Facts Archive - Page 36 of 78 - Interesting Facts

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Some species of trees that line city streets predate the dinosaurs by millions of years, but when it comes to the truly ancient, you need to look to the oceans. Sea-dwelling creatures have a many-millions-of-years head start on any terrestrial life-forms. Take, for instance, the shark: This apex predator of the sea has been stalking the world’s oceans for upwards of 450 million years. Meanwhile, the very first forests filled with Earth’s very first trees, in the genera Wattieza and Archaeopteris, likely didn’t sprout on land until the mid-Devonian period some 385 million years ago. However, it’s worth noting that the animals some scientists consider the first “sharks” likely didn’t look like the magnificent predators of today. First appearing in the Late Ordovician, these creatures sported sharklike scales, but likely didn’t yet possess the species’ most memorable trait — a terrifying set of teeth.

Sharks are the oldest living species still in our oceans today.

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Sharks are old, but the world’s oceans are home to some truly ancient species. Jellyfish, for example, are thought to be at least 500 million years old, and scientists have found fossils of dendrogramma — a mushroom-like deep-sea animal — that are 560 million years old.

Surviving that long as a species is no easy feat. Only a few million years after the shark’s appearance on the world stage, these proto-sharks (along with the rest of life on Earth) suffered through the Late Ordovician mass extinction. This event was the first of five major extinction events in Earth’s history, and sharks survived them all; not even trees can add such an impressive accolade to their resume. So the next time you cross paths with a shark, whether behind the glass of an aquarium or on screen in the act of devouring the residents of Amity Island, don’t forget to marvel at this amazing animal’s incredible story of survival.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Average size (in inches) of the dwarf lantern shark, the smallest shark in the world

7.9

Number of shark species the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists as endangered or threatened

143

Year “Jaws” was released

1975

Rough odds of being attacked by a shark in the U.S.

1:5 million

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The ______ geologic period some 359 million years ago is known as the “golden age of sharks.”

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The Carboniferous geologic period some 359 million years ago is known as the “golden age of sharks.”

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Marine biologists age sharks in a manner similar to how arborists age trees.

Arborists use a technique called dendrochronology, or counting tree rings, to estimate a tree’s age. Every year, trees put on new growth near their bark, which over time forms predictable concentric circles — a timeline of their lives. In a strange biological plot twist, sharks do much the same thing. Similar to a tree’s trunk, sharks also put down new layers of material on their vertebrae. Unlike the bony bits that form our spine, a shark’s vertebrae are made out of cartilage (in fact, sharks don’t have any bones at all). Although counting the cartilage layers is helpful in getting a snapshot of a particular shark’s life, these layers can be affected by many things, including food shortages and health; plus, older sharks seem to stop putting on new rings entirely. That means counting these vertebrae rings only provides a ballpark estimate of a shark’s timeline. For some species of shark, including the incredibly long-lived Greenland shark, scientists use carbon dating of the proteins embedded in the shark’s eyes from birth to capture a more accurate age.

Darren Orf

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Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.

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A sea otter’s fur is an evolutionary marvel. Within just 1 square inch, otter fur contains 850,000 to 1 million hairs, making it denser than that of any other mammal on land or in the sea. The aptly named fur seal comes in a distant second, with only about 300,000 hairs per square inch. Humans, meanwhile, have only about 80,000 to 120,000 hairs on our heads (if we’re lucky).

Sea otters are the only marine mammals that habitually use stone tools.

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When floating on their backs, otters will use rocks balanced on their stomachs to crack open shells. They have also been spotted smacking shells on rocks or driftwood strewn along the Pacific coast. They’ve even been known to use garbage as tools.

But the number of hairs per square inch is only one aspect of sea otters’ complex, luxurious coat, because their fur has two distinct layers. The outer fur is called guard hair, which protects the second layer, or the undercoat, from getting wet. This double-layer system, and the tiny barbs on the guard hair, trap air next to an otter’s skin, which helps them withstand chilly waters without the blubber found in other aquatic animals such as walruses, whales, and seals. However, their fascinating fur has historically made otters a target, especially during the fur trade of the 18th and 19th centuries. Sea otters are also vulnerable to oil spills, which effectively destroy the insulating abilities of their fur. Since the 1970s, sea otters have slowly recuperated from near-extinction in the U.S. (at one point, California’s population was only 50 — it’s now 3,000), but they still have a long way to go before reaching their former abundance.

