39 weird facts most people don’t know

In the 1840s, a big – dare we say, cheesy – grin was seen as childish, so one London photographer told people to say “prunes” to keep their mouths taut. And that look predated today’s “fish face” selfie by, oh, about 180 years.

Some of these weird facts are very unexpected. The pasta comes with a beef tomato sauce and a piece of “McDo” fried chicken.

Thirteenth-century philosopher John Duns Scotus believed that a pointed cap would help spread knowledge from the tip to the brain, and his “Dunsmen” followers wore them as a badge of honour. In the 1500s, though, his ideas became less popular and the meaning of the Duns cap was turned on its head, becoming something of a joke.

Tiny bristles inside a lobster’s little pincers are their equivalent to human taste buds. Meanwhile, lobsters’ teeth are in one of their three stomachs.

You’d think Windsor Castle was named after the House of Windsor, but it’s the other way around. The royal family changed its name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in 1917 so it would sound less German and chose Windsor because they had ties with the English town.

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Alternatively, they’d use periodicals like the Farmers Almanac, which was designed with a hole so it could hang in outhouses. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all.

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It’s home to 10118.

When the sultan of British-protected Zanzibar died and a new one took over without British approval in 1896, the Brits were not happy. Tension escalated when Sultan Khalid bin Barghash refused to step down, but the British warships spent less than 40 minutes bombarding the palace before Khalid fled, marking the (very quick) end of the Anglo-Zanzibar War.

Their hearts, meanwhile, can weigh almost a ton and needs to beat just once every ten seconds.

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Yes, there are waterfalls under the ocean. At the Denmark Strait, the cold water from the Nordic Sea is denser than the Irminger Sea’s warm water, making it drop almost three kilometres down at 123 million cubic feet per second.

Here are 14 more crazy facts about Earth you never learned in school.