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46 Eerie And Interesting Facts, As Shared By These Science-Savvy People Online
Look, the truth is, everyone has knowledge gaps. Some of them might be super niche. Others might be more general and embarrassing to admit to. But no matter how well-read and educated you are, there are always going to be things you don’t know about the world.
Though, some truths are so sensitive and mind-warping that you sometimes might wish you had remained ignorant. Today, we’re featuring a handful of online threads where people shared little-known facts that can be quite scary to contemplate. It’s the kind of stuff the general public doesn’t always know about or misunderstands. Scroll down to learn something new.
This post may include affiliate links.
#1
The country that places the tariffs pays the extra tax, not the country we impose a tariff on. The consumer foots the bill.
Spidercat 4 months ago
Please don't insult Julius Ceaser by comparing him to that t**t.
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Zig Zag Wanderer 4 months ago
I fail to understand why countries that impose a 20% 'tariff' (sales tax) on their own citizens for anything manufactured in their own country can be worried about any tariff of a foreign country.
Tom Brincefield 4 months ago
A tariff is specifically a tax on imported goods. It's in addition to any local taxes that are imposed.
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Tom Brincefield 4 months ago
The government imposing the tariffs. The people importing goods have to pay the government before the goods are released from customs.
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Victor De Cenzo 4 months ago
General correct unless the company shipping the product elects to cut its profit margin by the tariff amount and few can afford to do that, or want to.
JB 4 months ago
Yeah... I can definitely see Amazon and Tesla cutting their profits! /S
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#2
Science isn't scary. people ignoring science is.
JoJerome 4 months ago (edited)
Seeing as how Fauci lives in Amerikkka, I'm sure he's already aware that conspiracy theorists are way scarier than people doing rational, scientific research. But ya gotta put the correct information out there and hope it reaches a few sane ears amongst all the "But, Dear Leader says to just drink bleach."
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The Darkest Timeline 4 months ago
Oh, please; this is just plain nonsense. Do you even know what the scientific method is? Scientists successfully use the scientific method on a daily basis. The fact that some people politicize, misrepresent, or outright lie about science is not the fault of scientists.
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#3
All we have to do have world peace is in our own power. We turn everything over to greedy sadistic sociopaths, then wonder why is there endless war, racism, sexism, poverty, hunger.
Marnie 4 months ago
If you want to know about why this is happening in the US right now, read "The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science - and Reality" by Chris Mooney, William Hughes, et al. Another good read to explain some of the history and tactics of the power hunger is "Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein
Zig Zag Wanderer 4 months ago
I wish they'd stop exporting their Idiocy to other countries
Load More Replies... Zig Zag Wanderer 4 months ago
No, it's not in our own power. It's in the majority's power to some extent in a democracy, but it's often usurped by individuals or groups. Often it's down to whoever is most influential. This is a facile and incorrect assumption.
Michael Largey 4 months ago
In my country people elected someone to promote racism, sexism, poverty, hunger, not to end them.
As The New Yorker points out in a recent piece, people are, generally, vastly uninformed about common everyday things. From how basic technologies and systems function to how political policies actually work. And yet, despite this lack of knowledge, people form (strong) opinions about all of these things.
“As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach write in their book, ‘The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone.’
Sloman and Fernbach urge people to preach and lecture others less and spend more time trying to work out the implications of, say, policy proposals. If you do this, then you might realize that you have barely any idea about how things work, and it might force you to moderate your views about the world.
#4
We’re running out of helium, it’s essential for MRIs, not essential for birthday balloons.
Frunkadunk 4 months ago
I used to work for a company that shipped all kinds of gas all over the US, including Hawaii, and helium was ALWAYS running out. This was over 5 years ago. And the number of party supply customers that would lose it over the shortage was astounding. That and the dental offices that specifically wanted it for balloons and not medical. It was so hard for them to understand that it's needed for medical purposes over a party.
Zig Zag Wanderer 4 months ago
Y3s, a really finite resource being used frivolously, unfortunately. Someone should figure out a way to store it, and hoard it all. They'd make a fortune in 100 years.
SouthernGal 4 months ago
The US sold the entire Federal Helium Reserve over a year ago to private industry. How can this make sense?
SnootWaggling Fox 4 months ago
The US used to have a strategic helium supply. Also used to have a strategic cheese cave :(
#5
It's very difficult and costly to recycle plastic. So difficult and costly, that it is in all likelihood never done. Your rinsed peanut butter container probably goes into landfill, is incinerated, or dumped at sea. Anything that is recycled probably uses more energy than was expended in its original manufacture. I want to live in a world that is less throwaway, but I don't want to be lied to.
Yeah.
obox2358:
Aluminum is the one exception. It costs a lot to make new aluminum but very little to recycle it. This makes it the winner in the recycling world.
sbj 4 months ago
I know this but I still do it anyway as maybe in the future things will be different and I and my family already have the habit
Moira 4 months ago
Can relate. I know this, I have studied this during my college days. I have matched against this during that time too... And it still hurt my heart if I don't separate plastic from normal trash, despite in my little town I literally see from my window how the trash truck takes both normal trash and plastic in the same place... I just think somewhat similar "I have good habits, maybe the future will be better"
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Maren Villadsen 4 months ago
In Denmark you get money from your plastik bottles when you give them to be recycled
Zig Zag Wanderer 4 months ago
I've known this for decades. It's almost completely pointless until we start to run out of oil in a couple of hundred years.
Theora Fifty-five Johnson 4 months ago
Cardboard is recycled, most glass and unsorted metal, some paper, little plastic. Thin film plastic, nope.
Gvozden Buzdovanovic 4 months ago
Glass is an exception. Cardboard, wood, lots of metals, also. Textiles can be recycled.
Melinda Landis 4 months ago
I tote my canvas and some plastic reusable grocery bags everywhere. I never use plastic bags to bag my food. My husband, on the other hand, can never remember to take one of our nice bags with him, so I always have grocery bag wastebasket liners. I try...it seems hopeless.
