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‘What Is A Scientific Fact That Absolutely Blows Your Mind?’: People Share 35 Incredible Facts About Our World
The world of science has been capturing our imagination for ages. Especially in the current times, when a part of the public is skeptical about the things scientists tell us. While causing a divide, it reminds us just how much (and little) humans know about the world around us, whether it’s Earth, space, living beings and entities that live in them, or our own bodies.
So today we are diving into a mind-blowing science class where facts sound too crazy to be true. And thanks to Redditor analyzeTimes, who asked “What is a scientific fact that absolutely blows your mind?” on the Ask Reddit community, we have a whole lot to uncover. From a Voyager that has been traveling >30,000 mph for 43 years and is only 20 light hours away to our brains simultaneously creating stories and being genuinely shocked by plot twists as we dream, these are some of the best ones to mess with our brains.
Scroll down, upvote your favorites, and share a scientific fact you find hard to wrap your head around in the comments below!
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When you dream, one portion of your brain creates the story, while another part witnesses the events and is really shocked by the plot twists.
I think it also happens when awake: "What if this thing happened/I did something?" "How and why are you thinking about this far fetched thing?"
I spent some time with Gene Cernan, the Apollo 17 astronaut who was the last guy to walk on the Moon. He told me two things that I couldn’t stop telling people:
1. the Earth is round in space like a ball, not flat looking like the Moon is to us. He said while looking up from the lunar surface, the Earth just hung there, like a grapefruit that he could almost grab if he just jumped high enough. Could see the weather change too.
2. because of the smaller size of the Moon, not only is it’s curve very visible, the apparent horizon is also much closer so he said there were moments where if he ran too fast or jumped too high he felt like he was going to fall off.
Trees can communicate and cooperate using a network of underground mycelium. They can store excess energy in it for later use, can trade different nutrients with neighbors so their needs are met, take care of their young when they're unwell, and even warn others of a spreading disease or parasite.
And then bipedal macrofauna come by and cut vast holes in that network, dump chemicals on it, or set fire to it.
The time period in which dinosaurs lived is so vast, there were dinosaur fossils when dinosaurs were still alive.
There are human fossils while humans still exist, and we haven't been here anywhere near as long as the dinosaurs were. Also, there's more time between Allosaurus and T. rex than between T. rex and humans.
Whales will grow up singing a specific song based on where they were born, but they’ll learn verses of other songs from whales they encounter throughout their lives!
Hippos sweat sunscreen. They produce "sweat" made of one red and one orange pigment. The red pigment contains an antibiotic, while the orange absorbs UV rays.
Some forms of anaesthesia don’t numb you to pain- they make you forget that you felt it.
The knowledge that the atoms of our bodies contain elements only forged in the center of stars, and that such stars upon death blow the elements via supernova across the universe and into our very existence. We are made of star dust.
Scientists know virtually nothing about dark matter and dark energy, which make up about 95% of the universe. So, we basically know nothing about the stuff that makes up 95% of our reality! Talking about being kept in the dark!
I recently read about the Split-Brain experiments. There is a procedure for severe epilepsy that involves cutting the connecting nerves of the two brain hemispheres, resulting in the two hemispheres being unable to communicate with each other. The experiment shows that both halves can answer questions independently of each other, have seperate opinions/preferences, form memories independantly. Basically suggesting that there are two minds in the brain. That just blows my mind(s).
Quite an upbeat description of hemispherectomy. My 10 yo daughter suffers from a rare and severe form of epilepsy. There is no cure and the prognosis is that her condition will gradually worsen. When her quality of life becomes catastrophic enough, the only thing left is to have a hemispherectomy. In almost all cases the procedure will lead to severy cognitive disablility and partial paralysis.
Caterpillars basically dissolve into liquid in the cocoon. The only thing left are the so called ‘imaginal discs’, groups of cells that contain all the information and the mechanism to turn that soup into the various body parts of a butterfly (the same applies for other insects).
If the entirety of the Earth’s history were compressed down to a single day, humans of any sort wouldn’t appear until the last second before midnight.
