No matter how many all-nighters you pull devouring volume after volume of dust-laden encyclopedias, it will never be enough. Because learning is a process, and there’s no end visible on the horizon.
But most of us are just fine with one or two "did you know that?" facts always ready to be served at a dinner table. Except they get old fast and nobody wants to listen to another “banana is a berry,” like, ever.
Luckily, one Reddit user who goes by u/RyanBlitzpatrick did everyone a favor and asked people on r/AskReddit “What's a fact that just blows your mind?” 3.6K upvotes and 3.5K comments later, the results are in and you’d better get your notebook ready, 'cause these are some of the hand-picked knowledge bites that may honestly surprise you.
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When you dream, one part of your brain is making up the story, and another part is experiencing those events and is genuinely surprised by all the twists in the plot.
2006, which doesn’t feel THAT long ago, saw the death of two colossally old tortoises. The first, Harriet, was reportedly collected by Charles Darwin when he visited the Galápagos on the HMS Beagle. She belonged to Steve Irwin at the time of her death. Charles Darwin and Steve Irwin shared a “pet.” Estimated to have lived 176 years.
The second, Adwaita, was born before the United States declared its independence from England. Think of it: just 14 years ago, there was a land creature alive that was older than our country. Just incredible.
November 2, 2000 was the last time all humans were on the planet together. Since then at least one person has remained on the international space station
I wish it was as easy to remember these facts as it was to scroll through. In reality, we do learn things every day, but not much of that information sticks with us.
But memory is a very complex function. It turns out, much of it is generated not only through recollection, but also through the emotions that are attached to it. Shahram Heshmat, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Springfield, believes that “emotion affects all the phases of memory formation.”
For example, “Attention guides our focus to select what’s most relevant for our lives and is normally associated with novelty.” And nothing focuses the mind more than a surprise which escalates emotional intensity.
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Anne Frank were born in the same year.
Also, that same year, Betty White was already 7 years old.
The oldest living tree in the world methuselah is 4851 years old
That the Oxford Univeristy is older than the Aztec Empire
Another interesting thing which escalates long-term memory is not the recollection of a fact itself, but rather the so-called mood memory. Prof. Heshmat explains that “Our current emotional state facilitates recall of experiences that had a similar emotional tone.”
For example, being in a bad mood primes us to think of and remember unpleasant moments.Having said that, most of the things we forget easily have to do with our inability to put them in our long-term memory.
The sound made by the Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 was so loud it ruptured eardrums of people 40 miles away, travelled around the world four times, and was clearly heard 3,000 miles away.
That's like you standing in New York and hearing a sound from San Francisc
If time travel were possible, you would need a time-and-space-machine to survive the trip, otherwise when you travelled back in time, the planet would be at a different point in its rotation around the sun and our solar system would be at a different point in space as it rotates, which means you'd travel back in time and be in an empty part of space
I have seen a thousand comments on Boredpanda over time. You good sir was the first comment I actually found it worthy to registrer to "upvote". Made me LOL :P
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Since no one knows how to make a time machine, it's not clear if that's true -- maybe the time machine is somehow bound to the matter beneath it, so it doesn't have to travel anywhere, it's location gets pulled along through time.
What if the matter was taken from several places? Hold on - what amount and type of matter are we even talking about? A molecule? An atom? How would "atom" even be defined in a metallic compound? If it's several atoms, how many, and is the reason for that amount? Does the bit of air between the ground and your feet (surfaces are pretty rugged from up close) count?
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Which is why the TARDIS is the ultimate time machine: time and relative dimension IN SPACE
well, it's nearly at the same point in the solar system every year, also, you don't necessarily need to jump to some date in the past at the same location in space - if you find, so-called, worm-hole, you will travel to a certain space which is entwined with the exact difference of time compared to your current location and time or exact location can only lead to other exact location which will be linked with a certain time. otherwise, you need to use other technology/logic route to acquire time travelling which, f.e. could be manipulating time flow within certain sphere/space/room of controlled material which means you are at the same location and only undoing things. There could be other theories but it would be completely against the current theory of physics at least to my knowledge.
Well no... I suppose that's one way to solve the issue, but the reality is you just need to be in space, or travel to points in time where the earth was in the same position.