Phae Thompson 4 months ago
Then why do people b***h about recycling it if it costs more to recycle it, if it's done at all?
Uncle Panda 4 months ago
We're already mining our landfills for the stuff we used to throw away. There's oil and metal in them there hills.
#6
Money only has value because we all agree that it does.
Caffeinated Ape 4 months ago
Gold has utility, though, independent of how we value it.
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Rosecrucian Roeth 4 months ago
Any thing is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it................
Yrral Spavit 4 months ago
Almost everything in peoples lives is imaginary. Money, music, relationships, nationalism, politics, religion and soon.
The Darkest Timeline 4 months ago
None of that stuff is “imaginary” in the slightest
Load More Replies...According to the researchers, this might be “the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes.”
There’s hope that, no matter the (often politicized) arguments you see in the public and political sphere, science continues to advance. The limits of human knowledge continue to be pushed, no matter what.
“At any given moment, a field may be dominated by squabbles, but, in the end, the methodology prevails. Science moves forward, even as we remain stuck in place,” The New Yorker states.
#7
Jupiter is Earth’s shield. Its gravity pulls away so much space stuff that would constantly hit and destroy our planet. Daddy Jupiter is particularly critical to sustaining life on earth.
#8
There are about 7000 known viruses, but scientists estimate that over a trillion are unknown.
CaramelMartini:
I took pathogens in university, and it was so, so interesting. Our bodies are being bombarded all the time with microorganisms trying to get in. Like, all the time. You have no idea how many different types are being born, trying to take hold, mutating, failing, dying out all around us. And sometimes they succeed, and sometimes they’re helped, and sometimes they combine in the freakiest way into something new. It’s fascinating and terrifying. And this is why I wash my hands all the time and I’m secretly glad for an excuse to still wear a mask in public.
Zig Zag Wanderer 4 months ago
The bacteria cells that are contained within and on our bodies vastly outnumber our own cells. Without many of them, we would die.
Marnie 4 months ago
This is what bugs me about people saying, "Oh, there are X number of germs on your phone right now." Yes, well, the vast majority are not harmful. (That's not to say you shouldn't wash your hands as recommended!)
Ace 4 months ago
Similar to the comparisons of 'germs' on kitchen work surfaces compared with toilet seats - it's not how many there are, but what they are, that counts. (Although TBF the toilet seat is probably often better in that respect as well).
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#9
The big fallacy is people believe there's going to be some earthwide catastrophic event that announces climate change is here.
The truth is climate change is already here and worsening as far as the effects on humans. The cost to humans will be trillions of dollars as in more than the United States national debt today.
The Earth will be just fine; it will take care of itself. The ability of the Earth to support human life is an entirely different subject.
JB 4 months ago
The key to convincing people is asking them if they could do now what they did in their childhood. Can you go and play pickup hockey on frozen lakes? No. Did you have weeks of fire smoke in the summer back then? Nope. Were there multiple catastrophic floods or storms that hit your hometown? Nu-uh. Was it hotter than Satan's testicles when you went outside to play? Still no. --That's the effect of climate change.
Ace 4 months ago
Actually that's really not a good way to convince people, because it inevitably brings forward the examples where the opposite is true, which are then used to deny it. Like every time we get a cold winter people are saying "see, it's colder this year than last year, so global warming is a myth".
Load More Replies... Lady Eowyn 4 months ago
I've seen enough change over my 70 years to be quite certain climate change is already here and has been for some time.
Uncle Panda 4 months ago
"What if the Earth decided it needed plastic and came up with humans as a likely vector to make it?" ~ George Carlin (paraphrased)
JoJerome 4 months ago
The Earth won't be "fine." It will survive and life in general will go on, but we have likely started the 6th (or 7th, 8th, depending on how you rank them) mass extinction event. With any luck, humans will be among the extinct and let the next alpha species make better choices.
Michael Largey 4 months ago
We've already had two earth-wide catastrophic events creating dire climate crises. One occurred in November 2016, the other in November 2024.
Theora Fifty-five Johnson 4 months ago
Big hurricanes, massive wildfires, all over the world. We are paying for it in increasing insurance, it's going to get way more expensive in so many ways
Marnie 4 months ago
At this point, I care far more of the countless other species that definitely will not survive. Humans are very adaptable, and enough of us may survive to keep the species around. But many species have already gone extinct due to our activities. A lot of species are very adapted to a very specific environment. Some uneducated think they will just evolve. Things don't typically evolve very quickly and sometimes when they do, it's because a whole bunch of other species did not and went extinct, leaving room for a few others that manage to stick around. This is how mammals took off after the dinosaurs went extinct.
NEMESIS 4 months ago
Climate change has been happening since the world was formed. It's stupid to be distraught about it now.
JB 4 months ago
So the earth has earned more in the last seventy-five years than it has in the preceding **300 million** years. Are you sure you don't want to be worried about it? What you just said is so dumb, it's like saying, "knives have been around for thousands of years, no sense worrying about them now," when there is one being stabbed at your heart. I'm sure you feel superior because you know a technicality but everyone else sees how painfully stupid it is to miss the point so spectacularly.
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Rich Black 4 months ago
Earth does not normally have polar ice caps. They peaked 25,000 years ago. They will continue melting no matter what kind of car you drive
Which of the science facts shared here genuinely stunned you? On the other hand, which ones did you actually know before? What are some of the most uncomfortable, even frightening facts that you’ve recently learned?
What do you do to fill in the knowledge gaps you have? Let us know what you think in the comments, at the bottom of this post.
#10
Diamonds are worthless. Diamond cartels keep them expensive. Diamonds are literally pure solidified carbon.
Edit: unless obviously in tools. Which aren’t overpriced at all. I was talking about the overpriced diamonds used in jewelry.
Zig Zag Wanderer 4 months ago
Absolutely. Prices have dropped 75% apparently, because artificial diamonds cannot be told from natural ones. Ha ha!
Otto Katz 4 months ago
They're not artificial, they're lab created. Same exact crystal structure, just manufactured in a factory. And I'm all for it.
