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Sharks are older than trees. Yes, you read that correctly.
On today's episode of The List Show, we're sharing our favorite facts that sound completely untrue. These facts are all real, but your brain might not believe us at first.
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2025 Mental Floss
16 Facts That Sound Like Lies | Mental Floss
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Up until the 2020s, John Tyler, who was born in 1790 and became the 10th president of the
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United States in 1841, had two living grandsons. Not great-great-great-grandsons. Not great-great-grandsons
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Not great-grandsons. GRANDSONS. I know what you're asking yourself. What the heck? How
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Well, John Tyler had 15 children between two wives. His 13th of those kids, Lyon Gardner Tyler, was born in 1853 when his dad was in his 60s
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Tyler also had two wives, the second of whom he married in 1923, and they had two sons. Lyon
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Gardner Tyler Jr. came first in 1925, when Lyon was around 72. Next came Harrison Ruffin Tyler
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who was born in 1928. Lyon Gardner Tyler died in 1935, but his sons lived until September 2020 and
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May 2025, respectively. Mental Floss broke the news on this seemingly impossible fact in 2012
0:50
kicking off a string of press for Tyler's grandsons. Harrison, who occasionally gave
0:53
tours at his grandfather's homestead, told New York Magazine in an interview that year
0:57
I am sometimes called the great-grandson. We have to correct that. The internet is full of
1:01
wild facts that seem way too good to be true, and John Tyler's grandsons are just the beginning
1:06
Let's cover a few more, shall we? Roll the intro. If you, like me, assumed we call letters uppercase and lowercase because uppercase
1:19
letters are taller than lowercase letters, well, you'd be wrong. The technical terms for the letters
1:24
are majuscule for uppercase scripts and minuscule for lowercase scripts, which both have Latin roots
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We call them uppercase and lowercase because printers kept letters in trays called cases
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In those cases, capital letters went in the uppercase and minuscule in the lowercase
1:39
It seems almost too silly and literal to be true, but it's true
1:43
Floppy disks are so 1970s. Unless you're the US nuclear launch system
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in which case you were using 8-inch floppy disks all the way up until 2019
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Yeah, that's right. Up until just six years ago, launching a nuke would have required the use of
1:56
not just a floppy disk, but an IBM computer that also dated back to the 70s. In the eyes of Lieutenant
2:01
Colonel Jason Rossi, commander of the Air Force's 595th Strategic Communications Squadron
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that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. He told 60 Minutes that you can't hack something that
2:10
doesn't have an IP address. It's a very unique system. It is old and it is very good
2:15
In June 2019 the Strategic Automated Command and Control System finally phased out floppy disks for what they called a highly secure solid state digital storage solution I don know what that means and if I should feel better or worse about it There are a lot of things more deadly than sharks Lightning strikes for example
2:32
killed 444 people in the U.S. between 2006 and 2021, an average of almost 30 a year. Sharks
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just one per year on average. Around 150 people died due to falling off of a ladder. So, you know
2:44
take caution and have a buddy hold the bottom firmly. Speaking of sharks, they're older than
2:49
trees. The first thing we'd call a tree dates back 350 million years, and it's now extinct
2:55
Sharks, meanwhile, have been around for 400 to 450 million years. That's way too many candles to
3:01
put on a birthday cake. And it also means that sharks are so old, they've been around for a lot
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longer than even some astronomical bodies. Like the stars that make up Polaris, aka the North Star
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They're only around 70 million years old. And also Saturn's rings, which are 10 to 100 million
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years old. Sharks are also older than the Atlantic Ocean, which emerged after the supercontinent
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Pangea split up 150 million years ago. As far as we know though, sharks aren't radioactive
3:26
which is more than we can say for the next few things in this video. Bananas have high levels
3:30
of potassium, and some potassium is radioactive. And that means bananas are naturally radioactive
3:35
It's not a lot of radiation though. As the Environmental Protection Agency explains
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consuming one banana would deliver a dose of 0.01 millirem of radiation. To put that in context
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you would need to eat about 100 bananas to receive the same amount of radiation exposure
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as you get each day in the United States from natural radiation in the environment
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You know what else is radioactive? The U.S. Capitol Building, thanks to the granite it's
3:59
constructed from. According to PBS, the building is so radioactive due to high uranium content in
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its granite walls, it could never be licensed as a nuclear power reactor site. A 2001 report
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measured a dose of radiation at some locations in the building at 30 microrem per hour, which the
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report notes is up to 550% greater than the typical dose rate at the fence line around nuclear power
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plants and is about 13,000 times greater than ongoing worldwide exposures to radiation from
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the Chernobyl accident. Yikes. As far as we can tell, none of the politicians who spend a ton of
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time in the building have become Bruce Banner. Yet. One person who did come close to getting
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the Hult treatment was President Jimmy Carter, who in 1952 was a Navy man in the Atomic Energy
4:41
program He and a team were sent to clean up a reactor in Chalk River Ontario that had been damaged by a meltdown after a power surge At that time we didn really have a firm grasp on the damage radiation could cause which was still being studied So Carter suited up and was lowered into the reactor
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getting a dose of radiation that would frankly horrify us today. For about six months after that
