That Can't Be True! #3

The expression “Light as a cloud” couldn’t be further from the truth. At ½ gram per cubic meter, the weight of cumulus clouds can really add up when you consider how long and wide they can get.

You might think the two are basically the same thing, but according to conditioning coach Mike Antoniades, in an article for BBCSport, jogging means moving at “speeds less than 6 mph.” Any faster than that, and it’s technically running.

Arrector pili muscles, fan-shaped muscles at the base of each hair, are responsible for goosebumps—which contract when the body is cold in an effort to generate heat and cause a person’s hair to “stand up straight” on their skin.

A study comparing how people viewed the “cuteness” of dogs found that most reached their highest levels of cuteness when they reached the ages of six to eight weeks old.

Known as momiji, maple leaves collected from the ground, preserved in salt barrels then fried in tempura style sweet batter are an unexpectedly delicious and beloved seasonal snack in Japan.

Called “the reminiscence bump,” this psychological concept holds that as adults reflect on events of their lives, they remember more events from their teens and twenties than from any other time in their lives. According to psychologist Dan McAdams of Northwestern University, this phenomenon grows out of the fact that this period of one’s life is important in shaping one’s identity or “life story.”

Known as Turritopsis dohrnii—or colloquially, the immortal jellyfish—this animal is able to revert back into its adolescent state after going through adulthood, and repeats this process for all eternity.

The Aztec Civilization was founded in 1325. As early as 1096, teaching had already started in Oxford. By 1249, the University of Oxford had grown into a full-fledged university, replete with student housing at the school’s three original “halls of residence”.

Princeton University has been around since 1746, but the school didn’t start officially awarding doctorates until 1879. And though it took more than a century for the university to officially begin graduate studies, it actually had its first graduate student back in 1771. His name was James Madison—the fourth President of the United States.

Before rap battles, there was “flyting,” a type of trading of insults that was popular from the 5th to the 16th centuries in England and Scotland. As Atlas Obscura describes it, “Participants employed the timeless tools of provocation and perversion as well as satire, rhetoric, and early bathroom humor to publicly trounce opponents,” and even society’s elite would join in these battles of wits.

In 1983, the coastal city adopted a resolution to make the legendary aircraft the official city bird, even presenting a plaque to a team from Goodyear Airship Operations to commemorate the decision.

The DeLorean was not always the way Marty McFly was supposed to travel to the past. As Slashfilm explains, in the original draft of Back To The Future, the time machine was attached to a refrigerator, and “taken to the Nevada desert test site for the atomic bomb, where it was strapped into the back of a truck and driven into the atomic explosion in order to harness the power from the nuclear explosion.

In 2008, a penguin living in the Edinburgh Zoo, named Nils Olav III was knighted. The penguin is the mascot of the King of Norway’s Guard, making it a special figure for the country’s military and the knighting of this particular one an opportunity to celebrate the relations between the two countries. It went over so well, that in 2016, he was promoted to Brigadier.

Larry. Supposedly, the blue bird was named after former NBA player Larry Bird, who used to play for co-founder Biz Stone‘s home-state team, the Boston Celtics.

Boasting “a one of a kind international collection of more than 100 innovation failures,” the touring Museum of Failure features displays on such bad ideas as Harley-Davidson perfume, Colgate beef lasagna, and Google Glass.

King Tutankhamen had lots of cool toys, but one of his most intriguing may have been a dagger, discovered in his tomb in 1925, made of meteoric metal.

In order to perpetually work on continuing their lineage, female kangaroos are equip with two uteri and three vaginas (with the outside two being connected to the uteri and the middle vagina devoted entirely to giving birth). The same goes for koalas.

All those Kit Kat bars that are somehow imperfect during production—due to air bubbles, weirdly shaped wafers or some other issue—are not thrown away or given away, but instead ground up into a fine paste and turned into a filling that’s then incorporated back into the production process to create new, perfect bars.

Things probably get a bit confusing around the Foreman household, seeing as all of the boxer’s sons are named George Edward—and there are five of them. When asked why they all have the same name, Foreman said, “I named all my sons George Edward Foreman so they would always have something in common. I say to them, ‘If one of us goes up, then we all go up together, and if one goes down, we all go down together!'”

According to the Guinness World Records, the Japanese fishing town of Susami houses the world’s deepest underwater postbox. Situated 10 meters underwater, the box gets anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500 pieces of mail every year—though depositing mail in the box requires a diving suit, water-resistant postcards, and a special oil-based paint marker.

According to Olympic records, the youngest athlete to ever become a medalist in the Olympics was Greek gymnast Dimitrios Loundras, who finished third at the 1896 Olympic Games when he was ten-and-a-half years old.

We think of dolphins as fun-loving and friendly, but when they don’t get sexually satisfied, they can get pretty nasty. Scientists have found that young male dolphins go on the attack, killing fellow porpoises, when they are sexually frustrated.

The fast food shop Kailis garnered a good bit of publicity a few years ago when it turned two great things into one weird thing—fish and chip gelato. Reports of its taste were not as bad as one might expect, but that’s likely because, as one person put it, it “didn’t taste like fish and chips.”

The molds manufacturing process of LEGO bricks is so accurate and effective, that just 18 out of 1 million are found to be defective, according to the company.