Either way requires massive calculations regarding your position and the earth's position.
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Also, you wouldn't be able to go to the future unless going to see the 'future' on another planet or star. Again, that's not relevant.
And your atoms would be messed up when they reconstruct, so you might have a leg on your butt, and your arm and belly button might switch places. Either that, or you wouldn't reconstruct.
But what about gravitational pull? My machine is anchored by gravity in the present. As I move through time, I move with the earth because gravity keeps me there.
Another reason you would need a space and time machine is because spacetime is a single entity. In order to go back in time you would have to move faster than the speed of light. When you look at the stars, you are seeing them as they were about 6,000 years ago when they first emitted light. You are looking into the past; some stars have since died and others have been born but the light hasn’t reached us yet. The way we know how the universe began is by developing telescopes that can see so far that it can pick up light emitted 13 billion years ago when the Big Bang happened. If we could look a bit further we might be able to see all the way back to the Big Bang itself.
Ok, so the movie Time Machine is really wrong as he travels back and forward in time in his study!!!
If you are smart enough to make a "Time Machine" you probably know all this and consider it!
Time And Relative Dimensions In space. The Gallifreyans got it right.
Not true, for two reasons! There is no absolute reference frame, and what does that mean? It means all points of reference are equally true, meaning you are not actually travelling through space right now because from your perspective your mass is resting, wanting to fall to the center of mass of the earth but being stopped by strong interaction. Your speed around the sun can only be measured by from a second reference frame, but for you, you're not moving at all. That is actually, physically, true from your experience. 2a: There isn't any consensus on what time is, it remains one of the biggest mysteries in physics. If it is indeed a dimension of spacetime, then moving in one direction doesn't change your place along the axis of another dimension. Like if you'd move in a straight line up from your house, no matter how high you would go you wouldn't end up north or west of it. So travelling through a time dimension wouldn't change your placement along the space axes.
2b: If time is only the asymmetry of entropy, travelling through time wouldn't displace you either. It would be difficult to even define what time travel would be in this scenario. But it shouldn't affect your position in space.
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i know, right? Catching up with the solar system after a trip is a bitch
But, what if you travelled exactly 1 year into the past or future?
This was one of those things that when I learned it, it kind of ruined most sci-fi time travel .... however current theories on if time travel is possible often involve two linked devices, which might help over come this.
Can you explain this like im a 3 years old kid.? My brain Just hurts.
Can you explain this like im a 3 years old kid.? My brain Just hurts.
I finished my degree in physics and can safely say that unless they include location in the equation then yes... your a** will be way off of Earth. However, in terms of time travel, I theoretically think it's impossible. Time, as the fourth dimension, moves only forward. You cannot go back unless implicating a new timeline. Our current timeline will never be changed, no one will ever go back to the past in OUR timeline. If the infinite universe theory is correct, then you would simply go to a different universe, not necessarily a different time in ours. There's a lot more detail to this, but this is the simplest way I could explain it without going into other shtuff like time dilation, etc. etc.
I took a physics class that got into all that stuff with time dilation and why matter (and also information?) cannot travel faster than the speed of light. I don't remember all of the complex details but I do remember the prof explaining why you would have to break very well-understood laws of physics in order to travel backward in time, but *not* to travel forward at faster than our usual speed - that would still be possible. I recall being (sadly) absolutely convinced that it was true. I still write time-travel stories though, they're just too fun. :)
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This assumes there is an absolute frame of reference. Relativity teaches us that here is no such thing.
Whenever I watch time weird situation movies like interstellar and the time machine I think way too deep. It is really hard to break down those kinds of movies in my head like I tend to do with other movies.
You can counter-act that problem by "flying" the time-machine to where Earth is in the year you are traveling to. Assuming your engine is powerful enough to cover the needed distance
I was saying this on Quora a few months ago, in relation to Back to the Future (https://www.quora.com/How-realistic-is-Back-to-the-Futures-take-on-time-travel). Any time machine would have to be able to travel through space as well.
H.G. Wells was right. The machine would have to be in a fixed space and essentially create a stasis field around the person inside.
