Fun fact Friday: today's fun fact for work, plus 160 more
Today's fun fact is below, the same for your whole team. Plus 160 more true, surprising facts and how to run Fun Fact Friday in Slack, Teams or a meeting.
Today's fun fact
Fun Fact Friday is the easiest team ritual there is: one true, surprising fact, posted every Friday. It costs nothing, takes a minute, and gives a quiet channel something to reply to. Use the picker for a fun fact of the day for work, or pull from the lists below. Every fact is settled and checkable, and none of them depend on this year's records or champions.
How to run Fun Fact Friday at work
Five minutes to set up, then one minute every Friday.
- Pick one home for it. A Slack or Teams channel people already read, or the first two minutes of your Friday meeting.
- Post at the same time each Friday. Late morning works. The habit matters more than the fact.
- Use the fact above, or one from the lists. Everyone who opens this page today sees the same fact, so nobody posts a repeat by accident.
- Ask one small question with it. "Did anyone know this?" or "Guess the number first" turns a post into a thread.
- Rotate who posts. A different person each week. Newer teammates often find the best ones.
Fun Fact Friday in Slack, Teams or a meeting
- Slack. Make a #fun-fact-friday channel and a scheduled Workflow Builder reminder for Friday morning.
- Microsoft Teams. Post in a team channel and ask for replies in the thread. A recurring Power Automate flow can post the reminder.
- A team meeting. Read the fact before the agenda, or ask the room to guess the number in it first. It takes a minute.
- Email or a newsletter. Put one fact at the top of the Friday update. People read further when the first line is fun.
5 ways to turn Friday fun facts into a game
- Fact or fiction. Post two facts, one true and one invented. People vote with emoji before you reveal it.
- Guess the number. Hide the number ("How many bones does a newborn have?") and the closest guess wins the week.
- Teammate fun facts. Each Friday, one person shares a fun fact about themselves and the team guesses whose it is.
- Theme months. Animals in one month, space the next. Use the category chips above to pick.
- Friday quiz. On the last Friday of the month, ask five of that month's facts as a quick quiz.
Want something for the other four days? Post a question of the day that gets people talking about themselves, or open a call with one of our team meeting games.
29 animal fun facts
The safest bet for a Friday post. Nobody argues with a wombat.
1. An octopus has three hearts.
2. Octopus blood is blue, because it carries oxygen with copper instead of iron.
3. A group of flamingos is called a flamboyance.
4. A group of owls is called a parliament.
5. A group of crows is called a murder.
6. Sea otters sometimes hold paws while they sleep on the water, so they don't drift apart.
7. Koalas can sleep around 20 hours a day.
8. Hummingbirds can fly backward.
9. Butterflies taste with sensors on their feet.
10. Cats can't taste sweetness.
11. Dolphins sleep with one half of their brain at a time.
12. An elephant's trunk has no bones. It's almost all muscle.
13. The blue whale is the largest animal known to have ever lived, bigger than any known dinosaur.
14. Giraffes have seven neck bones, the same number as people.
15. Owls can't move their eyes, so they turn their heads instead, up to about 270 degrees.
16. Almost every penguin species lives in the Southern Hemisphere.
17. Polar bears have black skin, and their fur is see-through rather than white.
18. Sea stars have no brain and no blood.
19. Honeybees tell each other where to find flowers by dancing.
20. Cheetahs can sprint at around 60 to 70 mph, but only for short bursts.
21. Sharks have been around longer than trees.
22. Axolotls can regrow lost legs and tails.
23. Male seahorses carry the eggs and give birth to the babies.
24. The platypus is a mammal that lays eggs.
25. Wombats make cube-shaped poop.
26. Tiny animals called tardigrades have survived being exposed to open space.
27. A garden snail has thousands of tiny teeth.
28. Goats have rectangular pupils.
29. An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
30 science and space fun facts
Physics, chemistry and the solar system, with no homework.
30. Water expands when it freezes, which is why ice floats.
31. Sound travels about four times faster through water than through air.
32. Diamonds and pencil lead (graphite) are both made of carbon.
33. The chemical symbol for gold, Au, comes from aurum, the Latin word for gold.
34. Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. Helium is second.