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Number of otter species worldwide (two live in the U.S. — the sea otter and the North American river otter)

13

Amount a sea otter eats compared to its weight every day

25%

Depth (in feet) that sea otters dive when searching for prey

330

Year the North Pacific Fur Seal Treaty protected sea otters from commercial hunting

1911

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Apes go through a midlife crisis.

Sea otters are a ______, meaning they play a vital role in holding their ecosystem together.

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Sea otters are a keystone species, meaning they play a vital role in holding their ecosystem together.

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90% of all sea otters in the world live along the coastal shores of Alaska.

Before Europeans arrived in the western United States, sea otters numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Their native range stretched from Mexico’s Baja California to the coastal waters of Japan, following the horseshoe-shaped path of the Pacific Rim (which includes California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and Russia). Since then, the sea otter hasn’t had an easy go of it, for the reasons mentioned above. Today, sea otters in the U.S. are split into two main groups. Southern sea otters call central and Southern California home, whereas northern sea otters — representing 90% of all sea otters in the world — live along Alaska’s coast. Scientists and environmentalists are still hard at work reintroducing sea otters to the rest of their once-sprawling coastal domain.

Darren Orf

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Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.

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Herbert Hoover’s time in office isn’t remembered especially fondly, dominated as it was by the Great Depression, but no one can deny the 31st president’s intelligence.

A member of Stanford’s inaugural class, Hoover is credited with saving as many as 10 million lives during World War I by leading America’s efforts to provide food to Europe’s most devastated areas. Hoover and his wife Lou Henry Hoover also lived and worked in China around the turn of the 20th century, and they both spoke fluent Mandarin — a skill they used to evade eavesdroppers during their time in the White House.

Mandarin is the most widely spoken native language in the world.

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About 940 million people speak it as a first language, with an additional 400 million speakers of other Chinese dialects bringing the total number of Chinese speakers to 1.3 billion.

That wasn’t their only lingual feat, as the couple also spent several years translating De Re Metallica, a 16th-century text on metallurgy and mining, from German to English, for which they won an award from the Mining and Metallurgical Society. Lou was especially skilled with languages, having also achieved fluency in Latin, Spanish, German, Italian, and French. Hoover served just one term as president, as he was soundly defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, and his 31-year retirement was the longest in presidential history until it was surpassed by that of Jimmy Carter.

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Native English speakers in the world

379 million

Electoral votes won by Hoover in the 1928 presidential election

444

Hoover’s net worth, adjusted for inflation

$75 million

Languages spoken by President John Quincy Adams

7

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Herbert Hoover’s vice president was ______.

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Herbert Hoover’s vice president was Charles Curtis.

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India recently overtook China as the world’s most populous country.

From the time the United Nations first began keeping records in 1950, China had been widely known as the world’s most populous country — a title it had likely already held for decades if not centuries prior to those records. That reign came to an end in April 2023, when India’s population reached 1,425,775,850, surpassing the number of people in China. As of 2025, the populations of India and China are estimated at 1.46 billion and 1.41 billion, respectively.

The Middle Kingdom’s population has been declining for years due to decreasing birth rates. India’s growth rate has been slowing as well, but not enough to prevent it from becoming the most populous country in the world; an average of 86,000 babies were born in India every day at the time it overtook China, which reported just 49,000 births a day. India’s population is expected to peak at 1.7 billion in 2064.

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Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.

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As beloved as the crisp fall weather seems to be, English speakers haven’t always paid attention to it … at least not linguistically. Historically, the more extreme seasons have always been named — specifically winter, which was so important that it was used to mark the passage of time by the Anglo-Saxons, who counted their years in winters. But when English speakers of the past referred to summer’s end, they often used the term “harvest,” from the Old English (and ultimately Germanic) haerfest. The first recorded usage of “harvest” to mean a season appears in the 10th century, but the word didn’t stick around in common usage (it was considered outdated by the 1700s). It could be that it was just too confusing a term, considering it was used for both the time of year and the task of plucking crops from trees and fields.

