Learning new topics and facts every day, stimulates our brain. With random facts from different websites, it makes us eager to read more. Today let’s learn the five most fascinating facts! Read on.
1. The longest place name on the planet is 85 letters long.
When it comes to learning to spell the name of their home town, people living in Mamungkukumpurangkuntjunya Hill, Australia, need a little patience. So do the folks in Massachusetts from Lake Chargoggagoggman-chauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg and Tweebuffelsmeteen-skootmorsdoodgeskietfontein, South Africa.
When jotting down their address, none of them have quite as much work to do as those living in Taumatawhakatangihanga-koauauotamateaturipukakapikimaung-ahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu, New Zealand. With 85 letters in length, this is the world’s longest place name.
2. The oceans contain about 200,000 viruses of various kinds.
You do not want to worry about the fact that the seemingly pristine water is home to almost 200,000 different kinds of viruses the next time you feel like taking a dip in the great blue ocean.
Although this could sound frightening, Matthew Sullivan, an Ohio State University microbiologist, told CNN, “Getting these facts about what viruses exist allows us to do a lot of stuff that we might be involved in to better understand the ocean, and I hate to say so, but I may have to engineer the ocean to fight climate change at some point.”
3. The United States Once Planned On Nuking The Moon
If you thought that ‘because we can’ was the rationale behind such an act, you are absolutely right. To one-up the Soviet Union, which was regarded as leading the space race at the time, the United States had ambiguous proposals to nuke the moon.
“The project was called” A Study of Lunar Research Flights “or” Project A119 “and was produced by the U.S. Late 1950s, Air Force. It was thought that this would be a relatively simple thing to do and would also improve the public’s understanding of the role of America in the space race.
Reaching the moon with an intercontinental ballistic missile would have been reasonably easy to do, including hitting the target with a precision of around two miles, according to one of the project leaders, physicist Leonard Reiffel. As the Air Force wanted the resulting explosion to be clearly observable from Earth, this precision would have been especially important.
As such, the explosion was proposed to occur on the edge of the moon’s visible portion so that the resulting cloud will be clearly visible, illuminated by the sun. Eventually, the project was scrapped as it was felt that the public would not respond favorably to the dropping of a nuclear bomb on the moon by the U.S.
4. The Sun is White, Not Yellow
For people out there with graphics, the exact color of the sun is # fff5f2. The explanation that the sun appears yellow to people is that light is scattered from the sun by our atmosphere, so the sun’s perceived color shifts. The same scattering effect is why the sky, like at night, appears blue in the daytime instead of black.
In fact, what is occurring is that light in the blue and violet wavelength spectrum is dispersed by the Earth’s atmosphere, while the remaining light wavelengths appear yellow. The same effect is why when the sun falls over the horizon, the sky will also always appear yellow, as well as why during this period of the day, the sky and sun which appear redder at times.
When the sun sets, due to the diminished angle of the sun relative to you, more of the shorter wavelength blue is scattered; so the light needs to pass through more atmosphere to get to you. This increased diffusion results in less illumination of the blue wavelength to you, and hence what remains appears yellow. Similarly, this filter out larger wavelengths if it is dusty or there are a lot of other larger particles in the air, resulting in a red sky and a red sun.
5. Where The Words “Geek” and “Nerd” Come From
The first known “geek” case dates back all the way to 1916. The term was used at the time to characterize sideshow freaks in circuses.
In particular, it was commonly due to those circus performers who were known to do insane things, such as biting the heads of different small live animals or eating live insects. These performances have also been referred to as ‘geek shows.’ The term “geek” itself was derived from the word “geck,” which was originally a Low German word meaning someone who is a “fool/freak/simpleton.”
In Dr. Seuss’s If I Ran the Zoo in 1950, the first known case of “nerd” was. “A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too” was the basic text. In a Newsweek magazine report in 1951, just one year after the Dr. Seuss book, we found the first recorded case of “nerd” being used similarly to how we use it today. They used it primarily as a synonym for someone who was a “drip” or a “square.”
Two common hypotheses exist as to where the word came from. The first is that, perhaps, it was derived from “drunk,” “knurd,” pronounced backward. This was suitable for describing individuals who studied instead of going out with friends and partying.
A much more recent theory suggests that it originated from a “nut” alteration, specifically “nert,” which meant “stupid or mad person,” and was widespread in the 1940s, right before the word “nerd” emerged. In the 1960s, the word nerd became fairly popular, and the T.V. show Happy Days, where it was often used, was hugely popularized in the 1970s.
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Louie is the father behind the travel blog Browseeverywhere.com. He has a background in photography, E-commerce, and writing product reviews online at ConsumerReviews24. Traveling full time with his family was his ultimate past-time. If he’s not typing at his laptop, you can probably find him watching movies.
