the best facts i heard in 2025
I love reading yearly fact lists by nytimes, so i chose to shamelessly steal that thing, these facts might not be up to dat, or might not be as cooler as you ar thinking, well they are just facts.
January 6. The handrail on a grand London opera house staircase was built to match the height of a particular monarch, which explains why it feels strangely low today.
January 11. Around the world, a large majority of household travel decisions are made by women.
January 17. By regulatory definition, a hot dog must be finely ground meat; if the particles are too large, it legally stops being a hot dog.
January 24. Typeface studios are called “foundries,” a name left over from when letters were literally cast in metal.
February 3. A popular American sour candy had to be reformulated in Europe after regulators flagged a coloring as potentially unsafe.
February 9. Airlines have historically handled in-flight deaths in ways that prioritized calm over honesty.
February 18. In the UK, a contract becomes binding the moment the acceptance letter is posted—even if it never arrives.
March 4. Whales don’t develop cancer at the rate expected for animals of their size, partly because their tumors tend to develop fatal defects themselves.
March 12. An online baseball community helped uncover a professional sign-stealing scheme that relied on trash-can signals.
March 19. Some of the world’s most valuable concert pianos use custom-built elevators so they never have to be carried up stairs.
March 27. Warsaw’s Old Town was rebuilt after WWII using historical paintings—including the painters’ original inaccuracies.
April 2. Roughly 96% of books sell fewer than a thousand copies in their lifetime.
April 10. Even a neural network layer without an activation function isn’t truly linear, because floating-point math introduces distortion.
April 16. There is no clock on Earth that gives the “correct” time—only negotiated approximations.
April 28. The forbidden fruit is often imagined as an apple because Latin uses the same word for “apple” and “evil.”
May 5. One small American coastal city has more restaurants per capita than anywhere else in the country.
May 14. Honduras’s best coffee is typically exported to Asia, the second-best to Europe, and the rest to the U.S.
May 21. During WWII, Allied planners considered sabotaging enemy scientists with logistical annoyances rather than bombs.
May 29. Commercial dishwashers are engineered around a two-minute cycle, which quietly dictates how restaurant kitchens function.
June 3. Among top-tier AI researchers working in the U.S., more were born in China than in America itself.
June 9. If a child turns two years old mid-flight, airline rules technically require them to occupy their own seat afterward.
June 10. The Allies wanted to drop bandit problems on German scientists to distract them during the war.
June 14. Restaurant dishwashers take two minutes.
June 15. In 2022 more of the top-tier AI researchers working in America hailed from China than from America.
June 16. John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” might not be about West Virginia, but about the western part of Virginia.
June 18. British housing-distance regulations trace back to Edwardian concerns about visible nipples through fabric.
June 20. Airlines: The infant must be under 2 years of age for the duration of the flight. If they turn 2 during a flight, they will need their own seat for the remainder of the flight.
June 26. Telephone keypads and calculator keypads differ because one is optimized for randomness and the other for real-world number entry.
July 7. One U.S. state has an unusually balanced economy: no single industry dominates its GDP.
July 15. Steam locomotives once refilled their water tanks while moving by lowering scoops between the rails.
July 23. Concorde flew measurably slower when painted in certain liveries due to weight and surface effects.
July 31. Competitive snail racing exists, and the world record speed is best measured in fractions of an inch per second.
August 6. Shostakovich reportedly loved Jesus Christ Superstar and suggested politics were the only reason he hadn’t written that way himself.
August 13. India’s largest airline grew from a startup into a dominant domestic carrier in under twenty years.
August 19. One European airport allows pesto through security using a dedicated scanner exception.
August 27. Introducing carnivorous snails to control invasive snails instead wiped out native species within a decade.
September 4. The Olympic Games once included an equestrian long jump event; the record still stands.
September 12. The qipao literally means “banner gown,” named after Qing dynasty military divisions.
September 20. French labor unions sometimes bring portable grills designed to fit tram tracks during marches.
September 28. A local independent newspaper in one U.S. city reaches roughly half the city’s population every month.
October 3. For the cost of one legacy aerospace contract, a private company could fund years of rocket launches.
October 11. One Chinese liquor company operates at profit margins that outperform major global tech firms.
October 18. Atoms cannot survive intact collisions above roughly 15 km/s.
October 26. Medieval “trial by boiling water” acquitted most defendants because priests quietly controlled the conditions.
November 2. New fellows of one historic scientific society are now, on average, far older than its original founders were.
November 9. One infamous colonial-era trading company still exists today as a luxury food brand.
November 17. In China, fatal incidents involving exactly 35 deaths appear with suspicious frequency.
November 25. A majority of global internet traffic passes through a single U.S. state.
December 5. The builders of the pyramids were likely skilled, paid laborers rather than enslaved masses.
December 11. A famous Catalan architect designed his cathedral using inverted models to let gravity solve the engineering.
December 17. Some animals assign individual names to one another, not just generic calls.
December 22. A historic London bridge now resides, stone by stone, in the Arizona desert.