From lethal snack dispensers to out of control gun crimes, we count 10 facts that will shock
your pants off.
10 –Vending Machines of Doom • When you think of the most dangerous predators
in the world, the last thing you would think of is the unsuspecting vending machine.
• In the United States, it is twice more likely that you will be killed by a vending
machine than by a shark.
The statistical risk of fatal shark attacks on the average American is 1 in 250 million,
whereas the odds of you meeting your demise at the hand of a snack dispenser is 1 in 112
million.
• Neither option would be a great way to die, but I’ll bet you think twice about
whether you really need that bag of Cheetos next time you see a vending machine.
9 – Razor Acid • The human body is a shocking powerhouse
of abilities, but the sheer power of your stomach alone is insane.
• The acid in your stomach - which breaks up your food every day, is so lethal it could
dissolve razor blades.
That means the lining of your stomach is basically tougher than steel.
• This is a hypothetical example though, so please do NOT go around ingesting sharp
pointy things which can rip you up inside and kill you to death.
8 – Drinking Breathing Mammals • When humans were being invented by evolution,
we missed out on a pretty nifty biological feature that every other mammal has.
• Humans are the only mammals that can’t breathe and swallow at the same time.
This is a problem when sometimes we try to do both and end up choking on our food.
About nine months after we’re born, our voice boxes drop, allowing us to be able to
talk.
Our voice-boxes are more sophisticated than other animals which is why we can talk and
they can’t.
• Breathing and eating would be pretty cool to do simultaneously, but being able to talk
is probably better.
7 – Fizzy Drink Kills Your Bones • We like to call our species ‘evolved’
but then we do things like consume massive amounts of beverages which are slowly killing
us.
• The average soda contains the ingredient phosphoric acid.
It’s a substance that can allegedly suck the calcium straight out of your bones and
burn the enamel off your teeth.
Soda can potentially lower your bone mineral density and lead to osteoporosis.
• It’s pretty common knowledge that soft drinks are bad for you, but for some reason
we can’t seem to get enough of those delicious, fizzy, bone-killing, sugary drinks of death.
6 – New Cells • Luckily for us humans who like to bombard
our bodies with questionable food and drink choices, we are physically reborn every seven
years.
• With the exception of a small group of cells including our brains, most of the cells
in our bodies will completely regenerate every 7-15 years.
The cells in our gut which battle the razor-chomping stomach acid only last an average of 5 days
– but the rest of our body is generally no older than 15 years at any time.
• The outer layer of skin technically replaces itself every two weeks, more frequently than
a snake, although thankfully we don’t shed it all at once.
(Can you imagine that?
Ewww.) 5 – Missing Bomb
• Don’t be alarmed if you’re scuba diving on the coast of Georgia and stumble across
a long-lost nuclear bomb.
No wait, be alarmed.
Be really, really alarmed.
• A powerful uranium bomb had been missing somewhere in the ocean of Wassaw Sound near
Savannah for fifty years.
It was dropped accidentally in 1958 during a pilot training exercise that went wrong.
The navy spent two months looking for the H-Bomb before they decided it was lost.
• The bomb was found by amateur Canadian Scuba Divers in 2015, and was thankfully deactivated
by a group of brave navy seals. 4 – Horny Blood Lizard
• There is a type of lizard that has the most bizarre way of defending itself against
predators.
• This guy is called a horned lizard, and when a predator comes near it, the lizard
will brutally blast a stream of blood from its eyeballs.
It has an array of defense mechanisms including puffing its body up to double the size, and
good old fashioned camouflage.
But none of its defences work as well as the blood cannon it can shoot at other animals.
• Apparently the blood tastes so gross it freaks the predators out for a good fifteen
minutes.
3 – The Size of YouTube • Almost everyone’s uploading videos on
YouTube these days, I’m sure even your dog has his own channel, but the actual amount
of videos uploaded every minute is shocking.
• Every 60 seconds, seventy-two hours worth of footage is uploaded to YouTube.
That’s a lot of cat videos.
It would be literally impossible for even a full team of people to watch even a fraction
of all those videos.
• Good thing you have cool channels like Planet Dolan to tell you what’s good.
2 – Hitler Hated Smoking • Adolf Hitler hated a lot of things such
as human rights and fun, but a little known fact is he also really hated smoking.
• The first ever anti-smoking campaign was run by, yes, the Nazi party.
In 1939, scientists finally figured out that tobacco was a direct cause of lung cancer.
Hitler wanted his extreme vision for an Aryan future to be smoke-free and banned it in cinemas
and women were strictly forbidden from smoking at all.
• Unfortunately this doesn’t make up for the fact that he was a mass-murdering racist
dick-bag.
1 – Gun Crimes • If you’ve ever wondered about whether
guns are essential or just a really, really unnecessary weapon, just have a look at the
facts.
• In America in one single year, there were 372 mass-shootings that resulted in 475 people
dying.
There was 64 school shootings.
The total amount of people who died that year is 13,286.
That’s a lot sons and daughters who didn’t need to let their parents cry.
• Some shocking facts are not nice to look at, but that doesn’t make them any less
real.