Travel exactly a year. If you travel from July 2 2020 to July 2 1920 then you would still be on earth
Unless you were jumping exactly by full year, and not by many at once. Then the differences would be miniscule :D
The Tardis has built in compensators that keep it connected to the nearest large gravity source.
But then again if you had time travel you have the perfect space ship. You just need to travel back to when some other planet was in the same spot. Or go back 250 million years to when Earth was in the same spot before going round the galactic merry-go-round. All in all 18 times since Earth was formed.
If you want to make a time faster, Just simply go to bed and sleep.
Does a DeLorean counts? Or spacesuits like Avengers-style? #itsallcrap
I suppose what you are saying would be true if the sun was in a fixed location, but it is not. In one year, the earth would NOT be in the same position it was the year prior. Our whole solar system is moving. The Milky Way galaxy is moving. It’s pretty complicated.
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The International Space station is closer to the earth than San Francisco is to L.A
Meanwhile, forcing yourself to memorize things is likely not to be very effective because our brains are not capable of making sense of dense information quickly and forming strong associations.
It's better to use super simple tricks such as visualization (imagine what you are trying to remember), repetition (boring but effective), and learning the opposite things (create associations in your head).
And never underestimate the power of understanding that which you’re learning, because you'll never be able to remember something you can’t explain yourself.
Arctic foxes can survive temperatures as low as -70 degrees Celsius
If an underwater bubble is collapsed by loud sound, light is produced and no one knows why
Good. So next power outage I'm gonna fart in the tub and yell at it :D
Some people don’t have an inner monologue, like they literally don’t have a voice in their head.
I can't even imagine. Those must be the people who fall asleep easily!
A woman once jumped off the 86th floor of the Empire State Building but the wind pushed her back and she fell on a ledge on the 85th floor. She survived.
The fact that nobody knows that if we all see colours the same way
I think about that. It's more than just how you identify a color. There are colors in the aqua family I see as blue and my husband sees as green.
That there are people in the world who don't like music. Not one specific type, but music as a whole.
That both blows my mind and disturbs me
Hope I don't run into any of these people, because we wouldn't be vibin'!
I still can’t get over the fact that teddy roosevelt got shot and continued to give a three hour speech
Ant biologists still don't know the maximum life span of most ant queens. They just live too long to keep track, and they're not too easy to keep in captivity. The longest one on record is like 30 years old, and there could easily be species that live longer than that
There is a termite colony in the Amazon Rain Forest that is the size of Great Britain and is almost 4,000 years old. There are also hundreds of millions of termite mounds
The U.S government has an official for a Zombie apocalypse. CONPLAN 8888 also known as Counter-Zombie Dominance was written in 2011. And just in case you think it's weird bureaucratic humor, the first line reads, 'This plan was not actually designed as a joke.'
There are more trees on Earth then there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
Confirmed by NASA.
A neutron star is so dense that a teaspoon of material from one would weigh around 10 million tons
If the timeline of the universe (up to now) was compressed into a year starting on new year's day, Homo sapiens would appear at 11:54 pm on December 31st
Mitochondria is only passed down by mother so there's a concept of mitochondrial eve, all humans today have their mitochondrial dna derived from her
Hold onto your hats if you're a white supremacist. The place or origin is believed to be East Africa.
Strawberries aren’t berries.
But bananas are
The Fermi Paradox.
With the number of potentially habitable Earth-like planets in our galaxy alone, it’s very strange that we haven’t detected alien signals of any kind so far.
There’s lots of theories as to why that is, but my favorite is called the great silenceDark Forest (which sounds way cooler). Basically everyone else out there is being quiet and not transmitting because they know of some danger that we are unaware of, and they don’t want it to find them. Gives me chills.
Edit: It’s interesting that most of the replies here, joking or serious, correspond to legitimate theories on the Fermi Paradox.
That the biggest bacteria species known, Thiomargarita namibiensis, can have a maximum diameter of 0.7 millimeters, which is big enough for you to see it without a microscope.
That's insane if you consider that your average bacteria species has a diameter of 0.001 millimeters.