There are two different first days of fall.

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There are two ways to welcome autumn: meteorological fall and astronomical fall. Used by climate scientists, meteorological fall starts September 1, a consistent date for tracking weather. Astronomical fall is based on the equinox, alternating each year between September 22 and 23.

Eventually, the English language began recognizing the transitional seasons. Spring was first known as “lent” or “lenten” in the 12th and 13th centuries, then “spryngyng time,” among other terms, around the 14th century. “Autumn” emerged around the 1300s, taken from the Latin autumnus and French autompne, and slowly pushing out “harvest.” “Fall” cropped up around the 1500s as part of “fall of the leaf,” mirroring the popular phrase “spring of the leaf” used for the vernal equinox, and it’s likely that these phrases were simply shortened to give the seasons their modern names. “Autumn” and “fall” have been used interchangeably ever since, with their popularity waxing and waning over time, though English speakers today primarily use one or the other based on their homeland. “Autumn” reigns supreme in the U.K., while most Americans typically use “fall.” The vocabulary variation harkens back to the Revolutionary period, when disgruntled colonists attempted to split both governmentally and culturally from the British, in part by modifying their speech. Less than 100 years after the U.S. declared independence, “fall” was considered an entirely American word, used in a young country that would go on to establish its own season-defining traditions, such as trick-or-treating and Thanksgiving dinners.

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Year folk-rock legend Neil Young debuted “Harvest,” his fourth studio album

1972

Year “pumpkin spice” was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary

2022

Pounds of pumpkins harvested in Illinois (the top-producing state) in 2020

564 million

Number of days in fall, the second-shortest season of the year (after winter)

89

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Most Vikings didn’t wear horned helmets.

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The sky is never totally black, even at night.

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You can’t hum while holding your nose.

Apes go through a midlife crisis.

In Latin, “equinox” means “______.”

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In Latin, “equinox” means “equal night.”

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The first English dictionary had only 3,000 words.

Dictionaries were once popular graduation gifts and required purchases for college students, but the first English-only compendium wasn’t nearly as large as modern tomes. Lexicographer Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall, published in 1604, featured around 3,000 words with brief descriptions of their meanings on 130 pages — and unlike more recent dictionaries, it didn’t contain commonly used words. Instead, Cawdrey’s text listed difficult, unusual words that had crept into English thanks to a wave of literary, scientific, and artistic advances during the 1500s. (Many, like “ocean” or “hazard,” we wouldn’t think of as particularly challenging today.) Table Alphabeticall’s limited focus is often why its historical significance is overshadowed by Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language — an important language contribution that attempted to standardize the spelling of everyday words for the first time, but didn’t go to press until 1775.

Nicole Garner Meeker

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Nicole Garner Meeker is a writer and editor based in St. Louis. Her history, nature, and food stories have also appeared at Mental Floss and Better Report.

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There are some things in modern culture that people just love to hate, like Nickelback, cargo pants, and the most derided typeface of all: Comic Sans. At first glance, this fun and childlike font — originally designed to mimic the script found in comic books — seems to serve a lighthearted purpose. But for more than a decade, it’s been derided as one of the worst typefaces ever. It turns out that Comic Sans doesn’t even hold a particularly warm and fuzzy place in its own creator’s heart — typographer Vincent Connare only used the font once in his life, in a letter complaining to his broadband internet provider.

The word “italics” comes from the Latin word for Italy.

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An italic typeface was introduced by Venetian printer Aldus Manutius in 1501. Manutius first used this slanted type in a printing of the works of Virgil, which he dedicated to Italy. Hence, the word “italics.”

Connare originally created the font for Microsoft Bob, a short-lived operating system designed to make computers more user-friendly. The desktop resembled a family room with icons representing certain computer programs. When someone clicked on a pen and paper icon, for example, it opened a word processor. Users were assisted by a cartoon dog named Rover, and during the software’s development, Connare decided that dogs “don’t talk in Times New Roman” — so he created Comic Sans. Although the final version of Microsoft Bob didn’t include the font, it appeared as an additional typeface in Windows 95.