Load More Replies... Nadine Debard 4 months ago
I don't mind buying synthetic diamonds as zirconium oxyde, but I just stopped buying jewelery.
SouthernGal 4 months ago
De Beers has pulled off the biggest con ever with the way they have manipulated the entire diamond market since the 1800s.
#11
How truly dangerous antibiotic resistance is. Bacteria are capable of replicating and adapting extremely quickly. Even if you start with a regular non-resistant infection, it can become resistant to multiple d***s in a few short days. Once they give you a last-line-of-defense antibiotic like Colistin or a carbapenem, there is nowhere to go from there.
So make sure you take ALL of your antibiotics and don’t just randomly take them for every little infection. Poor antibiotic stewardship is the reason we’re here in the first place.
someguy14629:
A few points here:
1.) the biggest driver of increasing antibiotic resistance is the use in animal feed. Cows/pigs/chickens grow bigger faster and give a better return on investment than animals not fed antibiotics.
They literally get antibiotics every single day of their lives for no reason than increasing profits. This is far worse for the global health crisis than the occasional prescribing by a PA for a viral infection in a telehealth visit.
2). The reason we don’t have new antibiotics coming is due to profits. If you invent a new drug for erectile dysfunction or heart disease or diabetes you immediately have customers for decades. Each is being charged hundreds per month.
For an antibiotic, you get some customers who get the right infection for 7-10 days once in a while. There is no profit incentive in antibiotics. Unless government explicitly subsidizes research into new antibiotics, research and development dollars and effort are going to go into profit-generating d***s.
In the last, when new antibiotics were invented, there was not regulation and they were used by the agriculture industry so quickly (unregulated by FDA because they are just cows, not people) there was 50% resistance rate in the community by the time human testing had been completed. Thst is a huge turn off when you invest 10 years and a billion dollars into a new drug.
H**h risk of failure, long time line, astronomical cost, low profit margin all add up to drug companies going any other direction but antibiotics. We should not let profitability be the main driving force in pharmaceutical innovation.
JB 4 months ago
When the rich put profit over lives, the poor start sharpening the guillotine...
Day Andie 4 months ago
We're way over due for a few beheadings. Luigi killed one CEO with a gun. That CEO m******d thousands of people--men, women, and children--just with an ink pen. We live in evil times.
Load More Replies... Zig Zag Wanderer 4 months ago
It's so revealing how Americans refer to patients as customers. In civilised countries, they're patients.
Rich Black 4 months ago
Vote responsibly. Not just because you want your student loans forgiven or because you're annoyed by immigrants
#12
The ocean is warming up and also becoming more acidic. We are on a fast track to an ecological disaster that will likely cause humanities extinction.
Marnie 4 months ago
It seems unlikely to actually cause extinction. We are extremely adaptable, so we only need to find a few niche areas that we can live in. Could it push us down to very lower numbers, I think definitely yes. Are we talking about the collapse of all civilizations? Yes. Are we talking about the eventually suffering and deaths of billions? Yes. Are we talking about the actual extinction of many, many species. Yes! Most species are not very adaptable but are the "fittest" for a very specific niche. Cats might survive. They are (if I remember correctly), the second-most adaptable species with regards to different ecologies.
George Costanza 4 months ago
This. All of humanity is not going to go extinct because of climate change. We literally can live on every continent in every weather. We'll survive. Won't be great at all, but the species isn't going anywhere due to this.
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Steve Kadner 4 months ago
Depends on how deep you are checking the temperature in the ocean. The upper 700 meters of the ocean has risen approx. 1.5°F (0.83°C) since 1901. Certainly measurable.
Load More Replies... #13
If the bees all die, we all die.
Capn Dad 3 months ago (edited)
I'm very late to the thread, but this is not true. Years ago in Sonoma County, CA, my former home, all the bees caught something and most died. The Ladybird moth took over and life went on until the bees recovered. The honey crop was obviously a bit thin that year, but everything else was fine. Nature has built-in redundancy.
Rich Black 4 months ago
If bacteria all die, so do we. There are more bacteria (by number) in your body than human cells. Most are helpful or benign.
#14
Average 17 years for medical research to reach patients. Researchers are working/thinking 2024 but patients are receiving Bush era care.
keyboardtek 4 months ago
And the huge waste of human time and energy they spend believing religious made up fantasy nonsense is really astounding. If half that time spent on religion was put to good scientific use, humans would be so farther along in their evolution.
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Martin Angerman 4 months ago
The problem with speeding up too much is the risk of another disaster like Vioxx or Thalidomide.
#15
Ocean circulation collapse
Amoc weakening
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which drives the Gulf Stream and regulates global climate, is weakening and could collapse as early as 2025–2095 (per recent studies in *Nature*).
Rich Black 4 months ago
Polar ice caps have been receding dmfor 25,000 years and will continue no matter what car we drive. When ice caps melt oceanic currents will be completely different
Bob Brezniak 4 months ago
Please enlighten us with your PHD level knowledge Zig Zag... the floor is yours.
Zig Zag Wanderer 4 months ago
I prefer to listen to the IPCC, not ridiculous nonsense paraded by the media. The IPCC doesn't predict aby such nonsense. Read the actual reports, not the summaries for policy-makers written by politicians.
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#16
Our concept of fruits and vegetables are culinary categories, not biological.
Child of the Stars 4 months ago
This is one of my favorite bits of trivia. Also: bananas are berries and strawberries are not.
Colleen Glim 4 months ago
Tomatoes are botanically a fruit but you won’t find them in a fruit salad
Lady Eowyn 4 months ago
Intelligence is knowing that tomatoes are a fruit. Wisdom is not putting them in a fruit salad. Philosophy is wondering is ketchup is really a tomato smoothie.
Load More Replies... Toothless Feline 4 months ago
“Fruit” is also a botanical term, a name for a particular part of a plant involved in the plant’s reproductive process. “Vegetable” is not a botanical term, except in that it used to be a common term for any kind of plant.
#17
That your stomach doesn't actually growl from being empty. It's your intestines contracting.