That there is a species of jellyfish called Turritopsis dohrnii, that can become young again when damaged or stressed. So they become young again. So they are immortal. Just an addition, the tardigrades. They can survive the vacuum of space.
A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.
The size of animals still blows my mind. You can read about how a manta ray is 23 feet long and 3 tons but it doesn’t really hit you until you realize that’s heavier than most cars.
Humans have hunted most of the megafauna into extinction. We have hard time coexisting with big animals.
When you lose weight it leaves on your breath.
So when people lose 100 lbs/ 50 kg, they have exhaled that much carbon.
An object has every color except the one you think it has, because its the only color that doesn't get absorbed.
Great. Now I'm suspiciously staring at everything on my desk and telling those inanimate objects, "Reveal your true forms, you chameleons!"
If some sort of super-advanced alien species on a planet 80 million light years away from Earth built a high-tech telescope that let them see objects on the Earth's surface, they would be seeing dinosaurs right now.
And also if there were aliens 5 billion light years away and they detected our signals we would be long gone by then. Those aliens would arrive at a scorched empty planet without any life
Sharks are older than trees, also, trees almost destroyed all land life on earth as there use to be nothing that could decompose them, so dead trees covered the ground and killed all other vegetation. Only once fungus evolved did trees start decomposing.
The trees that couldn't be decomposed turned into coal. No new coal has formed since the fungus evolved to break down the dead trees
If you put 1 of every animal in a bag and then pick one out you have a 1/5 chance in picking a beetle.
Voyager 1 has been traveling >30,000 mph for 43 years and it's only 20 light hours away.
The Cathedral Effect. If you work in a room with low ceilings, you will stay a bit more focused and be better at detailed, analytical work. If in a room with high ceilings, you will be more open and creative.
This can be simulated by wearing a brimmed hat if you’d want to hammer away at say data entry or data analysis.
There are some Ice Age animals that are so perfectly preserved in permafrost that scientists have been able to find them still with all their soft tissue, hair, and organs. They even found a couple mammoths that still had liquid blood in them and I remember one scientist even tasting the mammoth meat.
A recently discovered vine can mimic nearby artificial plants, modifying the size, shape and colour of its leaves to match them. The only plausible explanation is that plants can see.
Exponential power.
Fold a “big sheet” of paper - that is 0.1 mm thick - 50 times and the height of stack is over 20 times the distance earth to moon. Thank you.
You can theoretically do this but you cant fold a piece of paper mroe than 7 times. Fun fact: if you were to fold a piece of papper 300 times you will end up with a book that has more pages that atoms in the observable universe
Slime molds don’t have brains or nervous systems but some how retain information and use it to make decisions. Even more crazy is that they can fuse with another individual and share the information.
In fact, they are so intelligent that they can quickly get through mazes. They have a sort of awareness that doesn’t allow them to get stuck at dead-ends.
Both the absolute hottest and absolute coldest temperatures ever recorded in the known universe were achieved here on Earth.
The hottest temperature ever physically recorded in the known universe was when scientists at CERN used the Large Hadron Collider to collide lead ions. This produced a temperature flash of 5.5 trillion degrees celsius.
That’s 5,500,000,000,000°C. Convert to Fahrenheit, and you get this:
(5.5e+12°C × 9/5) + 32 = 9.9e+12°F
For the record, the current temperature at the core of our sun is around 15 million degrees celsius. 15,000,000°C. That’s 350,000x less intense than the flash produced by the lead ion particle collisions. That temperature, even if minuscule and fleeting in size and duration, was actually created here on Earth, in a lab. Let that sink in.
The coldest temperature ever recorded in the known universe was achieved relatively recently by a group of German researchers who achieved a nearly incomprehensible feat of 38 trillionths of a degree above -273.15°C, or more commonly known as Absolute 0° Kelvin. They did this by dropping magnetized gas down a nearly 400 foot tower in order to study a 5th state of matter; Bose-Einstein Condensate. For the record, weird s**t starts to happen near absolute 0°K. Example? Light turns into a liquid you can pour into a glass.
The coldest place we have recorded data from within our observable universe is the Boomerang Nebula, hovering nearly an entire degree (kelvin) above absolute zero. Still unfathomably cold.
