We may live inside our bodies every day of our lives, but how well do you really know yours? You’d never know it, but there could be tons of minibeasts living in your eyelashes right now. And if that wasn’t enough to make you question your whole existence, how about the equally bizarre fact that you ate your own moustache in the womb. And your eyeballs will deflate after you die, by the way. Let's explore some of the most amazing facts around!
Tiny Mites Live In Your Eyelashes
Your eyelashes are probably home to a horde of tiny bugs, but don’t go pulling them all out just yet. Eyelash mites are actually pretty normal, and they’re usually harmless. There are two types of eyelash mites, Demodex Folliculorum and Demodex Brevis, and both can be found around the eyelash follicles, where they lay their eggs.
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They feed on the mucus, sebum, and oils that we secrete from our facial pores and glands surrounding the eyes. The good news is you won’t be able to spot them just by looking in the mirror, you’d need a scientific magnifier to see one of these puppies up close. Although there’s a solid chance you’ve got a troop of these little mites in your eyelashes right now, some people may have more eyelash mites than others, particularly if you have really oily skin or make a habit out of sleeping in makeup. They’ll also be more attracted to you if you have a condition like
blepharitis which causes swelling, irritation and redness around the eyes. It’s definitely an unsettling thought, but the truth is that there’s not much you can do about it.
Your Eyeballs Will Flatten After You Die
A lot of gross stuff happens when we die; we bloat, twitch a bit, and start to smell like a rotten foot, but something strange happens to your eyes too: they flatten. As your pupils become unresponsive to direct light and dilate, they also start to “cloud over” as potassium in the red blood cells break down.
This process can take up to three hours, but because most people actually die with their eyes open it’s usually pretty speedy. When this happens, your eyeballs will also start to flatten and deflate like an old grape that’s been left in the fruit-bowl too long.
To try and recreate the natural curvature of the eye, morticians can use special ‘eye caps’ which go over the flattened eyeball to make sure you’re looking tip-top for your funeral, that is. On other occasions, ‘tissue-builder’ can also be injected directly into the eye to try and fill it back up. Without any of these measures, open-casket funerals would be a very different affair and would probably feature corpses with spooky sunken holes instead of eyes.
Babies Grow Moustaches in the Womb and Then Eat Them!
Here’s a nugget of information that’s sure to turn your whole life upside down: we’re not exactly naked in the womb. About four months into a normal pregnancy, when the fetus is about 5.3-inch long and weighs around 6 ounces, something totally bizarre happens: it grows a moustache!
Fine hair starts forming on the upper lip, and over the next month or so it spreads to cover the entire body. This soft, hairy coat is known as
lanugo, and it affects both boys and girls equally. So yes, even Beyoncé had a moustache once. At about thirty-three to thirty-six weeks in, we then shed this woolly coat like a snake-skin hair-by-tiny-hair, but where does it all go? The short answer is we eat it. By the time the baby is born the lanugo has been totally absorbed or swallowed by the baby, leaving us with nothing but a small amount of hair on our heads, eyebrows and eyelashes known as vellus hair. As we mature, the body replaces vellus with coarser, pigmented hair called terminal hair, which is our adult body hair. Imagine how different life would be if we all popped out looking like little woolly mammoths?
A Dead Pope Once Went on Trial
Way back in January 897, a trial unlike any other took place at the Basilica San Giovanni in Rome: The Cadaver Synod.
Several years earlier in 875, Pope Formosus, the then-bishop of Porto, was accused by reigning Pope John VIII of violating a law that prevented bishops from ruling over multiple places at a time, so that they didn’t start building their own little fiefdoms. Formosus was excommunicated, until in 891, several popes down the line, it was his turn to rule. He held on to the papacy for 5 turbulent years before dying of a stroke. Next up was Pope Stephen VI, who held a bizarre grudge about Formosus’ past crimes as a bishop. He was so hung up on it that he demanded that Formosus’ corpse be exhumed, dressed in papal robes, propped on a throne and put on trial.
Unsurprisingly, Formosus’ corpse was found guilty on all counts, stripped of his vestments, and had three ‘blessing’ fingers on his right hand chopped off before being tossed in the river Tiber. That summer, a mob threw Pope Stephen in prison where he was strangled to death.
Iran Once Made the Unofficial World’s Biggest Ostrich Sandwich
There are world records for just about anything nowadays, and in 2008 Iran set about putting themselves firmly on the map by creating the world’s biggest ostrich sandwich. Around 1,500 cooks spent two days cooking and stuffing ostrich meat into the whopping sandwich, which measured 1,500-m long and contained 2200 lbs of meat by the time it was complete.
Meat Feat: Ostrich Makes Biggest Sandwich by Associated Press When the big day arrived, crowds of people gathered in a Tehran’s Mellak Park to witness history being made, but things were about to take an unexpected turn for the worst. It seemed like the hours of waiting had provoked the appetites of the spectators, and before the officials from Guinness World Records could finish measuring the sandwich it was set upon by hundreds of hungry onlookers.As chaos ensued, the entire thing was quickly gobbled up, leaving the three official measurers bewildered as to whether a record had actually been set or not. Besides record-setting, the other long-term goal was to create a new cultural appetite for ostrich. It looks like that part worked out slightly too well.
The Longest Hiccupping Attack Ever Lasted 68 Years
Hiccups are one of the most annoying things we have to put up with. No matter how many so-called remedies you try, it’s usually best to wait until they disappear naturally, but what if that moment was decades away? On one spring afternoon in 1922, a young farmhand named Charles Osborne was weighing a hog on his farm when he suddenly started hiccupping.