Toothless Feline 4 months ago (edited)
It’s not onomatopoetic. It’s derived from Greek.
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Jumping Jellyfishes 4 months ago
When your stomach is empty, a hormone (ghrelin) is released to trigger the feeling of hunger and it also causes the intestines to contract, which makes the growling sounds.
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#18
Cleopatra lived closer to our time than to the time when the pyramids were built.
#19
Humanity on a geological scale will be about a 500,000 year 2" layer of compressed rock heavy in plastic, concrete, and refined metals.
#20
That "leaders" control us by SCARING us, all the time.
Rich Black 4 months ago
No that would be the media. It dominates cable nrmews and internet spam.
Bartlet for world domination 4 months ago
Y'all are just downvoting That One Commenter to keep me from being snarky, are you
#21
Your eyes don't technically see.
They just collect light, sends electrical signals to our brain, which then interprets those signals and constructs an image of what it thinks it's seeing.
So we're not actually seeing reality, just our brain's best guess of it.
AlexanderTheBright:
Also iirc:
• You have no blue cone cells in the focal point of your eye.
• You have a “blind spot” with no vision cells at all somewhere in your peripheral vision.
And your brain just kinda ignores both of those.
Grundel County 4 months ago
Yes this process is "sight". We use this process to see. Is OP suggesting our eyes would each need their own tiny brains to truly be able to "see"??
Uncle Panda 4 months ago
The eyes are forward projections of the brain. The retinae are effectively tiny dedicated pieces of the brain. A huge amount of processing takes place on the retina itself - contrast, edges, movement. All of which is to say, "You're right."
Load More Replies... Zig Zag Wanderer 4 months ago
"They just collect light, sends electrical signals to our brain, which then interprets those signals and constructs an image" AKA 'seeing'. The actual message is that our brains don't see everything, they make up a lot of it. We couldn't handle the full information, in any case, it's totally chaotic (try with LSD).
Victor De Cenzo 4 months ago
And inverts the upside down image projected onto the back of your high. Physics! Amusing studies on wearing special glasses that correct the image orientation confusing the brain for a while before it re-adapts.
JB 4 months ago
But it is strongly advised you do not try it at home, as for some people the flip was permanent!
Load More Replies... Michael Largey 4 months ago
Oh, fine - my brain's best guess. We all know how well that's worked out in the past.
Bob Brezniak 4 months ago
And we can only see in the past. It takes about 13-15 milliseconds to process what the eyes take in.
#22
Maps in school were usually distorted — Greenland is not bigger than Africa.
tdomer80:
My 41 year old daughter asked us if we were going to visit Hawaii at the end of our Alaskan cruise last year, “because it’s so close by”.
On a lot of maps of the USA, they just jam Alaska and Hawaii together off to the edge of the map, and that was her point of reference.
WindySwede 4 months ago (edited)
That's what you'll get when making a sphere into a rectangular map..? edit: here you can se the true size! https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTQ3OTEyMTM.NTIxNzMxNg*MjYyMTM5ODA(MTExMTQzNzE~!GL*OTM3ODEzOQ.MjkyOTEwNjU)NA
Yrral Spavit 4 months ago
I have met Americans traveling up to Alaska and being shocked when I tell them it is a multi day drive through Canada.
#23
There is a very good chance that the last silver mine that will be opened, has been opened. Every production metric for silver has fallen short multiple years in a row, and MANY industries use silver in a non-recoverable way. Even the cannabis industry uses about 3 grams of colloidal silver per plant they use to make feminized seeds. Disposable consumer electronics uses a LOT of silver in the form of switch contacts, and basically all of that is going into landfills or getting incinerated.
Platinum and palladium production are also both way down, but since those products were already rare and expensive, there's less notice.
stryst:
True silver deposits are rare; basically all the known ones are currently being exploited, and the primary mines in Mexico are reporting that the ore they are pulling is less and less pure. Ore grades have fallen 22 percent.
Silver is very reactive, and geological chemistry means that silver gets mixed into and reacts with lots of other ores.
So global demand for silver has mostly been met (to the tune of about 74% of the worlds current supply) from recovery during the processing of copper and lead.
This production fell 7% short of world demand this year. That means that if ANYONE can find a deposit and get an operational mine running, they immediately have more customers than they can serve.
But it's just not happening.
So while that was kind of long, basically its really hard to find new reserves, and the current reserves aren't meeting global demand.
Uncle Panda 4 months ago
Silver is at the bottom of the reactivity table, next to gold and platinum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactivity_series
Anonymouse 4 months ago
although, historically, there are mines and mining methods that are not productive due to costs, once prices rise they become cost effective. Many mines were shut down last century have been restarted due to rising metal costs.
Zig Zag Wanderer 4 months ago
This is never going to be true. When it becomes more expensive, more effective ways to extract it will be developed. Like every other resource, except possibly helium which is largely wasted.
#24
-40C = -40F
It’s the only place the two scales meet.
Flahdagal:
I was told to remember that 28c = 82F, and this has been very helpful.
Wumpus-Hunter:
Same for 4°C = 40°F; 16°C = 61°F; and 40° C =104 °F.
JB 4 months ago
I do not understand Fahrenheit, what the hell is it pegged to? Why are the degrees so close and seemingly neither decimal not fractional in their placement? What was Fahrenheit smoking when he made it?
Hmmm hmmmm 4 months ago
I think 100 was internal body temperature and 0 was the lowest Mr farenheihht could produce in his lab or something
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Theora Fifty-five Johnson 4 months ago
I do not care at all F scale is useful for how humans live
General Anaesthesia 4 months ago
The -40C = -40F is correct. The other examples are correct only if some rounding is done, for example: 28C = 82.4F
Zig Zag Wanderer 4 months ago
Or one could use a sensible scale. And of weights and distances. Try it. It's fun!
#25
Birds don't breathe in and out. Air just moves through them like it's an HVAC system. Their respiratory system is a lot more efficient than us, but also makes respiratory diseases very deadly to them.
We expect dinosaurs to have the same thing going on.