Yet Comic Sans slowly garnered derision in the years following its initial release, and was often perceived as overly childish, visually chaotic, and an affront to good typeface design. Hate for the typeface drove reliable traffic on Twitter (now called X), inspired entire websites, and even prompted one vitriolic manifesto — but maybe times are changing. One reformed Comic Sans hater (and co-author of the aforementioned manifesto) changed his Facebook group “Ban Comic Sans” into “Use Comic Sans” in May 2019, telling The New York Times, “It’s gotten to be so bad that it’s almost cool again.”

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Numbers Don't Lie

Number of comics and graphic novels sold in the U.S. in 2021

94 million

Year Swiss typographer Max Miedinger designed Helvetica, one of the most widely used fonts

1957

Signatures in one “Ban Comic Sans” petition

5,000

Year Microsoft introduced the assistant Clippy, an anthropomorphic paper clip inspired by Microsoft Bob

1997

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You can’t hum while holding your nose.

Apes go through a midlife crisis.

The use of the word “sans” means the typeface is without ______.

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The use of the word “sans” means the typeface is without serifs.

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Movable type was invented in China — not Germany.

The invention of the printed word is often inexorably linked with 15th-century German printer Johannes Gutenberg and his press, but the first evidence of movable type — arranging separate letters on metal pieces — predates the Teutonic inventor by several centuries. Although the first printed (or at least not handwritten) books date back to the ninth century, the invention of movable type arrived in 11th-century China, as the creation of artisan and engineer Bi Sheng (970 to 1051 CE). To create this early printing press, Sheng hand-carved letters into clay and then baked them into reusable bricks. During the Nan (Southern) Song dynasty, which stretched from 1127 to 1279, these printed books helped create a scholar class in Chinese society, and the size of book collections became entwined with a person’s social status.

Darren Orf

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Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.

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Few people have had a larger or more positive impact on the way we drive than William Phelps Eno, sometimes called the “father of traffic safety.” The New York City native — who invented the stop sign around the dawn of the 20th century — once traced the inspiration for his career to a horse-drawn-carriage traffic jam he experienced as a child in Manhattan in 1867: “There were only about a dozen horses and carriages involved, and all that was needed was a little order to keep the traffic moving,” he later wrote. “Yet nobody knew exactly what to do; neither the drivers nor the police knew anything about the control of traffic.”

Stop signs were invented before traffic lights.

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The first traffic signal (then gaslit) was installed in London in 1868. The stop sign, meanwhile, debuted in Detroit in 1915.

After his father’s death in 1898 left him with a multimillion-dollar inheritance, Eno devoted himself to creating a field that didn’t otherwise exist: traffic management. He developed the first traffic plans for New York, Paris, and London. In 1921, he founded the Washington, D.C.-based Eno Center for Transportation, a research foundation on multimodal transportation issues that still exists. One thing Eno didn’t do, however, is learn how to drive. Perhaps because he had such extensive knowledge of them, Eno distrusted automobiles and preferred riding horses. He died in Connecticut at the age of 86 in 1945 having never driven a car.

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Hours an average American driver spends at stoplights every year

58.6

Minimum height (in feet) of stop sign poles in rural areas (7 feet in other areas)

5

Registered cars in the United States as of 2019

276 million

Size (in feet) of the first stop sign

2 x 2

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Apes go through a midlife crisis.

Stop signs were originally colored ______.

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Stop signs were originally colored yellow.

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Stop signs have eight sides to indicate danger.

Though the first stop sign was a humble square, that design didn’t last long. In addition to being easily recognizable from both sides and easy to see at night, the octagon was chosen in the 1920s as part of a still-influential initiative in which the number of sides a sign has indicates the level of danger it’s meant to warn against. Train crossing signs were circles (which can be thought of as having an infinite number of sides) because those crossings were considered the most hazardous, followed by octagonal stop signs for intersections and the like; diamond-shaped signs were used for less perilous crossings, and rectangular ones were posted simply to convey information.

