The world is a strange and wonderful place.

Laurie Anderson

The world is a pretty strange place and there’s a lot of things that we will never know. With this in mind, it’s not surprising that there would be unexpected facts about everything from chess game tactics, to history, to science, and everything in between.

Already a site designed to surface interesting stuff, Reddit took it to the next level with a recent thread specifically asking for the most interesting/weird facts that people know.

Here are best responses, with links to the Redditor who found each fact:

There are more possible iterations of a game of chess than there are atoms in the known universe. — abbazabbbbbbba

Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza. — StickleyMan

It can take a photon 40,000 years to travel from the core of the sun to the surface, but only 8 minutes to travel the rest of the way to earth. — Bkaps

It would take 1,200,000 mosquitoes, each sucking once, to completely drain the average human of blood. — Bat245

Basically anything that melts can be made into glass. You just have to cool off a molten material before its molecules have time to realign into what they were before being melted. — cowboy-up

A small percentage of the static you see on “dead” tv stations is left over radiation from the Big Bang. You’re seeing residual effects of the Universe’s creation. — FanInTheCorner

Written language was invented independently by the Egyptians, Sumerians, Chinese, and Mayans. — NumberMuncher

If you were to remove all of the empty space from the atoms that make up every human on earth, the entire world population could fit into an apple. — TheSicilianDude

Honey does not spoil. You could feasibly eat 3000 year old honey. — Bluecheezeplatter

If you somehow found a way to extract all of the gold from the bubbling core of our lovely little planet, you would be able to cover all of the land in a layer of gold up to your knees. — TryToFlyHigh

To know when to mate, a male giraffe will continuously headbutt the female in the bladder until she urinates. The male then tastes the pee and that helps it determine whether the female is ovulating. — Sir_Ostrich

The Spanish national anthem has no words. — ricick

The state sport of Maryland is jousting. — KdogCrusader

Dead people can get goose bumps. — ObturateYourForamen

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