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The internet and social media aren’t there just to entertain you—they have a lot of educational potential as well. When you take educational content and add an entertaining spin, perhaps mixing in a dash of weirdness as well, you get something that’s captivating.

The ‘Weird Facts’ Instagram account has been taking this approach for years and years. Today, we’re featuring some of the freshest, most unusual and intriguing facts about the world that the curators of the project have shared online. Scroll down to take a peek—these posts are something that might just pique your curiosity and awaken your inner researcher.

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Something that the ‘Weird Facts’ team pointed out in a recent post is the huge number of centenarians living in Japan.

The country has long been known for the longevity of its people due to a wide range of factors, from eating a healthy diet and leading an active lifestyle to being incredibly social in one’s local community.

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As reported by the Japan Times in late 2024, the number of centenarians in Japan stood at over 95,000, according to the data from the health ministry.

This is a record high for the 54th year in a row. Back in 1963, when Japan began recording statistics, the country had barely 153 people aged 100 and over.

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By 1981, the number of Japanese centenarians had already reached 1,000. It jumped to 10,000 in 1998. By 2012, this number stood at a jaw-dropping 50,000. It climbed over 90,000 in 2022.

Now, there are an average of 76.49 centenarians for every 100,000 people living in Japan. The areas with the highest number of elderly people living to be over 100 were Shimane, followed by Kochi, and Kagoshima.

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Meanwhile, the lowest numbers lived in Saitama, Aichi, and Chiba. The Japan Times notes that the number of people turning 100 during the fiscal year 2024, running through to March 2025, stands at 47,888.

These individuals are given a congratulatory letter, as well as a silver cup to mark this momentous occasion.

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Nippon states that there were 95,119 centenarians living in Japan as of September 1, 2024, an increase of 2,980 compared to the year before.

The vast majority of Japanese living to the age of 100 or more are women. They account for 88.3% of all centenarians, with men making up just 11.7% of the total.

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There is a flood of information to be found online, so in this day and age, content creators and educators alike have to find new ways to stand out from the crowd. Walls of text and long-form content (while valuable in their own right) find it hard to compete with short-form ways of presenting info.

There’s a premium on internet users’ attention spans, so you have to find a way to be as concise as possible without losing the essence of your message.

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Aside from keeping your caption brief, it also helps a ton if you use a font that’s super easy to read, as well as high-quality images that grab your attention. Try putting yourself in your audience’s shoes and think about how you like to consume edutainment yourself.

There is no way that it’s possible to explain any topic in all of its nuance and complexity in a single social media post. However, it can be a good way to pique your audience’s interest and put them on the path of doing some independent research.

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If a topic sounds interesting enough, it makes you want to read up more on it. Or is that just us? It’s always a good reminder to look at multiple sources to examine how reliable certain claims are and to avoid as many biases as possible.

When gauging a source’s reliability, try to look at its track record, the type of information it relies on, whether it provides links to the original sources, how transparent it is about having made mistakes in the past, and whether it seems like it might have an agenda. Generally, a good source is one that looks at facts and doesn’t just present its opinions as objective truths.

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Which of the facts featured in this post intrigued you the most? Which ones were completely new and unheard of to you, dear Pandas? Were there any topics that you were so curious about that you couldn’t stop yourself from learning more about them online?

What do you think inspires you the most to keep on learning new things, no matter how old you are? We’re always happy to hear from you! If you have a moment, share your opinions in the comments.