Michael Nordine

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Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.

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If you think the Electoral College is confusing, perhaps you’ll take a liking to The Gambia’s method of choosing its leaders: marbles. The small West African nation eschews paper ballots in favor of this novel approach, which was introduced in 1965 due to the country’s low literacy rate. Voters are given a marble upon checking in at their polling station, with each candidate represented by a photo affixed to a color-coded drum. Once the marble has been dropped into the voter’s drum of choice inside a private booth, a bell sounds to confirm it went through — and prevent anyone from attempting to vote twice. As simple as it is effective, the system has even been credited with ending The Gambia’s former dictatorship and keeping its democracy thriving.

The Gambia is the smallest country in mainland Africa.

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Africa’s five smallest nations by size are all islands: the Seychelles, São Tomé and Príncipe, Mauritius, Comoros, and Cape Verde. When it comes to the continental mainland, however, The Gambia is the most modestly proportioned — its area is just 4,363 square miles.

Other countries have adopted unique electoral processes as well. Aspiring presidential candidates in France need to secure 500 endorsements from elected officials, a time-consuming process meant to discourage fantasy candidates. In neighboring Germany, the Bundestag (lower house of the Parliament) requires two votes per ballot: one for a district representative and one for the voter’s preferred political party, which determines how many seats each party gets in the Bundestag overall. In general, half of the Bundestag’s 598 seats are determined by the first vote and half by the second.

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Population of The Gambia, as of a 2024 estimate

2,523,000

Votes cast in the 2021 Gambian presidential election

859,557

Member states of the African Union, including The Gambia

55

Presidents in The Gambia’s history

3

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Most Vikings didn’t wear horned helmets.

September 1752 was only 19 days long in the U.K.

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You can’t hum while holding your nose.

Apes go through a midlife crisis.

The Gambia is home to three sacred pools of ______.

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The Gambia is home to three sacred pools of crocodiles.

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Only two countries’ names officially begin with “The.”

And The Gambia is one of them. The use of the definite article isn’t entirely uncommon when referring to countries — the Netherlands and the United Kingdom come to mind — but it’s mostly used on an informal basis or because the grammar of the sentence requires it. According to such authoritative sources as the U.S. Department of State and the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, the only two countries that should officially be referred to with the definite article are The Gambia and The Bahamas. (It’s also appropriate when the place in question is a geophysical entity, such as groups of islands like the Maldives, but that’s again a matter of grammar rather than official naming practices.) The Gambia’s article comes in part because it was named after the River Gambia, and in part because of a request from the prime minister to avoid confusion with another African country that also earned its independence in the 1960s — Zambia.

Michael Nordine

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Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.

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It’s taken a few centuries, but the Gregorian calendar, first instituted by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, is now the official calendar used by most countries — emphasis on “most.” A notable exception is Ethiopia, which uses its own calendar. The Ethiopian calendar shares some similarities with the Gregorian: They’re both based on the solar year and on ancient Rome’s Julian calendar, and they’re both 365 days long (366 during a leap year). But Ethiopia’s calendar has an extra month, its new year is celebrated on September 11, and, most notably, it’s seven to eight years behind most other nations, depending on the time of year.

According to legend, coffee was first discovered in Ethiopia.

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The story goes that the coffee bean’s caffeinating effects were first discovered by an Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi. After watching his goats acting strangely when they ate from a nearby bush, Kaldi tried some beans himself and experienced similar invigorating side effects.

This temporal difference is a feature, not a flaw, and stems from something Ethiopians call Bahere Hasab (“Sea of Thoughts”), the method used to calculate the calendar. Both the Gregorian and Ethiopian calendars recognize Jesus’ birth as a key date in their calculations, but they differ on when this event is supposed to have occurred. In the Gregorian calendar, Jesus’ birth year divides B.C. from A.D. (or BCE from CE). The Ethiopian calendar instead places Jesus’ birth around 7 BCE. This event is supposed to have happened 5,500 years after Adam and Eve repented for their sins in the Garden of Eden. Many of the atypical features of the Ethiopian calendar are shared by the Coptic calendar, including its 13-month construction and mid-September new year. However, according to the Copts — an ethnoreligious Christian group native to North Africa — it’s currently the year 1741.