Osborne tried every trick in the book to get cure himself of the sudden ailment, but to no avail. Days turned into weeks, months and eventually years, but
Osborne continued hiccupping for 68 years, until they suddenly vanished in 1990, the same year he died, aged 97. This incredible feat earned him a spot in the official Guinness World Records for the longest hiccupping attack, and his title is unbeaten to this day. During the first few decades he reportedly hiccupped up to 40 times per minute, but that eventually slowed to 20 times per minute in later years. In total, he hiccupped an estimated 430-million times in his lifetime. So, next time you get frustrated about your hiccups not going away, spare a thought for poor old Mr. Osborne.
Tiger Skin Is Striped, Not Just Their Fur
There are loads of common misconceptions about your favorite animals, and I should probably be the one to tell you that tigers’ skin is actually striped, not just their fur. If you were to completely shave a tiger, you’d find the exact same distinctive pattern imprinted underneath its brightly-colored coat.
According to Greg Barsh, a geneticist at Hudson Alpha Biotechnology Institute in Huntsville, Alabama, all mammalian hair color is dictated by melanin-producing cells called melanocytes. Some big cats like
tigers have skin that mirrors their striped coat because the pigmented hair follicles embedded in the skin are still visible even once the hair has been completely shaved off. You can think of it like a ‘5-o-clock shadow’ that indicates where facial hair grows, even when someone has only just shaved. Tiger stripes are especially important because they break up the outline of their bodies to help them blend into the shadows while stalking their prey. Each tiger has its own unique set of stripes, which could act like a human fingerprint to help them with identification.
How Many Trips Does A Bee Take To Make Honey?
Bees may be tiny, but you won’t believe how much work goes into producing the honey that ends up in our stores. Let’s first try and figure out how many trips a single bee would need to make to produce one teaspoon of honey, which is about as much a bee produces in its lifetime.
Bees have been recorded to fly distances of around 2 to 4-km on a single foraging trip, so let’s use a median distance of 3km for the purpose of this hypothetical sum. According to research by W.T. Wilson in 1958, the amount of pollen collected on one foraging trip would yield an average of about 17-mg of honey, which isn’t very much. Considering one teaspoon of honey weighs about 7 grams, and each trip produces 17-mg of honey, that means a single bee would need to make about 412 round trips to produce one teaspoon of honey, traveling a whopping average distance of 1,236-km in the process. To make a single, standard 12-oz or 340-g, jar of honey, one bee would need to travel 60,034-km, about 37,303 miles, making a grand total of 20,188 trips. For a single bee to make a whole pound of honey though, it would need to travel almost 50,000miles. Think about that next time you’re spreading honey on your toast!
A Blue Family Lived in Kentucky for Generations
What if I told you the Smurf’s aren’t as fictional as you might think? Once upon a time in Kentucky, there lived an entire family of people with blue skin, who became known as The Fugates of Troublesome Creek.
It all began in 1820, when a French orphan named Martin Fugate and his wife Elizabeth Smith moved onto the banks of Troublesome Creek, a beautiful area in Appalachian, Kentucky. Both Martin and Elizabeth carried a recessive gene causing a rare diaphorase deficiency that led to methemoglobinemia, a blood disorder which causes an abnormal amount of methemoglobin to be produced, giving skin a bluish hue. The Fugates had seven children, and four of them were blue-skinned. The thing is, inbreeding was a pretty common occurrence in the isolated Appalachian region, and as Fugate descendants married other Fugate descendants the gene became more concentrated through generations.
Luna Fugate was one of the bluest Fugates, and despite her bruise-like color she had 13 children of her own and lived to the ripe old age of 84. Ironically, Dr Madison Cawein, who studied the Fugates, discovered that an injection of a blue dye called methylene blue was enough to temporarily change the clue color of the affected blood into a normal red color!
Why Is Popcorn A Traditional Movie Snack?
Nowadays popcorn is synonymous with the movies, but once upon a time you’d be hard-pressed to find this beloved snack for sale at your local theatre. Back in the mid-1800s, popcorn was hugely popular at carnivals and fairs because street vendors were able to easily make and sell it after the first steam-powered popcorn maker hit the market in 1885.
At this time, though, the movies wanted to stay far away from this aromatic grub by closely associating themselves with the classier, latter part of their name: the theater. A real theater would never be associated with a food that was so noisy and would inevitably be strewn around the theatre, and considering movies were still silent, popcorn was a big no-no.
By 1927, things were changing as the so-called “talkies” hit the big screen, and the cinema became something that wasn’t reserved for the most sophisticated people. Vendors started selling popcorn outside the theatre and earned a tidy profit because corn kernels were cheap to purchase. Eventually, the theaters wanted in on the action too and
set up their own popcorn machines inside, and the rest, as they say, is history!
Some Frogs Eat With Their Eyes
When someone says they eat with their eyes, it usually means they size up their food before gobbling it down; but if we’re talking about frogs that phrase takes on a whole new meaning.
Scientists have often pointed out how frogs tend to scrunch their eyes tightly shut while eating, but now it seems like this behavior serves a more literal purpose than just showing they’re enjoying their meal. As it turns out, some frogs and toads are able to press their eyes down into their mouths to help push food down their throat like a personal trash-compactor.
In 2004, a team of biologists from the University of Massachusetts put this to the test by focusing on the Northern leopard frog. X-rays showed that the eyes did in fact retract into the mouth to force food toward the pharynx, so the researchers decided to cut the nerves to the ‘retractor muscles’ to see if it could still swallow. The frog was still able to eat, but they concluded it had to swallow twice as much to get each piece of food down. Who knows, your eyes might come in handy next time you enter into a hotdog eating contest!I hope you were amazed at these weird and wonderful trivia facts. If you want to find out more interesting facts, you might want to take a look at our whole
fun facts series. Thanks for reading.
