Random Facts That Sound Fake, But Are 100% True (14 items)

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  (#14) The Pyramids Were Built By Paid Workers Not Slaves

  The common consensus until very recently was that the pyramids of Egypt were constructed using huge numbers of slaves. How else would the ancient civilization have been able to construct such huge structures? However, those involved in the field of Egyptology have known for decades that the people who built the pyramids were paid workers, not slaves. This has been proven with recent tomb finds, which show the workers buried honorably near the massive buildings with beer and bread to prepare them for the afterlife.
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  (#8) The Surveyors Who First Measured Mount Everest Gave The Wrong Figure On Purpose

  Measuring the exact height of Mount Everest was a difficult job, and the first official figure came in 1856, when the Great Trigonometric Survey was carried out by Sir Andrew Waugh. When the measurement was first calculated, the height was revealed to be exactly 29,000 feet. Waugh was so worried that this number would be considered a guess or a rounding-off of the actual height that he decided to add an extra two feet to the total to create a more believable figure. Bizarrely, this actually resulted in a more accurate total as most officials now consider the official height to be 29,029 feet.
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  (#10) Clouds Can Weigh Hundreds Of Tons

  Clouds often have certain properties associated with them – such as being fluffy and soft – that lead people to imagine that they must not weigh very much. After all, they float high above the ground, and they have to be light to stay up there. Right? The truth, though, is that clouds can be incredibly heavy. It makes sense when you think about it, as clouds are effectively just water. Even small cumulus clouds can be as heavy as 200 tons, while the super dense cumulonimbus clouds are able to reach weights of up to one million tons.
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  (#7) Wyoming Only Has Two Escalators In The Entire State

  Escalators are a common sight around the world. Whether you are in a mall, a department store, or an airport, it is difficult to find a large building without a set of escalators for people to travel between different floors. That isn’t the case in the US state of Wyoming. There are only two sets of escalators in the entire state, both of them located in banks in the town of Casper. Local government officials believe that the lack of escalators comes from the fact that many of the buildings in Wyoming are older and not suitable whilst stairs and elevators are cheaper to install and maintain.
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  (#3) The Universe Is Beige

  Looking out at the night sky, you would be forgiven for thinking that the universe is black. Apart from the pinpoint light given off from stars, space appears to be a vast collection of nothingness. That hasn't stopped researchers from trying to discover what the real color of the universe is. Surprisingly, it isn’t black, but a sort of beige. By analyzing the cosmic light given off by hundreds of thousands of galaxies and billions of stars, they were able to see what the spectrum would be interpreted as in the human eye.
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  (#11) You Can Hear The Difference Between Hot And Cold Water

  Various experiments over the past decade or so have revealed that people can quite easily tell the difference between hot and cold water using just their hearing. The sound given off by pouring water is distinct enough that the vast majority of individuals are able to distinguish between them with almost 100% accuracy. The reason is that colder water is more viscous, which effectively makes it thicker and gives it a different sound than hot water, which is less “sticky” and so produces a higher frequency noise.

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