Ever feel like you're being lied to? Every single morning, millions of people scroll through social media or open an app to find their fun fact of the day today. It’s a ritual. We want that little hit of dopamine that comes from knowing something weird. But here’s the problem: the internet is a giant game of telephone. Half the stuff you read is either wildly out of context or just flat-out wrong.
You've probably heard that daddy longlegs are the most poisonous spiders in the world but their fangs are too small to bite you. Total myth. They aren't even spiders. Or maybe you read that humans swallow eight spiders a year in their sleep. Also fake. A guy literally made that up in 1993 to prove how quickly misinformation spreads. He succeeded.
If you’re looking for a genuine, scientifically verified fun fact of the day today, let’s talk about something actually bizarre: wombat poop is square. Not kinda squarish. I mean distinct, sharp-edged cubes. It sounds like a joke, but it’s a biological marvel that involves fluid mechanics and some very intense intestinal muscle contractions.
The Physics of the Cube
Most animals produce round or tube-shaped waste because, well, that’s how sphincters and intestines work. Nature loves a curve. However, the bare-nosed wombat (Vombatus ursinus) decided to defy geometry. For a long time, people thought wombats had a square-shaped anus. They don't. That would be an anatomical nightmare.
In 2018, a team of researchers led by Patricia Yang at the Georgia Institute of Technology decided to get to the bottom of this. They won an Ig Nobel Prize for it, which is the award given to science that first makes you laugh and then makes you think. They found that the last 17 percent of the wombat’s intestine isn't uniform.
Most intestines stretch evenly all the way around. The wombat's intestine has two stiff zones and two flexible zones. As the waste moves through, the stiff parts resist deformation while the soft parts stretch, molding the feces into a cubic shape. By the time it reaches the end of the line, the lack of moisture in the wombat's gut (they have incredibly slow metabolisms) ensures the cube stays solid. It’s basically a natural brick-making factory.
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Why though? Evolution rarely does things "just because." Wombats are territorial. They use their scat to mark their homes and they like to pile it on top of rocks or logs. If you’re a wombat and you poop a ball onto a sloped rock, it rolls away. A cube stays put. It’s the ultimate biological paperweight.
Why We Crave These Random Tidbits
Why does knowing about square poop feel so good? It’s about social currency. Humans are wired to share "sticky" information. According to Chip and Dan Heath in their book Made to Stick, unexpectedness is one of the primary drivers of why an idea survives.
When you share a fun fact of the day today, you aren't just sharing data. You're signaling that you are curious and observant. But there is a dark side to this. The "General Factoid Industry" often prioritizes the wow factor over the truth factor.
The Problem With "Common Knowledge"
Take the classic "Goldfish have a three-second memory" claim. It’s everywhere. It’s in movies, it’s in greeting cards, and it’s likely been your fun fact of the day today on more than one occasion. Honestly, it's insulting to goldfish.
Culum Brown, a researcher at Macquarie University, has spent years showing that fish are actually quite bright. Goldfish can remember things for months. They can be trained to navigate mazes, recognize their owners, and even associate specific sounds with feeding time. We keep repeating the "three-second" lie because it makes us feel better about keeping them in tiny, boring glass bowls.
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Then there's the Great Wall of China being visible from space. Ask any astronaut. It’s not. It’s too narrow and the color blends in too well with the natural landscape. You can see highways and airports way more easily than you can see the Great Wall. Yet, the myth persists because it sounds poetic.
The Most "Today" Fact You Need to Know
Since we’re hunting for the absolute best fun fact of the day today, let’s look at something happening right now in the world of technology and biology.
Did you know that scientists have recently figured out how to use DNA as a hard drive? This isn't science fiction. We are currently living in an era where data centers are consuming massive amounts of electricity. DNA, however, is incredibly dense and stable. You could theoretically store every single bit of data ever created by humans—every movie, every book, every tweet—inside a container the size of a couple of shoeboxes.
Researchers at Harvard and the University of Washington have already successfully encoded the entirety of War and Peace into DNA strands and then read it back with 100% accuracy. The "fact" here isn't just that it's possible, but that it's becoming commercially viable. Within our lifetime, your "cloud" storage might actually be a vial of synthetic genetic material sitting in a climate-controlled vault.
How to Spot a Fake Fact
If you’re a trivia nerd, you need a filter. Most people just swallow information whole. Don't be that person.
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- Check the Source: If a "fact" starts with "Scientists say..." but doesn't name a university or a study, be suspicious. Real science has names attached to it.
- The "Too Good to Be True" Test: If a fact perfectly confirms a political bias or seems way too ironic, it’s probably exaggerated.
- Check the Date: Scientific "facts" expire. What was true in a 1995 textbook is often considered a "misconception" in 2026.
The Real Value of Curiosity
The point of looking for a fun fact of the day today isn't just to win a pub quiz. It’s about maintaining a sense of wonder. The world is getting noisier. Everything is polarized. Knowing that there's a species of jellyfish (Turritopsis dohrnii) that can theoretically live forever by reverting its cells back to their earliest state? That’s cool. It reminds us that nature is weirder than anything we can imagine.
That jellyfish—the "Immortal Jellyfish"—doesn't just live a long time. When it gets sick, old, or stressed, it transforms its existing cells into a younger state. It’s like a butterfly turning back into a caterpillar. It’s the only known case of a metazoan returning to a colonial stage after reaching sexual maturity.
Actionable Steps for the Fact-Obsessed
Stop being a passive consumer of information. If you want to actually get smarter and have better things to talk about at dinner, change how you find your facts.
- Follow the Ig Nobels: Don't just read mainstream science news. Look at the Ig Nobel winners. They cover the weird stuff—like why humans can't run on water but some lizards can, or the brain activity of people who see the face of Jesus on toast.
- Use "Snopes" and "Hoax-Slayer": Before you share that "did you know" post on Facebook, run a quick search. Being the person who corrects a fake fact is a service to humanity.
- Focus on the "Why": A fact is just a data point. The "why" is the story. Knowing wombats have square poop is a 4/10. Knowing they use it as a non-rolling territorial brick to communicate in the Australian outback is a 10/10.
- Diversify Your Feed: Get out of the "Fun Fact" echo chambers. Read journals like Nature or National Geographic. The real world is much more interesting than the "Top 10" lists written by AI bots.
The next time you look for a fun fact of the day today, remember that the truth is usually more complex, more messy, and way more fascinating than the simplified version you see in a headline. Nature doesn't care about our need for "simple." It cares about what works. And apparently, for a wombat, what works is a very specific, very sturdy, biological cube.
Verify your sources. Question the "common knowledge." Stay weird.
Actionable Insight: To verify any fact you see today, use the "Lateral Reading" technique. Instead of staying on the page where you found the fact, open three new tabs and search for the specific claim alongside the word "debunked" or "study." If you can't find a primary source within two minutes, don't repeat it.