#26
About 8 percent of men in the region of the former Mongol empire, and therefore about one in 200 worldwide, share one single male ancestor – and based on a combination of logic, statistics, and common sense, that ancestor was almost certainly Genghis Khan.
Or, put more simply, in in 200 men is related to Genghis Khan.
BarBeeGirl 4 months ago
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I think they meant to say “one in 200 men”
#27
The brain named itself.
Marnie 4 months ago
For some reason, this reminds me of how when I was little, I thought all words were invented by scientists. I imagined these scientist muppets in white lab coats (that must have been on Sesame Street or some such) sitting around and trying to make up the words for what we see around us.
Lene 4 months ago
Interesting. I wonder if that is why my 6yo asks me so many questions about why things are named as they are? We do, however, talk a lot about what different names mean and what certain names of things mean. So perhaps she just thinks that there's a hidden meaning of all names for things? 🤔 I may have to ask her. Lol
Load More Replies... #28
What makes reinforced concrete so strong (rebar embedded within the concrete) is also what will make it fail. Rebar on most construction sites is already rusty and corroded, and will continue to corrode because of water within concrete and within small cracks.
The reason a lot of old Roman structures are still standing is that their unreinforced with no rebar to corrode. BUT the reason so many Roman structures have collapsed is that they’re unreinforced, so if a big enough earthquake were to come, they fall down.
So there’s really no good PERMANENT and economic solution to this.
Uncle Panda 4 months ago
They now coat the rebar in heavy epoxy, an economic solution to this.
WindySwede 4 months ago
Scientist also have made an discovery why the concrete lasted so long! Now on phone so to strainful to look for an article about that.. 🤓
B Jones 4 months ago
Read same. They used volcanic ash and as it cured formed crystal structures inside that made it stronger with age.
Load More Replies... #29
An emf burst from the sun is inevitable. When it comes all cell phones, wifi, most cars, satellites and banking systems will all crash simultaneously. We should still be using landlines and cash money but we don’t. It will be apocalyptic.
JoJerome 4 months ago
The fact that you're cheering this while your username is "Daria" is nothing short of poetic. Daria/Jane, 2028!
Load More Replies... Theora Fifty-five Johnson 4 months ago
Read about the Carrington Event. The sun can have massive flares.
Yrral Spavit 4 months ago
It will affect just about anything we depend on. Electrical power will cease. There are not enough transformers to replace the ones that will be fried. Time to brush up on those coopering and smithing skills.
Tom Brincefield 4 months ago
We have been hit by Coronal Mass Ejections many times. When you hear about large aurora displays happening, it means we have been in some portion of a CME. But most of them don't do much, if any, damage. A large one in May, 2024, the Gannon solar storm, wreaked havoc with satellites and earth communications. In 1859, the Carrington Event was a massive CME, that caused damage and strange effects all over the world. It's estimated to have been about 10 times more powerful than the Gannon storms. There is debate over what would happen if we were hit by a Carrington level impact today. Some people think it would destroy civilization, others say it will cause damage, but leave most things running. There is evidence that earth has been hit in the past by even larger CMEs, one in the 770s that was 20 times larger than Carrington. And we've detected larger storms that missed the earth.
Load More Replies... Uncle Panda 4 months ago
I've been rehabbing a 95 year old log cabin and spent about 8 extra hours to bring all old comm connections forward to remain availabe, just in case. Cable, telephone, and Cat-5 in every room.
Bartlet for world domination 4 months ago
I wonder how you decide what is good science and what isn't.
Load More Replies... #30
Global warming markedly increases the risk of fungi adapting to higher temperatures. Currently they cannot survive within the human body but when they inevitably evolve we will be in trouble.
Luke Branwen 4 months ago
So what I see is that The Last of Us scenario is THEORETICALLY possible
WindySwede 4 months ago
And the average temp for us humans keeps going down!
Load More Replies... Rich Black 4 months ago
Fungi are already adapted to higher temperatures. visit anyplace near the equator
#31
Wood is one of the rarest materials in the universe.
Uncle Panda 4 months ago
I just ordered new wood flooring, so it's both in my case.
Load More Replies... Michael Largey 4 months ago
Trees are relatively rare in the universe too. Hardly any on Jupiter.
Load More Replies... Steve Kadner 4 months ago
From the google: "Wood is one of the rarest materials in the universe because it requires specific biological conditions and a stable planetary ecosystem to form, conditions only known to exist on Earth. In contrast, diamonds, formed from abundant carbon under extreme pressure, are relatively common across the cosmos, with evidence of diamond rain on gas giants like Neptune and Uranus"
Load More Replies... #32
Bananas are berries. Learned that in my 40s.
WindySwede 4 months ago
Sofi prefer to call it 'Meaty Cräck Capsule'. Since she diesent belive it's a Berry, cause it cräcks open when ripe. Which berries doesn't! Radio in Swedis, sorry no translation.. https://www.sverigesradio.se/artikel/efter-manga-ar-kan-det-komma-bananer-pa-plantan-aven-i-sverige
#33
Alaska is home to the northernmost, easternmost, and westernmost points of all US states.
Ravenkbh 4 months ago
AND we have the highest mountain in North America. AND if Texas doesn't stop bragging about how big it is we'll cut ourself in 2 and make Texas the third largest state!
Michael Largey 4 months ago
A Texan once insisted that if all that snow in Alaska melted away what was left there would be smaller than Texas.
Load More Replies... #34
Over 50% of respondents judge their IQ to be above average.
Owen 4 months ago
50% *would* be above average. I'm c**p at maths and even I understand averages.
Bartlet for world domination 4 months ago
And the mean IQ of 'respondents' would most likely be above 100, because those at the low end are institutionalized.
Load More Replies... Steve Kadner 4 months ago
"Lies, damned lies, and statistics" In 2022, the average (mean) net worth for U.S. households was about $1.06 million, while the median net worth was $192,900. The median is significantly lower than the average because it represents the midpoint, with half of households having more and half having less.
