The Amazing Stuff

Ming the clam was 507 years old and the oldest living animal. Humans accidentally killed it. Nice going.

The sad part? They’ll never meet each other because they’re on opposite sides of the planet.

To itself. Alone.

Between its discovery in 1930 and the stripping of its planet status, the object didn’t make a full trip.

Sorry.

In the movies this always works, but CPR mostly fails to revive.

There’s a whale that sings at a frequency other whales can’t pick up, so it swims alone.

The more you know about a subject, the harder it is to talk about it with people who don’t know as much as you do.

If faced with a dissenting opinion, people are more likely to double down on their beliefs.

You can talk yourself blue in the face and have a whole list of evidence, but that’s not going to change someone’s mind. In fact, they’ll probably be stronger in their resolve. Welcome to the Internet.

And the thought of a sad piggy is just too sad.

No one will come out and say they’re perfect, but most people consider themselves to be “above average” at just about everything, which is just not true. They tend to grossly overestimate their abilities, including the one about remaining objective and fact-based.

No, hunger is still a problem. It’s just that more people are threatened by obesity now.

So close, yet so far.

There are only 30 left in the world.

A study showed that women who suffered cat bites severe enough to need medical treatment tended to have higher frequencies of depression. But do cat bites cause depression, or does depression cause owning cats?

Your little buddies are probably gettin’ it on this very moment.

Despite looking very, very sorry, dogs don’t feel remorse. Those guilty dogs might not be so guilty after all.

Cuckoos get other birds to raise their young for them by laying eggs in their nests. The young cuckoos are larger than the other babies, and will kick them out of the nest.

They will abandon single cubs so thy can try for a larger litter next year.

If you’re on the beach and wondering what’s out there if you were to head out in a straight line, this map will tell you.

This is the point on the planet that is farthest from any land, at 1,670 miles from anything.

Depending on the country you’re in, Google will tweak disputed international borders to keep everyone happy. If you’re in India (left), you’ll see the northern and eastern borders extend a bit farther, and if you’re in China (right) you’ll see them as cut off sooner. A neutral country in the dispute, like Germany (center), will see a dotted line and both sides of the story.

These numbers represent the average age of a country’s citizens. Developing nations tend to have a younger population than more developed ones due to access to medical care and family planning.

“Other alcohol” in this case means rice wines or wines made with other fermented grains, like sorghum or millet.

The power of a passport is based on how many countries someone carrying that passport can get into with either visa-free access, or if they are readily given a visa on arrival.

This shows how winter and summer affect the globe.

Take this into consideration when plotting your world travel.

This map shows where the various words for “bear” come from in their most ancient forms.

Get it, Greece! The U.S. is second-to-last at 53%, by the way.

This is what the militaries around the world wear to blend in with their surroundings. Drab goes with everything.

Yep, that’s where your morning coffee is coming from.

This route involves going from just north of Greenville, Liberia, to Wenling, China. It measures 13,589.31 kilometers and crosses 19 countries and territories and nine time zones. You’ll go through Burkina Faso twice.

It takes up nearly a whole hemisphere on Mars, but is barely a speck on Jupiter.

To make up for the fact that the Earth is round, maps have to be proportionately projected onto a flat surface, which can cause some serious distortion. The Mercator projection makes Canada, Greenland, and other northern areas seem huge compared to things nearer the Equator. Here’s Africa and Greenland as Mercator shows them, and as they really are.

There are all kinds of social and political implications here, so we’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Sanitation includes waste water/solid waste treatment services and infrastructure, toilets, or homes linked to a septic tank.

Yep, it’s a big deal. Every coastal city would be underwater. 216 feet of water, to be exact. Ideally, this wouldn’t happen for another 5,000 years, but humans are really good at speeding it along.

You can watch this until the sun comes up, honestly.

Where does most of your stuff come from? This map will tell you. (It’s China. The answer is China.)

This isn’t what the terrain would actually look like, but it’s pretty impressive.

They’re the ones in white. The British have invaded nine out of 10 countries on the planet.

Nice job, U.S.

Which kind of puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?