35. Oxygen is the most common element in Earth's crust.
36. Absolute zero is about minus 459.67°F, or minus 273.15°C.
37. Atoms are mostly empty space.
38. A bolt of lightning is about five times hotter than the surface of the Sun.
39. Bananas are very slightly radioactive, because they contain potassium.
40. Old windows aren't thicker at the bottom because glass flows. They were made that way.
41. The Eiffel Tower grows a few inches taller in summer, as its iron expands in the heat.
42. Water covers about 71 percent of Earth's surface.
43. Earth isn't a perfect sphere. It bulges at the equator.
44. Sunlight takes about 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach Earth.
45. A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus.
46. Venus is the hottest planet, even though Mercury is closer to the Sun.
47. A year on Mercury lasts just 88 Earth days.
48. A day on Mars is about 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth.
49. Mars has two small moons, Phobos and Deimos.
50. Olympus Mons on Mars is the largest known volcano in the solar system.
51. More than 1,300 Earths could fit inside Jupiter.
52. Saturn is less dense than water.
53. The Sun could hold about 1.3 million Earths.
54. The Moon moves about 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) farther from Earth every year.
55. With no wind on the Moon, astronaut footprints there could last for millions of years.
56. Sound can't travel through the vacuum of space.
57. Neptune was found with math: astronomers predicted where it should be before anyone saw it.
58. A sugar-cube-sized piece of a neutron star would weigh about a billion tons on Earth.
59. Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006.
25 human body fun facts
Everyone owns one, so everyone can check these at their desk.
60. An adult skeleton usually has 206 bones.
61. Babies are born with roughly 270 to 300 bones. Many fuse together as they grow.
62. More than half of your bones are in your hands and feet.
63. The skin is the body's largest organ.
64. The femur, or thigh bone, is the longest bone in the body.
65. The smallest bone in the body, the stapes, is in your ear and is about the size of a grain of rice.
66. Babies are born with kneecaps made of cartilage, which slowly turn to bone.
67. Tooth enamel is the hardest substance in the human body.
68. Fingernails grow about twice as fast as toenails.
69. Identical twins don't have identical fingerprints.
70. Your left lung is a little smaller than your right, to make room for your heart.
71. Your heart beats about 100,000 times a day.
72. Your brain uses about 20 percent of your body's energy.
73. You're slightly taller in the morning than at night, because the discs in your spine compress during the day.
74. The cornea, the clear front of the eye, has no blood vessels. It takes oxygen straight from the air.
75. Red blood cells live for about 120 days.
76. The cells lining your stomach are replaced every few days.
77. The liver can regrow after part of it is removed.
78. The small intestine is about 20 feet long.
79. The gluteus maximus is the largest muscle in the body.
80. Most people blink about 15 to 20 times a minute.
81. Adults have 32 teeth, counting wisdom teeth. Children have 20 baby teeth.
82. Your taste buds are replaced about every one to two weeks.
83. Adults breathe about 12 to 20 times a minute at rest.
84. Most people's eyes have three kinds of color-sensing cone cells, tuned roughly to red, green and blue light.
27 history fun facts
Dates that surprise people, and a few myths put to rest.
85. Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid.
86. Woolly mammoths were still alive on a remote Arctic island when the Great Pyramid was built.
87. The Great Pyramid of Giza was the tallest human-made structure in the world for more than 3,800 years.
88. Oxford University was teaching students before the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, was founded.
89. The fax machine was invented before the telephone.
90. The Hundred Years' War lasted 116 years.
91. The Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896 lasted less than an hour, making it the shortest war on record.
92. Most delegates signed the Declaration of Independence on August 2, 1776, not July 4.
93. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on July 4, 1826, 50 years after the Declaration was adopted.