Rich Black 4 months ago
The dumb ones can't read or write, and were not part of this sample. But you meet them all the time.
#35
Prions. That is all.
#36
Hitting the delete key deletes letter by letter. CTRL Delete, deletes by the word.
Marnie 4 months ago
I am an avid keyboard and mouse shortcut user, but I just learned this about a year ago. I sear it increased my productivity by many hours over the past year.
Ace 4 months ago
It's been a fairly common feature of word processing software for 40 years or so, but is by no means universal.
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General Anaesthesia 4 months ago
Windows: Ctrl+Del deletes from the cursor to the next space to the right. Ctrl+Backspace deletes from the cursor to the next space to the left.
Load More Replies... #37
We are one economic hiccup away from empty shelves in the grocery stores. I don’t mean a world war level event either. A collapse in international relations can drastically increase food scarcity.
There is nothing anybody can really do to prepare for it.
Auntriarch 4 months ago
I'm not certain that does much good as one might hope these days.
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Unkeptwoman 4 months ago
We have spent the summer buying locally, meaning Canada, and buying specials.
Load More Replies... Theora Fifty-five Johnson 4 months ago
In the US, deporting farm workers,documented and un-, isn't helping.
Rich Black 4 months ago
You are helpless. Give up. Don't try to recruit the rest of us to your religion.
Jasmin Lapan 4 months ago
That’s why we should notify those who are consuming more than what they need. But we will be accused of fat-shaming.
#38
The atom is 99.99% empty space, so our very existence is questionable.
michael reid 4 months ago
The individual parts of an atom don't even exist in any tangible way when you zoom right in, they're simply the manifestations of many fields interacting.
B Jones 4 months ago
This, 99.99% empty dpayand what is left when you look closer turned from matter into energy so it's also empty of matter
Load More Replies... keyboardtek 4 months ago
But the parts of an atom are very close together so it does not make any difference. If the molecule that atoms congregates into is a gas then things can pass through it. If the molecule is denser, it become a solid and other molecules cannot pass though it. It makes no difference if each individual atom is 99 % space.
Rich Black 4 months ago
If you remove the empty space you get a singularity - a black hole. That is not open to question
Zig Zag Wanderer 4 months ago
This is something I often point out. Indeed, outside of planets and suns, most of a solar system is empty. Outside of solar systems, most of a galaxy is empty. Outside of galaxies, most of the universe is empty. Indeed, recent studies have shown that actual atoms may be mere waveforms, and not anything persistent at all. Any people you might meet are probably a figment of your imagination.
#39
A mass about the size of a grain a of sand could be accelerated to near light speed by a supernova and strike the earth with the force of a nuke.
#40
Complaining about the UN not doing anything useful misses the point of the UN: the only thing it was created for was to prevent another world war, and by that standard its worked so far.
Similarly, complaining that the US Government doesnt get anything done misses the point: it was designed to difficult to use and require cross party compromise and coalitions to work to stop one person getting too much power.
JB 4 months ago
Sadly, it started earlier than that. Back to when they started treating politics like basketball on the news. Or maybe back to when deregulation allowed for biased media to exist and not have guidelines on factuality. Or perhaps back to when again, deregulation, allowed corporations to pour limitless money into superPACs...
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Adrienne Wallage 4 months ago
Unfortunately the UN is not unbiased, refuses to review doxumented evidence, and prefers to rely on lies and conspiracies. In large due the large Arab contingency. The UN has long since proved itself to be more damaging than useful. It should be disbanded.
Michael Largey 4 months ago
Disbanded by who? And should the countries who want a UN organization be denied having one?
Load More Replies... Rich Black 4 months ago
Completely untrue ..there is nothing in the UN charter about war. Or peace. It was established to ensure regime stability of existing nations and their political systems. Whether they happen to be democracies, dictatorships, or hereditary rulers
#41
You can eat the outside of the kiwi, it's really very good for you.
LuckyL 4 months ago
I thought I couldn't and then I tried one time on a bet and it's not as bad as you imagine.
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Bad Alchemy 4 months ago
This factoid reminded me of a sentence that was included in a list of the 100 Worst Sentences Ever Written that I read more than a decade ago. It went like this: "He liked his women the same way he liked his kiwi fruit: small, round, and covered in short, brown fuzz." 🤣🤣🤣
#42
That we are all related and if you go back 2,000 - 5000 years you would find we share a MRCA ( most recent common ancestor).
Uncle Panda 4 months ago
Humans had already spread over the planet for millennia by that point. Is there any fact checking happening at all?
keyboardtek 4 months ago
I once read that every human can be linked by only going back eight generations.
#43
You live on a thin skin of rock that covers a molten ball of magma. The relative thickness is akin to the skin of an apple.
Rich Black 4 months ago
If this idea makes you uncomfortable, dont think too long about what happens when the molten ball cools and solidifies. Don't worry, be happy
#44
The ultimate fate of all living things is extinction.
Marnie 4 months ago
The ultimate fate of all living things is death (as far as we know). Do you mean, "The ultimate fate of all species is extinction"? (Even if so, I don't think we know enough to say that, if you discount the end of the universe itself.)
Melinda Landis 4 months ago
Those pesky cockroaches will be the last bug standing and they don't even do anything, but run fast.
Load More Replies... Rich Black 4 months ago
I'll be dead long before that happens. In the meantime im a loyal bored panda subscriber. Don't worry be happy
#45
The southernmost part of Canada is farther south than the northern border of California.
BarBeeGirl 4 months ago
Point Pelee National Park in Ontario is the most southern point of mainland Canada 🇨🇦
#46
The thing between hard and soft is firm. The thing between hardware and software is called...
#47
Large space objects are dropped into a single spot in the South Pacific called Point Nemo, the furthest point from dry land that there is. It is so out of the way that almost nothing lives there, and the closest to it are astronauts when they pass overhead.
#48
A direct hit by a gamma ray burst could sterilize the planet, or at the very least, k**l everything bigger than a microbe.
There's no way to know know or predict it's coming. Even if we could, we couldn't prevent it.