So while we are still essentially infinity away from achieving Planck Temperature (the staggeringly high temperature of beyond decillions of degrees celsius in which conventional physics breaks down and we enter a whole new realm of theoretics) we are extremely, extremely close to achieving absolute 0°K here on Earth.
However due to quantum mechanics we cant go to 0k since when measuring a particle we cant know how fast it is and where it is at the same time. If we get an atom to 0k then we would know how fast it was going= 0 and where it was which isnt allowed in this universe
You can fit all the planets (Pluto included) between the Earth & Moon.
Planets are actually really far from each other! Here is what they look like to-scale: https://bit.ly/3BGl5Hr
Giraffe necks are actually too short to reach the ground, so they have to splay their legs in order to drink water.
The astronauts on the ISS aren't floating around because of lack of gravity, far from it. They are in constant free fall, falling over the horizon of earth. Being pulled by gravity towards the earth.
Cleopatra lived closer to the moon landing than the building of the great pyramids.
The oldest known beer jug is over 5400 years old. Archeologists discovered ceramic vessels from 3400 B.C. still sticky with beer residue. 1800 B.C.’s “Hymn to Ninkasi" is an ode to the Sumerian beer goddess. No warrior/beer helmets have been unearthed yet.
If 2 pieces of the same type of metal touch in space, they will bond and be permanently stuck together. Space welding (cold welding).
If all the DNA in the average person was stretched out in a single line, it could reach from Earth to the Sun and back 248 times.
With the help of quantum tunneling, there is a 1 in 5.2^61 chance that the molecules in your hand and table would miss each other when slamming it, making your hand go through the table.
1:520,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (hope I did the zeros right)
Well, yes. They look round enough to me, like little eggs. Just right.
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So there's also a chance of 1 in 5.2^61 that I don't hit my toe on the dresser.
Nah, dressers are evil. It'll get you every time
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so somewhere sometime someone's hand went through the table ,and no one would ever believe them.
And with the help of quantum tunneling the universe has a chance of ending at this very moment
That could happen at any moment. If not the universe than your body could just decide to go "time to die" and stop working.
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So if I do it 520,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times I will succeed ? If I do this once every second, it will only take me 274 818 197 192 626 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 years!
Better start now, mate. I'll bring you a sandwich and a coffee in a bit.
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So I don't need to be quite so concerned about stepping on a Lego brick then?!
Sure happens all the time especially if the table only exists in vr and you forgot to remove your headset
Bahahahaha!!! I had a Physics teacher run HS that tested this theory … EVERY…CLASS. He would do this by walking into the wall to see if he could walk through and every time he whacked his face on the wall he would say “well, next time I have a better chance, the odds are with me” lol so weird… he also had a fake eye because he put LSD into his eye at Woodstock… great dude though.
I'm just gonna go slam my fist on the table until that happens.
This always tripped me out. The fact that you never actually feel / touch anything. Its the force of your molecules and the molecules of the other surface touching. This bothers me because although scientifically I know this is true, When I pet my animals they are soft, feathery, scaley etc. My kids skin is soft. My husband's hands are rough. My curling iron is hot etc.... like how the eff can I feel this when I never literally "touch" anything. Drives me nuts. lol
Visualize an atom. There is far more space in the atom than the nucleus, protons & electrons combined. So, theoretically correct.
This was mastered a few civilizations back. From the time of the oldest documents in the Library of Alexandria.
Cold or coldness doesn't really exist, as in, it is not a thing. But hot or hotness does exist and is a thing..
Cold is merely the word we use to describe the absence of heat. While heat is actually an energy that is present.
Most other planets cannot experience a full solar eclipse. The ratio of the size of the moon and sun just happens to be the same as the ratio of the distance of the moon and sun from earth.
When the pyramids were built, there were still some Woolly Mammoths roaming the earth.
So that's how they got the stones up there they used mammoths. I knew it wasn't aliens. (Sarcasm)
Ice doesn't cool your water, the water heats up your ice. Energy transfers one way.
Approximately 99.85% of all the mass in the solar system is concentrated in The Sun.
There are 8 times as many atoms in a teaspoonful of water as there are teaspoonfuls of water in the Atlantic ocean.