How a computer does what it does. Blows my mind how 1's and 0's can do so much. Maybe I'm uneducated, but still mind blowing
The way the human brain works. These cells that are powered by tiny jolts of electricity are collectively having conscious thoughts, coming up with morals and empathy and every human behavior
That Neutrinos have mass and every second of every day about a billion of them are going through every square inch of your body - but the space between your atoms is so huge there's pretty much a 0% chance they will ever hit you
One million seconds = approx 12 days
One billion seconds = 32 years
One trillion seconds = 32,000 years
Seeing as people are currently throwing the word 'trillion' around a lot lately (as in pounds or dollars) this really highlights the truly massive differences between these sums.
One quadrillion seconds = 32 million years.
Every 2 years there's a convention that reunites all the cities called newcastle in any language, this convention is called Newcastles Of The World, it even has his own website
My Choir sang at one in Newcastle Upon Tyne, England. It was very interesting.
Several thousand years ago, the Sahara was actually grassland with massive lakes that rivalled the Great Lakes of North America.
Also, at one point the Straight of Gibraltar was closed. This meant that the Mediterranean Sea almost completely evaporated.
Took more time to go from bronze swords to steel swords than steel swords to nuclear weapons and less time from nukes to melting lasers that literally MELT metal is seconds
Ounce for ounce, bone density is stronger than steel.
Another fun fact: It would creep everyone our if we make bridges out of dead people's bones.
Kleopatra was born closer in time to the launch of the first iphone than to the construction of the piramids
You are outnumbered in your own body. The bacteria present in/on your body outnumber your own cells. We wouldn't even be able to survive without most of them
Your brain automatically translates wtf but not lol
I'm fairly sure it's because LOL with its consonant, vowel, consonant construction reads like a word -- while WTF is clearly not a word and, what's more, has more syllables to pronounce if you say the letters instead of the words (5 vs. 3).
The v2 rocket killed more people while actually making it than during ww2 when it was used. Also pepsi once had the 6th largest army/navy in the world.
That our galaxy and the Andromeda are going to collide a long, long time from now to form Milkdromeda!
That and that our universe will slowly die one day. There'll be no galaxies, no stars, no nebulae, nothing. It will all die out and leave noting but black holes and dwarf stars
The 10th president of the USA John Tyler, born in 1790 has two living grandsons
This factoid has been floating around for many years. Anyone checked on them recently?
Vacuum decay could completely annihilate the entire universe at any moment and we wouldn't even see it coming. One moment you're doing your thing, the next you and everything else just blips completely out of existence
Don't give 2020 any Ideas. That sounds like the Plan for new years before going into 2021.
It took us about 70,000 years to go from stone tools to settlements
A gram of uranium is roughly 20 billion calories... Mind was BLOWN!
Some animal abilities are truly amazing to me.
There's a type of lizard called the axolotl that can regenerate lost limbs in a matter of months.
And there's also a jellyfish called the immortal jellyfish that is, well, immortal. When they are attacked or when they get old, they can somehow revert to when they were babies and start growing up again.
Also, some animals can live without a head. A chicken once lived 18 headless months. And a turtle (tortoise? what's the difference?) lived 1.
France is the only country that has recorded a successful cavalry charge against boats
That scientist was able to figure out what a girl looked like, where she was from and even her last meal from just a piece of chewing gum
Charles Darwin is considered to be the Father of Evolution. But he never once used the word "evolution" in his masterpiece book "On the Origin of Species".
When something is in orbit, that essentially means it is perpetually falling
I heard it like the space station is non stop falling around the earth.
The 52 factorial story (52 factorial being the number of possible combinations of a deck of cards.
If you haven’t read this before here. It still hurts my brain every time I read it.
“This number is beyond astronomically large. I say beyond astronomically large because most numbers that we already consider to be astronomically large are mere infinitesimal fractions of this number. So, just how large is it? Let's try to wrap our puny human brains around the magnitude of this number with a fun little theoretical exercise. Start a timer that will count down the number of seconds from 52! to 0. We're going to see how much fun we can have before the timer counts down all the way.
Start by picking your favorite spot on the equator. You're going to walk around the world along the equator, but take a very leisurely pace of one step every billion years. The equatorial circumference of the Earth is 40,075,017 meters. Make sure to pack a deck of playing cards, so you can get in a few trillion hands of solitaire between steps. After you complete your round the world trip, remove one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean. Now do the same thing again: walk around the world at one billion years per step, removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean each time you circle the globe. The Pacific Ocean contains 707.6 million cubic kilometers of water. Continue until the ocean is empty. When it is, take one sheet of paper and place it flat on the ground. Now, fill the ocean back up and start the entire process all over again, adding a sheet of paper to the stack each time you’ve emptied the ocean.