웅장한 거북이 🇰🇷🇰🇭 4 months ago
Every time, really, EVERY TIME this BS makes it on lists like that. Google a bit into it and you will know within 10 minutes max why this is very, very unlikely to ever happen
Stardust she/her 4 months ago
Exactly! While the possibilty of a GRB striking us is scary, the truth is that there are no stars in our neighbourhood or galaxy that will go supernova anytime soon and send a gamma ray at us
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JoJerome 4 months ago
I'm rooting for Yellowstone to go off. Or a KT level asteroid event.
Load More Replies... Rich Black 4 months ago
Space aliens are more likely to arrive and enslave us than gamma ray extinction
#49
Eating at a Potluck is playing food-poisoning roulette.
Uncle Panda 4 months ago
I used to think that but then I saw some of their kitchens.
Load More Replies... Otto Katz 4 months ago
I can't eat at potlucks. Everyone puts onions in everything, and I'm allergic!
George Costanza 4 months ago
That's because onions add great flavor to most dishes. Unfortunately a person with a food allergy often has to provide for themselves, just how it works.
Load More Replies... Rich Black 4 months ago
Same as buying fresh produce at markets. Or a restaurant salad bar. Or soup of the day.
#50
Life has been around for 3 billion years, developing untill what we are.
In a few 100 million years our planet will be to hot for most lifeforms.
Stardust she/her 4 months ago
And it’s all thanks to the sun as its luminosity increases by 10% every billion years. This process was what made Venus a hellish planet just 700 million years ago. And even after making life almost impossible on earth, the sun still has 3-4 billion years left as it keeps getting hotter and brighter. Assuming humans or any intelligent lifeform managed to think ahead, we could have colonies on the moons of the gas giants and even Pluto as the heat of the sun will cause all the ice on their surfaces to melt creating water worlds
Michael Largey 4 months ago
Unfortunately it will take 100 million and one years for some politicians to be honest about global warming.
#51
How as the world keeps warming up we are going to see more and more fungal infections. There are currently only four medications to treat fungal infections. Combine that with the fact they reproduce via spores floating around in the air...and it could be bag.
Marnie 4 months ago
I listened to a podcast about this and I wish I could remember more details. But it's something like most fungus can't survive > 97F/36C. Our average body temperatures have exceeded this. But in "Western" societies, the average body temperature is dropping, making us more susceptible to fungal infections. And then, I'm not 100% sure of this, but I think I remember that due to the warming climate, some fungus is now evolving to survive at warmer temperatures. Don't take my word for any of this, but if this sparks your interest, look it up.
#52
Antibiotic resistance. We are locked in an arms race against harmful bacteria. We've got the science, the thinking, and some days the will. They've got millions of years of evolution and multiple random mutation mechanisms. As it's thrive or die their entire biology is focused around it.
If we lose, welcome back to the days where minor cuts would get infected and be fatal.
#53
Over fishing of sharks is a disaster waiting to happen. The shark fin trade is killing off huge amounts of sharks. Sharks are so important for the ocean because they eat the dying fish which are toxic to the sea. A lot of oxygen comes from the ocean and a clean ocean is essential for life. Sharks breed very slowly so over fishing them is going to have disastrous consequences.
웅장한 거북이 🇰🇷🇰🇭 4 months ago
It is absolutley not. If sharks get extinct it would be sad but would have no effect on the oceans at all. There are plenty of other sea animals eating dead fish, come on
Michael Largey 4 months ago
Everything affects everything in nature, particularly at that scale.
Load More Replies... #54
There are celestial events called magnetar quakes. They release such an intense burst of gamma rays that if the earth were directly in the path of one, there would be no place to hide to avoid a fatal dose. They would travel all the way through the planet and still be fatal on the other side.
#55
You can't have a panic attack or hyperventilate if you hum. Hmmm. 🎵.
Zig Zag Wanderer 4 months ago
The best thing humming does is suppress the gag reflex. I'll leave it to you to work out how that's useful, and share as widely as possible!
#56
It is safer to be alive by every metric we have to track crime, and we have more access to everything that makes life worth living. Crime has dropped so much we can’t even explain it.
Yet everyone is always terrified.
Marnie 4 months ago
I think you might be talking about a specific country or region. This certainly is not true in many parts of the world right now. And seriously, how much crime do you think was happening in stable hunter gatherer or sustenance-farming societies, which was 95%+ of all societies priority to the 19th century.
Zig Zag Wanderer 4 months ago
Almost every single metric shows that we're better off every single decade. And still people believe everything is getting worse.
#57
The opening of a neck travel pillow. The opening goes on the back of your neck. Not the front.
keyboardtek 4 months ago
It goes under the chin to prevent your head from flopping forward.
Load More Replies... #58
Researchers didn’t know how blood actually flowed through arteries until the mid 1990s when it was modeled on supercomputers. Turned out there were 2 helical flows (known). But that pair moved collectively in a third helical flow (unknown) that essentially scrubbed your arteries. So if you or a loved one got a bypass that didn’t clog prior to then, you/they were in the lucky group. Now doctors know exactly the angles they need to maintain with bypasses in cardiovascular surgeries in order to keep them from reclogging.
#59
Superman is an alien who sexually identifies as a human male.
#60
If you are in Bristol Tennessee, you are closer as the crow flies to Canada than you are to Memphis Tennessee.
#61
That scientists once developed a bacteria for weed control that seemed to work wonderfully. They were set to release it for regular use when one of the scientists decided to cultivate it in normal soil instead of the sterile medium used in all the tests.
Turns out, in unstertiized soil it was super charged and would have flourished unchecked. Potentially killing all plant life on the planet.
We discovered this just days before it caused a runaway disaster.
Zig Zag Wanderer 4 months ago
And yet, scientists still look for bacteria that can digest plastic, without any consideration of the risks.