Without the development of genuinely sci-fi travel technology like wormholes or hyperspace (which may not even be possible) 99.99+% of the universe will be forever locked off from us. Because of cosmic expansion, the various galactic clusters are moving away from our local cluster faster than we could ever catch up to them.
The Wow! signal came from a planet/bit in space 17,000 light years away. It emitted a signal 30x stronger than anything we can make today. It lasted for an entire 71 seconds, was on 1444Hz (frequency of hydrogen, most abundant thing in the universe) and we couldn't find the signal again after pointing to the same spot.
That you can never physically touch anything. Basically the negative force from the electron cloud around atoms repels every other atom in existence. When we try to touch something, what we’re actually feeling is the resistance from the atoms in that object. For all practical purposes, this is touch, but in reality we can never feel anything but various forms of resistance.
Reindeer eyes, normally brown, turn bright blue in winter to see in low-light conditions.
T-rex lived 66million-ish years ago. Stegosaurus lived 155million-ish years ago. The gap between rex and stego is 16million-ish greater than between rex and present day.
A speck of dust is halfway between the size of the sun and an atom.
When you sleep, your brain is consolidating memories and throwing out duplicate information, which is the reason why time appears to be speeding up. If you want to slow down and enjoy life, feed your brain new information and don’t do the same stuff every day.
Isn't that the same way you keep yourself from getting early onset Alzheimer's?
Solids and liquids don't burn. Only their vapours and gases. That's why you can't just throw a huge log on the fire and have it burn, you need to haul its temperature up until the surface starts pyrolysis and turning into a gas, which then burns.
Jihana, there is no need to be rude just because you are lacking a few brain cells.
A teratoma is a tumor that can grow hair, teeth and eyes.
How much empty space there is in atoms. Like how the f**k I'm a solid object, I'll never understand.
There are actually blood vessels obstructing light from reaching certain areas in your eye, effectively creating a shadow. Your brain filters this out and essentially fills in the gaps so you don’t actually see this spiderweb-like network of black lines. However, you can visualise them by shining a light at a diagonal into your eye (not directly!) and gently wiggling it about. This means your brain doesn’t have enough time to filter it out and you see this spiderweb like network of blood vessels!
echnical instructions to clarify the actions involved. I find it easier to see this effect in a dark environment, so the contrast of the black shadow against the light is higher. You want to be staring straight ahead and shining the light into your pupil at a 45 degree angle from the side directed at your nose at about 10-20 cm away from them. Phone light will do great and have it on the dimmest setting if possible. Then wiggle the light in gentle 1 cm movements side to side. Keep this up for about a second at least and you should see them. Hope this clears it up a bit!
The strongest known acid is called Fluroantimonic Acid and it is made by combining a solution of two different ions in various quantities. Without going too crazy into the scientific details, the part that blows my mind is that at certain ratios of the two ingredients you can get an acid that is 1 QUADRILLION TIME STRONGER THAN 100% PURE SULFURIC ACID.
At acidity levels like this pH fails to even be a useful metric, as the pH of any solution would certainly be less than 0. Additionally, it is so acidic that it can force carbon atoms to have 5 bonds instead of 4, breaking one of the fundamental principles of organic chemistry.
Your head can live for up to 15 seconds without your body.
The Cosmic Horizon - there's vast swathes of space we will never be able to see or know anything about as space is expanding faster than the speed of light.
A shower thought I had recently: If space is expanding so fast, and if we can never know the edge of it, perhaps we cannot see that this 'space' is accelerating towards a huge, all-encompassing astral wall. When it arrives at this wall, will it burst through or will it bounce back towards us? And if it does return towards us, is it still expanding or will it be receding like a spent wave and will it affect the passage of time like a black hole does? Note: I have shower thoughts about other less interesting things too, like getting a puppy, and whether it will like my wife or me better. Comments on either are most welcome, of course.
The average cloud weighs about 1 million pounds. It just floats because it is less dense than the air below it.
I’ve always imagined that touching a cloud would feel like touching intensely damp and freezing cold dense fog.
If the distance between earth and the sun were the thickness of a dime, the next closest star would be ten miles away.
