Asklemmy

The country claiming to have the most “freedom” of any country has the highest incarceration rate of any country.

Oxford University is older than the Aztec empire.

Oxford University founded in 1326, Aztec empire ~1428-1521

Lighters were invented before matches! 1823 vs 1826

you are loved and deserve happiness

A broken clock is right twice a day, but a clock running backwards is right four times a day.

Oh, I have two good ones:

1. Nuclear power causes less deaths (per energy unit produced) than wind (source)

2. You get less radiation when living near a nuclear power plant, than if that nuclear plant hadn't been there.

To explain the second: A major misconception is, that nuclear power plants are dangerous due to their radiation. No they aren't. The effect of radiation from the rocks in the ground and the surroundings is on average 50x more than what you get from the nuclear power plant and it's fuel cells. (source). Our body is very well capable of dealing with the constant background radiation all the time (e.g. DNA repairs). Near a power plant, the massive amounts of isolation and concrete will inhibit any background radiation coming from rocks from that direction to you. This means, that you'll actually get slightly less radiation, because the nuclear plant is there.

Regarding the dangers of nuclear disasters. To this day, it's been very hard to find out, if at all any people have even died to Fukushima radiation (ans not other sources such as tsunami/earthquake/etc.) Nuclear radiation causes much more problems by being an emotionally triggering viral meme spreading between people and hindering it's productive use and by distracting from the ironic fact, that the coal burned in coal power plants spew much more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear power plants themselves. (source)

There are people still alive who remember a world before "splinter-free" toilet paper.

The manufacturing of this product had a long period of refinement, considering that as late as the 1930s, a selling point of the Northern Tissue company was that their toilet paper was "splinter free".

-Wikipedia

The closest planet to Earth is Mercury.

On average that is. Mercury is actually the closest planet to every other planet in average. Because when it’s on the other side of the Sun, it’s still pretty close.

Your car keys have better range if you press them to your head, since your skull will act as an antenna. It sounds like some made up pseudoscience that would never work in practice or have a negligible effect, but it actually works.

Edit: idk if it's actually because your skull acts as an antenna, although that's what I've heard. I looked it up and it seems like it's your head acting as a reasonance chamber. Since your body is conductive, your head can bounce and amplify the radio signal.

A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus.

If you start to think about how these lengths of time are defined it becomes clearer.

1 day = time to rotate on it's axis once 1 year = time to complete a full rotation around the sun

For Earth, it takes us ~24hrs to rotate on our axis and 365.25 days to orbit the sun.

However, because Venus' axial rotation is so slow (and another interesting fact, it rotates in the opposite direction to other planets) it actually completes a full orbit of the sun before 1 axial rotation.

Hence, a year is shorter than a day

For those interested:

1 Venus day = 243 earth days 1 Venus year = 225 earth days

The world is running out of sand.

It's one of the most used materials in the world for construction but islands are disappearing because of its limited supply.

General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil, and Phillips Petroleum were convicted of an actual conspiracy related to the monopolization of transit systems, which replaced beloved streetcar (rail) systems with rubber-tired oil-burning buses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy

All the planets in the solar system can fit in the space between the Earth and the Moon

Cleopatra was born closer to the invention of cellphones than the building of the pyramids

The northern most part of Brazil is closer to Canada than it is to the southern most part of Brazil.

Almost every atom in your body has been part of other living organisms thousands if not millions of times before.

• Wombat feces are cube shaped.
• Bananas are berries and strawberries are not.
• Oxford university is older than the Aztec empire.
• Humans share 50% of our DNA with bananas.

The can opener was invented 30 years after the can.

Maine is the closest US state to Africa.

Every Rubik's Cube, no matter how scrambled, can be solved in at most 20 rotations.

Air is a fluid.

Most people have more than the average number of legs.

The USA is not a true democracy in the academic sense of the word.

99.99% of population have more arms than average value.

Ice is a mineral. Just unstable at room temperature.

That I cleaned the house (according to my fiance at least)

Drinking Water has a 100% fatality rate. Everyone who drinks it eventually dies.

(also a good example of why correlation =/= causation)