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Estimated number of languages spoken in Ethiopia (Oromo and Amharic are the most widely spoken)

88

Year it would be in the Human Era calendar (a proposed reform that encompasses all of modern human activity)

12,025

Number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Ethiopia

9

Year when the Gregorian calendar will be a day out of sync with the solar year

4909

More Interesting Reads

Most Vikings didn’t wear horned helmets.

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Woman next to a telescope observing the night sky in the desert

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You can’t hum while holding your nose.

Apes go through a midlife crisis.

The Ethiopian calendar’s 13th month, called ______, is only five days long.

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The Ethiopian calendar’s 13th month, called Pagume, is only five days long.

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Ethiopia is home to 80% of Africa’s tallest mountains.

Known as the “cradle of humanity,” Ethiopia is both incredibly old and incredibly mountainous. Some 75 million years ago, magma from the Earth’s crust lifted up a dome of rock known today as the Ethiopian Highlands, which was then split in half by the Great Rift Valley. These highlands are home to nearly 80% of Africa’s tallest mountains — though the very tallest is Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania — and some fascinating species, such as the Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis), one of the most endangered animals in Africa. The mountains have also played a key role in human history by providing a geographic deterrent to European colonialism. Ethiopia is one of only two countries in Africa (the other being Liberia) to never be successfully colonized, which allowed its ancient culture to flourish to this day.

Darren Orf

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Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.

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If you’ve ever strolled through a market in the touristy part of a major city, you know that knockoff Gucci handbags and fake Rolexes are more abundant than real ones. The same can be said for flamingos, as the pink plastic lawn decorations made in their image far outnumber the actual birds. The exact number of real flamingos is hard to quantify given the animal’s broad global range and migration patterns, but estimates suggest there are roughly 3.45 million to 4.68 million flamingos in the wild.

Those numbers pale in comparison to plastic flamingos, of which tens of millions exist. The item was created in 1957 by artist Don Featherstone based on an image in the October issue of National Geographic. Initially, the flamingo was sold with a plastic duck for $2.76 (roughly $31.73 as of 2025). Some consumers purchased the bird as a way to make their homes stand out in cookie-cutter housing developments, while others just liked the way it looked on their lawns.

The plastic flamingo is the official bird of Madison, Wisconsin.

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In 1979, two University of Wisconsin students installed 1,008 plastic pink flamingos on a campus lawn overnight. The prank soon became tradition, and the school now holds a “Fill the Hill” fundraiser each year. In 2009, local officials designated the plastic flamingo the city’s official bird.

The 1960s saw a bit of backlash, as members of the counterculture movement rejected the ornaments for being tacky — but the flamingos were reembraced in the 1970s as people once again came to appreciate their kitsch. Sales spiked in the wake of the 1972 John Waters film Pink Flamingos and again rather inexplicably in 1985. In that year, several companies noted a confusing albeit welcome increase in purchases of the plastic bird, including big-box retailer Canadian Tire, whose sales jumped a whopping 70% year over year.

When Featherstone passed away in 2015, The Washington Post reported that upward of 20 million fake flamingos had been sold since their debut, and that number continues to grow. Several species of real flamingo, however, find themselves in a population decline, including the lesser, Chilean, and Andean varieties.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Numbers Don't Lie

Distance (in miles) flamingos can travel in a day

~373

Age of the oldest recorded flamingo

83

Recognized species of flamingos

6

Items in the longest line of garden flamingos

4,280

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______ has the highest wild flamingo population of any country.

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Kenya has the highest wild flamingo population of any country.

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Flamingos aren't born pink.

The colorful pink plumage of a standard flamingo has to do not with genetics, but with the bird’s diet. Flamingos are born with gray feathers and gradually develop their pink hue over the next two or so years. This happens as they consume more beta-carotene — a red-orange pigment that’s abundant in the many algaes, brine shrimp, and brine fly larvae flamingos eat.

