwater geysers on it that are 20 times the size of Mount Everest.

Useless Facts About Our Galaxy

• Venus is the only planet that spins clockwise.
• More energy from the sun hits the Earth every hour than is used for an entire year.
• If two pieces of the same metal touch in space they bond together and become permanently stuck. The process is called “cold welding.”
• When will Halley’s comet orbit the Earth again? In 2061.
• The largest asteroid in our solar system is a monstrous rock that’s name Ceres. It measures 600 miles in diameter.
• Polaris will change position over the next 13,000 years. At that time, experts believe it will no longer be our North Star.

Useless Facts About Animals & Wildlife

• Dolphins sleep with one eye open.
• An elephant tooth can weigh as much as 9 pounds.
• Ants never sleep. Poor things.
• During WWII, Americans attempted to train bats to drop bombs.
• Sloths have the ability to hold their breath for up to 40 minutes.
• Seahorses mate for life.

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Useless Facts About Animals You’ll Never Believe

• What do you call a group of porcupines? A prickle.
• Male rabbits are called bucks and female rabbits does.
• A herd of 60 cows can produce a ton of milk in a single day.
• What do you call a group of owls? A parliament.
• Flamingos can only eat when their heads are turned upside down.
• Snails have the ability to regenerate their eyes.

Even More Useless Facts About Wildlife

• A starfish can turn its stomach inside out.
• Deer do not have gallbladders.
• Humans can smell skunks from over a mile away.
• Female lions do 90% of the hunting for their pride.
• Nearly half the world’s population of pigs can be found on Chinese farms.
• If you need to escape the grip of a crocodile’s jaws, simply lodge your thumbs into its eyes and it will release immediately.

Useless Facts About History

• From 1912 to 1948, the Olympic Games awarded medals for art as well as sport. Medals were given for sculpture, painting, architecture, literature, and music. 
• Henry VIII knighted four of his “Grooms of Stool.” What’s a groom of stool? A person that would wipe the king’s butt.
• In ancient Egypt, servants of the Pharoah were smeared with honey to attract flies away from the Pharoah onto them.
• Every single British tank built since 1945 was outfitted with everything soldiers would need to prepare tea.
• Over 2% of the United States’ population was killed during the civil war.
• Pope Gregory IV claimed that Satan used black cats for his bidding. The declaration was met with a huge effort and the mass extermination of many cats.

Useless Facts About the Past

• Joseph Stalin had people removed from photos after they died or were removed from office.
• Johnny Appleseed is just a hero from folklore, he was an actual person. Though his last name was not Appleseed, it was Chapman, he hailed from Leominster, Massachusetts. 
• George Washington owned his own whiskey distillery.
• President Calvin Coolidge had two lions gifted to him by the government of South Africa following his presidency. The big cats were named Tax Reduction and Budget Bureau.
• Thomas Edison did not invent the lightbulb. He took credit for many inventions he did not create during his lifetime. The first light bulb was invented forty years earlier than Edison claimed by a man named Warren de la Rue.
• Before the invention of the dentures we are accustomed to today, dentures were made from the extracted teeth of dead soldiers.

Useless Facts About Music

• Rod Stewart hosted the world’s most attended free music concert. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, his New Year’s Eve concert on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, had some 4.2 million audience members live in attendance.
• Monaco’s army is smaller than its military orchestra. The number of soldiers is 82 while the orchestra is comprised of 85 players.
• Plants grow faster if you play them music. BestLife cites a study conducted by scientists at the South Korean National Institute of Agricultural Biotechnology. The study found that plants grew more quickly and argued that plants have a gene that allows them to listen.
• As you listen to music, your heart will sync to the rhythm.
• The nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb” is based on a real-life Mary from Boston who had a pet lamb who would follow her to school.
• Metallica was the first and remains the only band to tour each of the seven continents to perform. They performed under a dome in Antarctica for researchers and scientists who studied there to achieve this amazing feat.

