Random facts you have only recently discovered

[fandabbyfannyflutters]

I found out only yesterday you are not allowed to take photos of the Eiffel Tower at night...mind totally blown

The CentreParks dome was mine. I must have seen an advert with a dome and presumed everything was under it.

This year I learned there is a desert in Kent.

Venus isn''t the closest planet to Earth. Mercury is

Hear me out here.....

It is the closest at certain times of its orbit. But at times it's much much further away. Like the other side of the Sun.

So if you add up the average distance from the Earth, it turns out Mercury is closer.

In fact, Mercury is the closest planet to all other planets. Apparently.

Now try arguing that in a pub quiz.

physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.3.20190312a/full/

All the burgers and food on the Mcdonalds advert are plastic and polystyrene painted

@chomalungma Yeah no shit! I was taught this in primary school more than 20 years ago! It's not a new fact!!

It's not a new fact

It was new to me when I heard it.

Rosebud but if your mouth is open, you're not humming. Humming is sound coming from your nose which is why it stops if you hold your nose.

31RueCambon75001

‘Oslo will be car free by 2020’

What? Which source is that from? I live in Oslo and there is very little chance of that

Blown away by the Madagascar fact - for some reason I thought it was a small island with few inhabitants

Just watching a TV programme I'd recorded, about air traffic control. When there's fog, air traffic gets disrupted. But not because the planes can't take off or land, which they can do perfectly well because of sophisticated onboard computer systems. It's ground fog that's the problem. The controllers in the tower need to see where aircraft are taxiing, and pilots need to see the markings on the taxi-ways. So everyone has go slower, and there needs to be a bigger gap between aircraft. So, all that speed in the air, but crawling on the ground.

Also, civilian air traffic controlling for England, Wales, and southern Scotland is done at Swanwick in Hampshire.

Frith2013 - I was quite astounded when I learned not too long ago that the definition of a desert isn't that it's hot and has sand dunes, as in the Sahara Desert, it's the amount of precipitation. So I could well believe there might be odd pockets, even in England, where average rainfall is extremely low.

The largest desert in the world is the Antarctic!

@barnet, Hei :-) it was in a podcast given by David McWilliams, obviously he was wrong then !

@chomalungma @Omega369 it's a new fact for me. Rude much

@chomalungma and @Omega369

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06yhfbq

Only found out in the last couple of years that thunder is the sound caused by lightning 😱 I just thought they were 2 separate 'things' that happened in a storm.

When we little we were are always taught to count the seconds from seeing lightning to hearing the thunder and that this was to gauge 'how many miles away the thunder was' - turns out its how far the lightning is and each second is 300m away.

I never questioned why the lightning was ALWAYS followed by thunder 🤦🏼‍♀️🤦🏼‍♀️

Yes - More or Less was where I got that from!!!

Yes, it was so interesting, even though I find the maths difficult to follow sometimes.

A steeplejack is a skilled tradesperson who fixes steeples.
I always assumed it was some sort of machinery

Yeah no shit! I was taught this in primary school more than 20 years ago! It's not a new fact!!

Missing the entire point of the thread a bit, aren't you

Whitewash (as in the paint we used to have on our walls in the dark ages 1970s) contains lime, and helps "seal" the walls, making them waterproof.

@Omega369

I was taught this in primary school more than 20 years ago! It's not a new fact

So at primary school , you were taught that Mercury is the nearest planet to *Earth(, even though the order is given as Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars etc,,but your teacher explained to you that it was because the average distance varied on its orbit around the Sun and over a year, it meant that Mercury was nearer the Earth.

Some primary school teacher you had - that's impressive,.

India is entirely in the northern hemisphere. Geography has never been my strong point but this one blew my TINY MIND 🤯

That a female and Male zebra are called a mare and stallion like a horse.
Where as I thought they were just called mr and Mrs Z 🙄 oh well. You learn something new every day

If you mouth "elephant juice" in the mirror or to a person it looks exactly the same as i love you

@RiftGibbon but is it the same stuff they used to use to “blank out” windows years ago when they were refitting inside?

You never seen to see that anymore !