Once consumed, the pigments are broken down and absorbed by fats in the liver, which deposits the color into the bird’s feathers and skin. Zoos often serve a soupy, nutritious mixture with high levels of carotenoids to flamingos in captivity to promote good health and maintain the birds’ vibrant pink color.

Bennett Kleinman

Staff Writer

Bennett Kleinman is a New York City-based staff writer for Inbox Studio, and previously contributed to television programs such as "Late Show With David Letterman" and "Impractical Jokers." Bennett is also a devoted New York Yankees and New Jersey Devils fan, and thinks plain seltzer is the best drink ever invented.

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Original photo by EyeEm Mobile GmbH/ iStock

You may have grown up testing your nerve in front of the mirror by chanting in the dark to see if any spirits would appear. And while this may not summon ghosts, it turns out it can summon illusions. Staring into a dimly lit mirror for an extended period of time can distort your perception of your own face, making it appear to warp, blur, or even morph into someone — or something — else.

This phenomenon, dubbed the “strange-face-in-the-mirror illusion,” was first described in a 2010 study by Italian psychologist Giovanni Caputo. Subjects were placed in a room lit by a 25-watt lamp behind them with a mirror about a foot in front of them. They typically began to perceive the illusion after less than a minute, and after 10 minutes of gazing, many reported eerie changes.

More than 60% of participants saw “huge deformations” to their own faces, while others saw someone else entirely in their reflection, such as an old woman or a child. Almost 20% described seeing animal faces such as a cat, pig, or lion, and almost half experienced distorted perceptions of monstrous beings.

Ancient mirrors were made of volcanic glass.

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Obsidian, a volcanic glass, has been polished into mirrors since at least as early as 8000 to 6000 BCE in the Anatolian peninsula (modern-day Turkey).

The effect may seem frightening, but it isn’t supernatural — it’s neurological. When the brain is deprived of dynamic visual input, it quickly starts to adapt. Think of the optical illusions you’ve likely tried: In the lilac chaser, for example, a ring of lilac dots seems to vanish and a green dot appears in their place. This happens because of a process called the Troxler effect, in which staring at a fixed point can make surrounding details fade.

At the same time, because our brains are wired to search for faces, the experiment can also result in subjects seeing the faces of their own parents or other loved ones staring back.

Interestingly, this kind of illusion isn’t limited to mirrors. Caputo found in another study that staring into someone else’s eyes in dim light can trigger similar — or in some cases, even more dramatic — hallucinatory experiences. Many participants saw facial deformities and monsters, but they also reported that colors seemed muted, the volume of surrounding sounds noticeably increased or decreased, time felt stretched, and they felt spacey and dazed.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Numbers Don't Lie

Light-sensitive cells known as rods and cones in a human eye

~126 million

Year the first Magic Eye optical illusion book was published in North America

1993

Hours Thomas Edison’s 1879 light bulb lasted

~14

Distance (in light-years) to the Andromeda Galaxy, the farthest object visible to the unaided eye

2.5 million

More Interesting Reads

Most Vikings didn’t wear horned helmets.

September 1752 was only 19 days long in the U.K.

Woman next to a telescope observing the night sky in the desert

The sky is never totally black, even at night.

Woman wearing headphones , sitting on a couch, and humming to music

You can’t hum while holding your nose.

Apes go through a midlife crisis.

The ability to see millions more colors than the average person is known as ______.

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The ability to see millions more colors than the average person is known as tetrachromacy.

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Those tiny specks in your vision are shadows inside your eyes.

The tiny dots that occasionally drift through your vision may seem to be specks of dust in the atmosphere, but those eye floaters, as they’re called, are actually shadows cast on your retina. They’re caused by clumps of collagen fibers floating around inside the gel-like vitreous body between the lens and retina.

When light passes through the eye, those tiny clumps block or scatter it slightly, creating the little shapes you see. The clumps also move as your eyes move, darting across your field of vision, and they’re more visible against bright backgrounds such as a clear sky or a white wall.

Nicole Villeneuve

Writer

Nicole is a writer, thrift store lover, and group-chat meme spammer based in Ontario, Canada.

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