FACTS

Facts Catalogue

In today’s world, the Internet has brought every possible knowledge to the tips of our fingers. Hardly anything unknown or impossible exists today. Also, science and technology are turning almost every impossible feat possible so very few things surprise us. Nonetheless, here we are presenting 10 facts that sound wrong but are actually right.

1. Martin Luther King and Anne Frank were born the same year but they represent two different eras of history because Anne Frank didn’t get to grow up.

At first glance, it may seem impossible, but Martin Luther King is just five months older than Anne Frank. Martin Luther King was born on 15 January 1929 and Anne Frank on 12 June 1929.

Anne Frank is known worldwide for her diary in which she documented her life from 1942 to 1944 when the Germans occupied the Netherlands during World War II. In 1942 as the persecution of the Jewish population increased, Anne and her family went into hiding. They were arrested in 1944 and sent to concentration camps where Anne died. Anne Frank’s diary was published posthumously. After publication, the little girl and her diary became an icon depicting the heinous face of fascism.

On the other hand, Martin Luther King is well known for his fight for human rights and equality for the African-American population through peaceful protest. He became the most prominent leader of the American civil rights movement from the mid-1950s until his assassination in 1968. (1,2)

2. Australia literally lost a prime minister. Harold Holt went for a swim in 1967, and he was never seen again.

On the afternoon of December 17, 1967, Australia’s 17th Prime Minister, Harold Holt, arrived at Cheviot Beach, Victoria along with four other people. Holt decided to go for a swim even though it was high tide and there was a large swell with visible currents and eddies. While others refrained from swimming considering the water unsafe, Holt continued to swim and eventually swam into deeper waters. The current dragged him out to the sea, and soon he was out of the sight of the others.

As Holt’s companion couldn’t see him anymore, they organized an immediate search. Scuba divers were called, but the strong undertow and the current made it difficult to see underwater. Within an hour, four helicopters began scanning the site. About 200 personnel reached the site including rescuers from Australia’s army, navy, coast guard, the Marine Board of Victoria, and the Department of Air, but there was no trace of Prime Minister Harold Holt. Two days later, he was officially declared dead. (1,2)

3. Blood is made in the bones.

Our blood consists of four main components: plasma, red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets. Plasma is the liquid part of the blood that transports red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets. The red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets are produced by the bone marrow present in the bones through a process called “hemopoiesis.”

In an infant, the process of hemopoiesis occurs in the center of all bones. But as a human grows up, the hemopoiesis occurs only in the bones situated around the hips, ribs, and breastbone (sternum). (1,2)

4. Google tracks your location even when you disable your location history.

Today, everyone who owns a smartphone has used the GPS service at one time or other. So, what do we do when we don’t need it? We sometimes turn off the location service believing that no one can track us anymore. But the truth is if your phone is running on Android software, every step you take is being tracked and sent to Google.

Since 2017, Android phones have been tracking their users by collecting the addresses of nearby cell towers even when the user has disabled the location service. Also, some Google apps are storing time-stamped location data without asking user permission. (1,2,3)

5. More than 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents.

According to the statistics presented by the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), more than 90% of deaf children have hearing parents.

Parents are quite affected when a deaf child is born into this majority-hearing world. It has been widely reported that such parents often deal with feelings of loss, stress, anger, and/or grief. Before the birth of a deaf child, most hearing parents have no experience with deafness. So, at the birth of a deaf child, they are faced with major choices in the areas of language, education, identity, and technology. (1,2,3)

6. There is a lake in northern Tanzania that calcifies animals that are submerged turning the animals into preserved “statues”.

In 2011, photographer Nick Brandt compelled the world to take notice of Lake Norton which is situated in northern Tanzania when he photographed the calcified remains of various animals and birds. These creatures were turned into stone by the extremely alkaline water of the lake. It’s pH is 10.5 which is nearly as high as ammonia.

The inhospitable conditions of Lake Norton seem inhabitable for most organisms except cyanobacteria and lesser flamingos. It is the breeding ground of about 2.5 million lesser flamingos. Flamingos gather near this lake to feed on a blue-green algae called “spirulina.” (1,2)

7. There’s a piece of music being played right now at a church in Germany that started in 2001 and is scheduled to end in 2640. The next note change is gonna happen on September 5th, 2020.

Since the last 17 year, the medieval church of St Burchardi is playing music and is intending to play it for 622 more years. The St Burchardi church is located in the town of Halberstadt in Saxony Anhalt, Germany. The Halberstadt town was chosen to host the concert because of the historic event of 1316. In the year 1316, the world got its first organ and it that event happened in this town.

In the beginning, the continuous music of the concert created some problems in the church neighborhood. The uninterrupted tone was hard to bear for the neighbors, so the church has erected a Perspex sound barrier outside. (1,2)

8. Lightning is hotter than the surface of the sun.

All over the world, every single day, about 8 million cloud-to-ground lightning strikes occur. This data becomes more deadly due to the fact that lightning is four times hotter than the sun.

When lightning occurs, electrical charges pass through the air. Since air is a poor conductor of electricity, it gets extremely hot when electricity passes through it. Lightning heats the air through which it passes through to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit, while the temperature of sun’s surface is merely around 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit. (1,2,3)

9. Hillary Clinton won a Grammy Award in 1997.

Hillary Clinton, the American politician and diplomat, is the wife of the former President of the United States, Bill Clinton. She served as the First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001. In 1996 she wrote a book It Takes A Village. In 1997, she won a Grammy Award in the Non-musical Album category for the audio version of the book. (source)

10. Incans performed brain surgery, and by the 1400s their survival rate was higher than the cranial surgery performed during the American Civil War.

With the development of science and technology, we are inching towards perfection in terms of surgery. So, it may come as a shock that in some surgeries our ancestors were quite more advanced than us even without modern equipment. One such surgery is brain surgery. Archaeological surveys and studies have revealed that the Incans used to perform brain surgeries through trepanation.

Archaeologists have found many well-preserved prehistoric skulls in Peru, and about 800 of them were trepanned. After examination, researchers have found that over the course of 2,00 years, the Incas became progressively better at skull surgery. They were so much better that by comparison, the mortality rate from skull surgery was higher during the Civil War than among the Incans.