Daily Facts

Daily Facts: General Knowledge

One surprising, unusual or little-known fact every morning. One swipe, one discovery — two minutes is all it takes.

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Free on the App Store, with in-app purchases. Requires iOS 17 or later. Rated 4.6 out of 5 (111 ratings).

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What Daily Facts does

Eight fields

History and civilisations, science and nature, art and literature, sport and records, geography and travel, film and pop culture, curiosities, philosophy and society.

Quizzes to test yourself

When you want to go further, measure what actually stuck. Quizzes for every level, without the pressure of an exam.

Verified facts

Every entry is picked to be true, surprising and memorable at once — not scraped from a list of trivia.

Two minutes a day

On the train, over coffee, before bed. It slips into any routine without ever demanding a slot of its own.

Today's fact, . Geography

The "Door to Hell" Has Been Burning by Mistake for Over 50 Years

Since 1971, a 70-meter-wide gas crater has been burning non-stop in the Karakum Desert of Turkmenistan due to a miscalculation by Soviet geologists.

During a mining survey in 1970, researchers accidentally drilled into an underground cavern, causing their drilling rig to collapse and leaving a gaping hole. To prevent atmospheric pollution and explosion hazards from the natural gas, the team decided to ignite the emissions, confident that the reserve would run out within a few weeks.

Locally dubbed the "Door to Hell" (from the Turkmen word "derweze" meaning "door"), the Darvaza crater is still burning over fifty years later. Even a decree signed in April 2010 by President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow ordering it to be extinguished failed to stop it: the crater was still actively burning in 2023.

Source: fr.wikipedia.org

Previous days

This week's facts can be read in full in the app.

  • . History

    Taking a Bath in Hitler's Apartment on the Day He Died

    On the very day Adolf Hitler committed suicide, American journalist Lee Miller entered his apartment to pose in his bathtub…

  • . Practical Life

    Why does ice cream give you a brain freeze?

    A brain freeze does not actually hurt the brain itself, but rather the meninges, its protective outer layer: when ice-cold food or air hits the back of the throat, blood vessels contract and send pain signals straight to the forehead and temples…

  • . Science

    An Air Conditioner for the Brain

    Yawning does not serve to take in extra oxygen, but to regulate the temperature of your brain…

  • . Nature

    A 40-Story Salt Layer Across the Entire Earth

    If all the salt in the oceans were spread evenly across the Earth's land surface, it would form a layer over 166 meters (500 feet) thick—about the height of a 40-story office building…

  • . Science

    Why Do Our Fingers Wrinkle in Water?

    Our fingers do not wrinkle in water because they absorb liquid, but because our body triggers an active reflex to improve underwater grip…

  • . Nature

    How your cat hijacks your brain to demand food

    To demand food, your cat modifies its purr by adding a frequency perceived as more urgent and less pleasant, directly hijacking human psychology…

  • . Science

    The Onion's Chemical Defense

    Onions make you cry when you chop them because they deploy a chemical self-defense system designed to stop animals from eating them underground…

Read the rest in the app →

A few facts to discover

Learning without noticing

General knowledge is rarely built by blocking out two hours with a textbook. It accumulates in small touches, whenever something is surprising enough to stay. That is the whole bet of Daily Facts — one fact, chosen to surprise, and the rest follows.

The app is not trying to keep you. It offers a fact, you read it, you close it. If curiosity takes over, eight fields are there to keep exploring, and the quizzes are there to check what really stuck.

Why it works

A single striking fact anchors better than a structured lesson forgotten the moment the page closes. Coming back each day, you accumulate effortlessly what a course would not make you retain.

The quizzes act as spaced recall: they resurface facts seen weeks earlier, right when memory starts to let go of them.

Daily Facts in pictures

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Frequently asked questions

Is the app free?

Yes. Daily Facts is free to download and read. It is funded by ads, and an optional in-app purchase removes them.

How many facts are there?

Several hundred across eight fields, with new ones added in successive updates.

Do I need an account?

No. No sign-up, no email address, no profile to fill in. You open the app and you read.

Are the facts reliable?

Every fact is checked before publication. If you spot an error you can report it by email and it is corrected in the next update.

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