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I had radioactivity in my urine, Carter said in 2008. They let us get probably a thousand times more radiation
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than they would now. It was in the early stages and they didn't know. I know the answer is no
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but I really wanna believe his pee was glow in the dark. If you've ever talked about having a buttload of something, hold on to your butts because
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butt is a real unit of measurement. It was at one point used for casks of liquids like
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wine and whiskey. As Adam Clark Estes so elegantly put it at Gizmodo, that means if you fill
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the barrel up you technically have a buttload of wine, though you'd probably just call
5:31
it a full butt. A butt amounts to about 108 imperial gallons, or around 130 American gallons
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That's a buttload of gallons if you ask me. Before we move on from butts, did you know that farts can actually leak out of your mouth
5:44
if you don't partake in that toot? Apparently the unexpressed gas goes back through your gut wall, gets absorbed into your circulation
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and then you exhale it. This might sound like another, if you keep making that face it's gonna stay that way
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but this time it's actually true. Here's a fact that might blow your mind
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The last time all of humanity was on Earth together was October 31st, 2000
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That's the day the first crew of the International Space Station headed into orbit, and someone's
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been on the ISS ever since. Though Aztec civilization feels like ancient history, probably
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because archaeologists spend a lot of time digging up evidence of it, in reality we can
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trace its beginnings to 1325. By that point, Oxford University had already existed for
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more than 200 years. It first opened its doors in 1096. In 1881, Charles Gouteau assassinated President James Garfield, under the delusion that the
6:32
President had refused him a position in the government, and because he had a book to promote
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but that's a story for another time. A couple of decades before that, Gouteau had
6:40
been a member of the Oneida community, which you might know from Silverware, but which began as a free love utopia, which we would today most definitely call a cult, founded
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by a preacher named John Humphrey Noyes in the late 1840s. One of the community's practices
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was complex marriage, which basically held that people could not shack up with one other
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person but that they could sleep with whomever they wanted, provided the other person was
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also interested. Which was actually kind of progressive. Complex marriage was basically the tamest and least upsetting of the community's doctrines
7:09
But again that a story for another video Guiteau did not do well in Oneida He didn want to do the required chores and was super mad when women refused to sleep with him Community members called him Charles Get Out
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He also didn't like participating in mutual criticisms in which other community members surrounded you
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and detailed all of your shortcomings, of which Charles Guiteau had a lot
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He pretty much thought he was on a mission from God, so all of this insulted him a great deal
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He would eventually leave the community and try to blackmail it into giving him $9,000
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dollars, which did not work out for him, and eventually he found himself on a path to murder
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History is wild, huh? Guess what? Like zebras and tigers, you have stripes. I know, you're looking
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down at yourself thinking, what is she even talking about? But these stripes, which cover
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you from head to toe, are invisible. They're known as Blaschko's lines, after dermatologist
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Alfred Blaschko, who noticed that moles and other skin conditions tended to show up in line-like
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formations on his patients, and the lines didn't correspond to any known system of the body. Today
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we know that this is a holdover from our development from a single cell to a whole human
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You can see the stripes under UV light. Pretty cool, huh? Let's finish up with a fact that
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seems so much like a lie. I took a screenshot of it to add it to this video. In June 2025
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Dr. Sam Ghali tweeted, hit me with a shocking medical fact, to which Medic Kim replied
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baby got back is older than the first policy requiring women and minorities to be included
8:30
in clinical trials and medical research. It seems kind of wild to exclude a huge part of
8:35
population from clinical trials, right? Let alone that this problem was corrected so recently
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As a reminder, Sir Mix-a-Lot's Baby Got Back came out in May 1992, and according to the National
8:44
Institutes for Health, between 1989 and 1993, inclusion of women in clinical research was NIH
8:50
policy, but it was not law. In 1993, including women in underrepresented groups was made law
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in a section of the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993, which mandated, among other things, that
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NIH ensures that women and minorities are included in all clinical research. In trials including
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women and minorities, the trial should be designed and carried out so that it is possible to yze
9:10
whether the variables being studied affect women and minorities differently than other participants
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Cost is not an acceptable reason for excluding women and minorities. That law went into effect in September 1994, after which, according to the NIH
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it would not fund any grant, cooperative agreement, or contract or support any intramural
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project unless it complied with this policy
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