#62
You know how not having any trees around your house makes your house hotter in the summer? Think about how not having trees would heat up the planet. Think about all the forests lost to clear cutting or to the many many forest fires that are burning and how the planet is heating up. All that heat is building up on the surface and then inside the planet itself. Now connect that to the increase in volcanic eruptions there are and earthquakes. Go plant trees. Put them in pots on your balcony if you must, do what you can where you live.
Gunný Petersen 4 months ago
Why do I have the feeling that you voted for Trump?
Load More Replies... #63
That your brain decides what you’re going to do before you’re consciously aware of deciding it. Free will might just be a story your brain tells after the fact to keep the illusion going.
Zig Zag Wanderer 4 months ago
So I, being my brain, decided to do something. How is that not 'free will'?
#64
Scientific fraud in medical journals as well as scientific fraud in reporting the safety and efficacy of prescription d***s.
What makes the news when things are retracted, recalled, or removed from the market is only the tip of the iceberg.
Gunný Petersen 4 months ago
I really hope that you just don't know what the word science means. Otherwise you are so very uneducated person.
Load More Replies... #65
When you recall something, you are just recalling the last time you recalled it. So a memory is a memory of a memory. You do not actually remember the specific event.
Victor De Cenzo 4 months ago
Um, what about the first time you recall something. There's no "last time" before that, is there?
#66
Months were originally called Moonths, and were aligned with the lunar cycle.
JB 4 months ago
B******t. Though it shares a linguistic root with words for "moon," it was never "month!" Christ on a stick that's the dumbest thing I've read in a while. Here's the actual etymology: "From Middle English mon(e)th, from Old English mōnaþ, from Proto-West Germanic *mānōþ, from Proto-Germanic *mēnōþs (“month”), from Proto-Indo-European *mḗh₁n̥s (“moon, month”), probably derived from *meh₁- (“measure”) with moon-cycles being used to measure time. Related to moon."
Ace 4 months ago
There's a false implication here as well; all those ancient calendars understood perfectly well that moon cycles of 28 days did not fit into any division of the year so they created systems to account for this in various ways.
Load More Replies... Steve Kadner 4 months ago
I thought they were originally called "menses" and were aligned to a different cycle! j/k
#67
The Yellowstone caldera could make large parts of the USA uninhabitable. And it's overdue for an eruption.
#68
Fire is, as far as we know, unique to earth. .
Daria 4 months ago
fire can burn in other oxidizing gases (like chlorine or fluorine ), not only oxygen. For example, water would burn in fluorine atmosphere.
Bartlet for world domination 4 months ago
Fire is a chemical reaction that requires three ingredients: organic material, oxygen, and heat/an ignition source. The sun is not on fire. Where are you so sure is fire, except on earth?
Load More Replies... #69
Every piece of plastic ever created still exists.
Victor De Cenzo 4 months ago
Only some are just random carbon and hydrogen atoms in carbon mon/dioxide and water molecules as products of combustion when plastics are burnt as fuel.
#70
If we completely stopped all pollution this instant, the rate of planetary heating would increase and still keep going up (due to no aerosol pollution reflecting the suns energy). In other words, the idea that we can stop climate change is a lie. We are doomed.
Zig Zag Wanderer 4 months ago
We've cleaned up so much real pollution since I was a child, it's amazing. I wish you could visit the past and see how awful real pollution is. This thermageddon you imagine is not scientific. Even the IPCC does not say anything like this garbage that media spouts.
Bartlet for world domination 4 months ago
The IPCC may be politicized; man-made climate change is real.
Load More Replies... Zig Zag Wanderer 4 months ago
H9w exactly does "aerosol pollution reflecting the suns [sic] energy" cause the Earth’s temperature to go up? This whole thing is garbage.
#71
Deep seated. For all intents and purposes. Vacuum. Affect is not always a verb. You can have a flat affect. Effect is not always a noun. You can effect a desired result. Letters in the English alphabet have names that can be spelled out. You use these words every day and probably have never thought of them as actual words. Most of these are two letters long (ef, el, ai, etc.), and you can use them to dominate at Scrabble.
You can drag a file into the window of an open application to open that file in that application. If the application is minimized, you can drag the icon to the application's taskbar button, hover there a couple seconds, and the corresponding window will come up so you can drag your file into it.
Steve 4 months ago
Dude, did your boyfriend run off with someone? Or are your panties in a bunch?
Load More Replies... #72
1. UFOs are real.
2. Sugar is poison.
3. Plastic courses thru our veins.
Marnie 4 months ago
Of course UFOs are real. If I see something flying in the sky and am unable to identify it, it is a UFO. Simple as that. (Did OP mean that UFOs flown by aliens are real?)
Ace 4 months ago (edited)
Yes, I'm pretty sure that OP did indeed mean that... assuming they also believe the other shite they posted.
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#73
Jamaica is the only national flag without red, white, or blue.
JB 4 months ago
God, another poorly edited, BS-fact-ridden list of absolute trash. Like, what in the racist racism is this? Y'all never heard of AFRICA? You got like 30 of them!
Caffeinated Ape 4 months ago
Is it? I was curious so I had a quick look and unless you discount a couple with blue/green shades of blue, it does look like Jamaica is the only one...
Load More Replies...Explore more of these tags
What do you think ?
웅장한 거북이 🇰🇷🇰🇭 4 months ago
Above average BS posts this time. Keep repeating the same wring things again and again does not make it any more true
Auntriarch 4 months ago (edited)
I can't remember quite when I saw so much drivel in one place. I struggled through to about 60 then thought nah I'll go and cut my toenails instead.
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mandy the capibara 4 months ago
How about next time we do an evidence-based one, and add reliable sources for our "facts"? Or at the very least, do some fact-checking?
웅장한 거북이 🇰🇷🇰🇭 4 months ago
Above average BS posts this time. Keep repeating the same wring things again and again does not make it any more true
Auntriarch 4 months ago (edited)
I can't remember quite when I saw so much drivel in one place. I struggled through to about 60 then thought nah I'll go and cut my toenails instead.
Load More Replies... mandy the capibara 4 months ago
How about next time we do an evidence-based one, and add reliable sources for our "facts"? Or at the very least, do some fact-checking?
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