Do this until the stack of paper reaches from the Earth to the Sun. Take a glance at the timer, you will see that the three left-most digits haven’t even changed. You still have 8.063e67 more seconds to go. 1 Astronomical Unit, the distance from the Earth to the Sun, is defined as 149,597,870.691 kilometers. So, take the stack of papers down and do it all over again. One thousand times more. Unfortunately, that still won’t do it. There are still more than 5.385e67 seconds remaining. You’re just about a third of the way done.
To pass the remaining time, start shuffling your deck of cards. Every billion years deal yourself a 5-card poker hand. Each time you get a royal flush, buy yourself a lottery ticket. A royal flush occurs in one out of every 649,740 hands. If that ticket wins the jackpot, throw a grain of sand into the Grand Canyon. Keep going and when you’ve filled up the canyon with sand, remove one ounce of rock from Mt. Everest. Now empty the canyon and start all over again. When you’ve leveled Mt. Everest, look at the timer, you still have 5.364e67 seconds remaining. Mt. Everest weighs about 357 trillion pounds. You barely made a dent. If you were to repeat this 255 times, you would still be looking at 3.024e64 seconds. The timer would finally reach zero sometime during your 256th attempt. “
The statement 'it hurts my brain' is indeed true in this case.I admire the person who had a brain capacity and time to come up with this way of explaining this, but I doubt that there are many people who can comprehend this.
I recently got my cat some catnip treats and as I was googling what to buy, I found that catnip actually works as an insect repellent. In fact, catnip is 10X more republican than DEET!
More REPUBLICAN? Maybe you're trying to say repellent? (Which Republicans generally are anyway.)
A concept more than a fact but how the whole body functions. Like, even just your heart beating in order to get blood round your body, let alone everything else working in sync. And most of it is done without us even noticing. It's no wonder some are flawed.
There used to be nine different species of humans.
At least that is...
Homo Sapiens (aka us)
Homo Neanderthalensis
Homo Floresiensis (sometimes called Hobbits)
Denisovans
Homo Erectus
Homo Habilis
Homo Heidelbergensis
Homo Rudolfensis
Homo Rhodesiensis
Homo Ergaster
Those are all the members of the Homo family I can think of right know. However it is important to remeber that there are almost certainly some that I forgot to mention and there might be some that we haven't discovert yet. Furthermore it is surprisingly difficult to find out if the groups I've listed are distinct species or different groups of the same species (the fact that our definition of species is kinda arbitrary doesn't help). This is actually a surprisingly interesting topic I would recommend you look into.
A now-closed cave in Utah still holds the body of a man who died in 2009
He was cave exploring with his family and got wedged in and couldn't be removed. Very sad way to go.
There are about 100 times as many cells in a human body than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy
How MASSIVE the solar system is compared to Earth. Not even regarding any other part of space, just the solar system. It's insane.
There's this website that shows the entire solar system lengthwise - If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel - take the time to read everything in it while you scroll through and just take in the massive expansiveness of space
You can fit all the planets in the solar system in the gap between the earth and the moon.
The biggest thunderbolt ever recorded in the universe was 150 000 Ly long. Our galaxy the milky way is 100 000 Ly long. And it came from a blasar which is a frikinn insanely big blackhole : M87. And yes this is the black hole we took in photo. It is way way bigger than our milky way's super massive one
I already wrote this in a comment above, but I'm kinda worried it'll get lost in all the other comments and never be read... The most mind-blowing fact I can think of is from university (animal physiology lecture, topic visual sense). There's a small experiment that shows you how crazy much your visual input is curated before it ever reaches your consciousness, in a way not other experiment ever made that clear to me: Take a flashlight, point it sideways at your eye (as in, hold it by the side of your head and point it at the nose so you eye is hit sideways), then wave it about. Then sit in stunned silence. The sensory cells don't actually detect light as such, but a CHANGE from dark to light, so cells behind blood vessels never report anything. Until you wave a light about from sideways, that is... (my other favorite weird fact from that lecture is that "penis fencing" is an actual zoological term. Flatworm mating.)