Random Useless Facts About Music

• The Japanese word karaoke comes from a phrase that means “empty orchestra.”
• One violin is comprised of over 70 individual pieces of wood.
• Freddie Mercury is rumored to have snuck Princess Diana into a gay club back in the 1980s by outfitting her in a baggy army jacket and sunglasses.
• The London Symphony Orchestra had been booked on the Titanic’s fateful voyage, but they were spared as they changed boats at the last minute.
• Taylor Swift is named for singer-songwriter James Taylor.
• The inventor of the Stratocaster and the Telecaster guitars, Leo Fender, couldn’t actually play guitar.

Useless Facts About Movies

• Michael Myers’ mask in Halloween was borne of necessity as there was not much of a budget for a mask. The production designer purchased a Captain Kirk mask in the likeness of William Shatner and painted it and added hair to create the iconic mask.
• Christopher Nolan wanted to grow 500 acres of corn for one of the cornfield scenes in Interstellar. He and the production team successfully did it, selling the corn after production had wrapped, and turning a profit.
• The original script for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was titled The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy. The flip in the title happened after Paul Newman accepted the role as Butch.
• The snow in Wizard of Oz‘s famous poppy dream sequence was not snow at all! In fact, asbestos-based fake snowflakes were used on set. Yikes!
• Psycho was the first film to show a toilet flushing.
• Hannibal Lecter, Norman Bates, and Leatherface were all inspired by the same real-life serial killer, Ed Gein.

Random Useless Facts About Cinema

• Saw was filmed in just 18 days
• There’s a 20-year age gap between Sam Neill and Laura Dern. In Jurassic Park, Dern was 26 during filming.
• The Dark Knight made more money in its first six days in the US than Batman Begins made in its entire domestic run.
• Enya was James Cameron’s first choice to compose the music for Titanic. 
• Darth Vader only has 12 minutes of screen time in the original Star Wars.
• Disney turned down the chance to make Back to the Future claiming the mother/son relationship went too far. Hint: It did.

Absolutely Random Useless Facts

• The cigarette lighter was invented before matches.
• Nutmeg is a poison if injected intravenously.
• The only continent without reptiles or snakes is Antarctica.
• Leonardo da Vinci invented scissors.
• Toxic indoor plants poison more children than household chemicals do.
• There is enough fuel in a full jumbo jet gas tank to drive the average car four times around the world.

Random Useless Facts

• The longest period of time between two twins’ births was 87 days.
• The largest snowflake ever measured was 15 inches across.
• In 1920, Babe Ruth out-homered every other American League team.
• The constant erosion at the base of Niagara Falls has caused the falls to recede seven miles over the past 10,000 years.
• Each year, 56,000,000 people attend major league baseball games.
• There is a glacier called “Blood Falls.” You’ll find it in Antarctica that regularly pours out red liquid, making it look like the ice is bleeding. It’s not actually blood, however, it’s oxidized saltwater.

Useless Facts That Your Kids Will Love

• Peanuts are not nuts. They’re legumes.
• Before it was called “ice cream” the dessert was known as “cream ice.”
• The oldest domesticated cat lived to be 38-years-old. Her name was Creme Puff and she called Texas home.
• The eye of an ostrich is bigger than its brain.
• Lettuce is a member of the sunflower family. We’re pretty sure sunflowers are not edible.
• Bees are the only insect that produces a product that people eat.

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Useless Facts to Share with Children

• Strawberries are not actually berries but bananas are!
• Fortune telling is illegal in the state of Maryland.
• In WWII British soldiers were only given three sheets of toilet paper a day.
• We all know giraffes have long necks but do you know how long a giraffe tongue is? They are between 18 and 20 inches in length!
• The White House has 35 bathrooms.
• New York City’s Central Park is larger than all of Monaco. Yes, Monaco could fit inside Central Park.

There you go! We hope you had fun learning about these random useless facts. Although they may have little to no practical use, these facts are fun to know as they are rather curious. As we all know, fact is stranger than fiction and these random ones go a long way in proving that sentiment. Now, go share these useless facts with the world!