94. The Wright brothers' first powered flight, in 1903, lasted 12 seconds.
95. Vikings didn't wear horned helmets. That look came from 19th-century costume designers.
96. Napoleon wasn't unusually short. He was around average height for a Frenchman of his time.
97. The Leaning Tower of Pisa started leaning while it was still being built.
98. The Eiffel Tower was meant to stand for only 20 years.
99. The Eiffel Tower was built as the entrance arch to the 1889 World's Fair in Paris.
100. The Statue of Liberty is made of copper. It turned green as the metal weathered.
101. The Statue of Liberty was a gift from the people of France, dedicated in 1886.
102. The Titanic sank in April 1912, four days into its first voyage.
103. Ada Lovelace published what's often called the first computer program in the 1840s.
104. The oldest surviving camera photograph, from the 1820s, needed an exposure of hours or even days.
105. Paper money was first used in China more than 1,000 years ago.
106. The first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens in 1896.
107. The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901.
108. The United States bought Alaska from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million.
109. Abraham Lincoln is in the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.
110. The Berlin Wall's border crossings opened on November 9, 1989.
111. Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon in July 1969, during the Apollo 11 mission.
Want to quiz people instead of telling them? Our true or false questions turn facts like these into a round, with each answer explained.
27 geography fun facts
Countries, oceans and map quirks. Great for teams spread across time zones.
112. Canada has more lakes than any other country.
113. Canada has the longest coastline of any country.
114. Russia is the largest country by area and spans 11 time zones.
115. France uses more time zones than any other country, thanks to its overseas territories.
116. Africa has 54 countries, more than any other continent.
117. Africa is the only continent that sits in all four hemispheres.
118. Australia is wider than the Moon.
119. Vatican City is the smallest country in the world.
120. Monaco is smaller than New York's Central Park.
121. Istanbul sits on two continents, Europe and Asia.
122. Lake Baikal in Russia is the deepest lake on Earth.
123. Lake Baikal holds about a fifth of the world's unfrozen fresh surface water.
124. The Dead Sea is almost ten times saltier than the ocean, so people float in it easily.
125. Antarctica is the largest desert on Earth. Deserts are defined by how little rain falls, not by heat.
126. The Sahara is roughly the size of the United States.
127. The Nile flows north.
128. The Amazon carries more water than any other river.
129. The Pacific Ocean covers more area than all of Earth's land put together.
130. The Mariana Trench is deeper than Mount Everest is tall.
131. Measured from Earth's center, the top of Ecuador's Chimborazo is farther out than the top of Everest.
132. Greenland is the world's largest island.
133. Alaska is more than twice the size of Texas.
134. Alaska has the westernmost and the easternmost points in the US, because its Aleutian Islands cross the 180th meridian.
135. At their closest, Russia and the US are less than 3 miles apart, between the two Diomede Islands.
136. There's a town called Boring in Oregon, and it's paired with Dull in Scotland.
137. Nepal's flag is the only national flag that isn't a rectangle.
138. At Point Nemo, the ocean spot farthest from land, the nearest people are sometimes astronauts on the space station.
25 food fun facts
Best posted just before lunch.
139. Properly stored honey can stay edible for decades.
140. Botanically, a tomato is a fruit.
141. Botanically, bananas are berries and strawberries aren't.
142. Avocados are berries too, with a single big seed.
143. Peanuts aren't nuts. They're legumes, like peas and beans.
144. Each cashew grows hanging from the bottom of a fruit called a cashew apple.
145. Almonds are the seeds of a fruit closely related to peaches.
146. Pistachios and cashews belong to the same plant family.
147. Coffee beans are the seeds of a red fruit called a coffee cherry.
148. Vanilla comes from the pod of an orchid.
149. Saffron is the dried threads of a crocus flower, and it's the most expensive spice by weight.
150. Pound cake is named after its original recipe: a pound each of flour, butter, eggs and sugar.
151. Ketchup was sold as a medicine in the 1830s.
152. The first cultivated carrots were purple and yellow, not orange.
153. Apples float because about a quarter of their volume is air.
154. Cucumbers are about 95 percent water.
155. A pineapple plant takes about two years to grow one pineapple.
156. Ripe cranberries bounce, and growers have used that to sort them.
157. White chocolate contains cocoa butter but no cocoa solids.
158. Rhubarb stalks are safe to eat, but the leaves are poisonous.
159. The Caesar salad is named after restaurateur Caesar Cardini, not Julius Caesar.
160. The chocolate chip cookie was created at the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts in the 1930s.
161. An 11-year-old named Frank Epperson invented the Popsicle in 1905.
162. Fortune cookies as we know them were popularized in California, not China.
163. Much of the wasabi served outside Japan is mostly horseradish, mustard and green coloring.
Want someone to run this for your team?
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