I tried it out, it's so weird O-o. There's another cool thing worth mentioning is that everything we see is in the past. It takes time for light to travel from our eye to an object and then back while also processing the image so even if that time is minimal, we only see what has already been. Same with sound. When someone speaks, it takes time for the sound the travel so we never really hear a person speak in the present, but what they said in the past. AND this includes interactions. There is a concept of space-time where each person, wherever they are standing, is their own form of "present." When I am speaking and looking at someone right in front of them, I am actually communicating with their past selves, not the present. The only way for us to be in the same "present" is when we hug :3 (amongst other touchy interactions)
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There are 7.5 Billion humans on earth. -- But there are 24 Billion CHICKENS. -- This is a magnitude larger than all other birds on Earth, combined. -- This is also enough for every two people to own 7 chickens.
The total weight of ants in the world adds up to the total weight of humans...
How long did it take you to count those suckers Jack?
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I’m amazed the math works this way. If you wrapped a belt around the equator, how much length would you need to add so the belt would be 12 inches off the ground for you to crawl underneath? The answer is 6 feet would need to be added, yes just 6 feet. 25,000 miles around and only 6 feet make that big a difference.
The Universe is 10 ^ 26 meters in diameter. Atoms are 10 ^ -15 meters in diameter. -- Quarks are 10 ^ -19 meters. Humans are just a bit closer to the size of atoms and their components, than we are to the size of the Universe. -- We're really not that consequential after all, but we do kinda straddle the middle point between atoms and the Universe, size-wise.
i'm disappointed the factoid about nintendo's origins in the 1800s isn't on here, for shame, boredpanda
I already wrote this in a comment above, but I'm kinda worried it'll get lost in all the other comments and never be read... The most mind-blowing fact I can think of is from university (animal physiology lecture, topic visual sense). There's a small experiment that shows you how crazy much your visual input is curated before it ever reaches your consciousness, in a way not other experiment ever made that clear to me: Take a flashlight, point it sideways at your eye (as in, hold it by the side of your head and point it at the nose so you eye is hit sideways), then wave it about. Then sit in stunned silence. The sensory cells don't actually detect light as such, but a CHANGE from dark to light, so cells behind blood vessels never report anything. Until you wave a light about from sideways, that is... (my other favorite weird fact from that lecture is that "penis fencing" is an actual zoological term. Flatworm mating.)
I tried it out, it's so weird O-o. There's another cool thing worth mentioning is that everything we see is in the past. It takes time for light to travel from our eye to an object and then back while also processing the image so even if that time is minimal, we only see what has already been. Same with sound. When someone speaks, it takes time for the sound the travel so we never really hear a person speak in the present, but what they said in the past. AND this includes interactions. There is a concept of space-time where each person, wherever they are standing, is their own form of "present." When I am speaking and looking at someone right in front of them, I am actually communicating with their past selves, not the present. The only way for us to be in the same "present" is when we hug :3 (amongst other touchy interactions)
Load More Replies... There are 7.5 Billion humans on earth. -- But there are 24 Billion CHICKENS. -- This is a magnitude larger than all other birds on Earth, combined. -- This is also enough for every two people to own 7 chickens.
The total weight of ants in the world adds up to the total weight of humans...
How long did it take you to count those suckers Jack?
Load More Replies... I’m amazed the math works this way. If you wrapped a belt around the equator, how much length would you need to add so the belt would be 12 inches off the ground for you to crawl underneath? The answer is 6 feet would need to be added, yes just 6 feet. 25,000 miles around and only 6 feet make that big a difference.
The Universe is 10 ^ 26 meters in diameter. Atoms are 10 ^ -15 meters in diameter. -- Quarks are 10 ^ -19 meters. Humans are just a bit closer to the size of atoms and their components, than we are to the size of the Universe. -- We're really not that consequential after all, but we do kinda straddle the middle point between atoms and the Universe, size-wise.
i'm disappointed the factoid about nintendo's origins in the 1800s isn't on here, for shame, boredpanda
