Past wow facts

Missed a day? Here are the facts we've already revealed, sorted by topic, each with a source. A new one is added every day. Reveal today's fact.

🐙 Animals

• Owls can turn their heads 270°
• Axolotls can regrow lost legs
• Honeybees give directions by dancing
• Platypuses glow under UV light
• Butterflies taste with their feet
• Ostriches have the biggest eyes on land
• Hummingbirds can fly backwards
• Mantis shrimp see colors differently
• Tardigrades survived open space
• Koalas have fingerprints
• Flamingos are pink because of their food
• Sharks' family tree is older than trees
• Wombats poop cubes
• Octopuses have three hearts

🪐 Space

• A year on Mercury is 88 days
• 15 sunrises a day on the ISS
• A volcano 2.5 times taller than Everest
• Sunlight is 8 minutes old
• Venus is hotter than Mercury
• A teaspoon of neutron star
• Neptune finished its first orbit since discovery in 2011
• Saturn is less dense than water
• Venus spins slower than it orbits

🏛️ History

• Paper money started in China
• Ancient Rome taxed urine
• Vikings didn't wear horned helmets
• Napoleon wasn't short
• The theft that made the Mona Lisa famous
• Scotland's national animal is the unicorn
• The shortest war lasted under an hour
• Cleopatra and the Moon landing
• Oxford is older than the Aztec Empire

🫀 Human body

• The tongue map is a myth
• Your strongest bone is in your thigh
• Your neck has as many bones as a giraffe's
• Your heart beats about 100,000 times a day
• Your cornea breathes air
• Your smallest bone is in your ear
• Babies have more bones than adults

🍌 Food

• Cashews grow outside a fruit
• Pineapple breaks down protein
• White chocolate has no cocoa solids
• Coffee beans aren't beans
• Buried in a Pringles can
• Carrots used to be purple
• Tomatoes were once sold as medicine
• Honey almost never spoils
• Peanuts aren't nuts
• Bananas are berries, strawberries aren't

⚡ Science

• Helium was found on the Sun first
• Diamonds and pencils are both carbon
• Why ice floats
• The Eiffel Tower grows in summer
• Bananas are slightly radioactive
• Sound travels faster in water
• Lightning is hotter than the Sun's surface

🌍 Geography

• Canada has the longest coastline
• The largest desert is Antarctica
• One lake holds over a fifth of the world's fresh surface water
• The world's smallest country
• The top of the world isn't Everest
• You can't see the Great Wall from the Moon
• The lowest land on Earth
• Russia spans 11 time zones
• France has the most time zones
• Australia is wider than the Moon

🔤 Language

• An island where people talk by whistling
• The Hawaiian alphabet has 13 letters
• A 45-letter word invented by puzzle fans
• OK started as a joke spelling
• & used to be part of the alphabet
• Where the word robot comes from
• The dot over an i has a name
• One country, 800+ languages

💾 Technology

• Apollo 11's computer had about 4 KB of memory
• CAPTCHA is a 10-word acronym
• The first YouTube video
• The first text message said Merry Christmas
• Networked email is older than the web
• QWERTY is 150 years old
• An early webcam watched a coffee pot
• A computer bug that was a real moth

🎨 Arts & music

• Piano is short for soft-loud
• There's more than one Scream
• The view behind The Starry Night
• Michelangelo painted the Sistine ceiling standing up
• Beethoven composed while deaf
• Happy Birthday was copyrighted
• The Statue of Liberty used to be brown

🏅 Sports

• The Olympic colours were chosen to match every flag
• Someone played golf on the Moon
• Tug of war was an Olympic sport
• The first basketball hoops were peach baskets
• Why a marathon is 42.195 km
• Volleyball's original name
• Why golf balls have dimples
• Olympic gold medals are mostly silver

🌻 Plants

• A plant that folds when you touch it
• A flower that smells like rotting meat
• A tree that's nearly 4,900 years old
• A Venus flytrap counts before it snaps
• Young sunflowers track the Sun
• A forest that's one tree
• Bamboo can grow almost a metre a day

🌊 Ocean

• The Pacific is bigger than all land
• Starfish that regrow from one arm
• The longest mountain range is underwater
• A reef you can see from space
• Thank plankton for your breath
• The biggest heart on Earth
• A jellyfish that can reverse ageing
• The ocean is deeper than Everest is tall

🧮 Math

• Why bees use hexagons, proven in 1999
• A puzzle unsolved since 1742
• 39 digits of pi are enough
• A 9-year-old named the googol
• Your shuffled deck is probably unique
• 0.999... equals 1
• The birthday paradox
• More chess games than atoms