And also, if the milky way were the size of the united states then the sun would be the size of a white blood cell
There are about four times as many unique ways to shuffle a standard deck of playing cards as there are atoms in the Milky Way.
A hummingbird beats its wings 12 times a second.
A (gone too soon, aged 44) friend of mine used to play in a football team that I coached. Before each match, I would explain our set pieces; free kicks, corners etc. and give each player a specific role to play during the match. At the end of my 'teamtalk' I would ask if there were any questions and every week, my mate would say; 'What's the average wingspeed of a Hummingbird?' And now I know!
Our galaxy is on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy and will meet in about 4.5 billion years. Due to the vastness of the space between the contents of these galaxies, it's unlikely any stars/planets will actually hit each other.
The night sky would glow because of the gas clouds colliding and creating new stars. The name of the galaxy that will form after the collsion is milkdromeda
When you look up into the sky everything you see is in the past.
When you look at the tip of your own nose it's in the past. Everything you can see is.
When you decide to you move hand (as an example) the signal will already be half way down you arm by the time you have consciously decided to do it. There are two explanations. Something other that your conscious mind decided to move your hand or your conscious mind sent the signal around 20 milliseconds backwards in time.
All of life can be tracked back to a (or several depending on who you ask) continuous billion plus year chemical reaction.
All matter literally gives off light, but we can only see a sliver of that spectrum (although we do have tools to help us see other spectrums.)
Our bodies give off infrared, and are basically glowing in that portion of the spectrum similar to how iron glows to our normal vision when it’s heated. Something that sees a different spectrum than us might not see hot iron as glowing at the same temperatures we see iron glow at.
The whole universe glows in infrared. If you had infrared vision you would be blinded by the amount of heat in the universe
I actually learn more from the comments by my fellow pandas than I learn from the posting. Thanks for all the tidbits
I've got an uninteresting scientific fact; jays (that used to be quite uncommon where I live) are excellent sound mimics, which was proven to me by the fact that me and a bunch of neighbours this morning spent an hour looking for the dying cat we could all hear screaming that turned out to be a mf jay sitting in the top of a tree >:(
me & a buddy ran through stickers and briars through a field once to 'save' a woman screaming "help!" - it was peacocks.
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In the cold death version of the universe where everything just gets further and further apart and energy ebbs away, this entire 'bright' phase with stars and galaxies etc is so brief as to be almost unmeasurable. "Forever and ever" is actually a nasty curse to wish on someone.
This, Chich, brings passive aggression to a whole other level!
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Aluminum is an excellent heat sink, so putting a piece of frozen meat on a heavy aluminum cookie sheet will cause it to defrost much faster than a piece of meat lying on your counter. It acts like its sucking out the cold, but it's really conducting the heat of the air into the vacant energy of the meat
I wondered how that "magic defrosting tray" worked. thanks.
Load More Replies... Borborygmi. It's a real thing. The noise your abdomen makes (technically, your lower GI tract) as it digests food ---- the noise of gas and liquid and matter moving merrily along. (One hopes, anyway.)
I am so confused by many of these. My brain hurts! Hell who knows, I may not even have one.
Obviously you're thinking about stuff, and that's good. Don't worry about feeling confused, lots of us are with you on that. Lots of these facts just boggled my mind as well.
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Why do I get so distressed by some of these facts? It shouldn't bother me that there are more card shuffles than atoms, or more water atoms in a teaspoon, than teaspoons of water in the ocean, but it does. I think my brain gets troubled by things that are too big or too small for me to actually experience and observe.
As I stated above sometimes I learn more from the comments of other people on here than I do from the original posts. And even if not some things are really really funny which makes it worth reading. This is a posting site so if you don't like to read posts or you don't like to post this might not be the right site.
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I actually learn more from the comments by my fellow pandas than I learn from the posting. Thanks for all the tidbits
I've got an uninteresting scientific fact; jays (that used to be quite uncommon where I live) are excellent sound mimics, which was proven to me by the fact that me and a bunch of neighbours this morning spent an hour looking for the dying cat we could all hear screaming that turned out to be a mf jay sitting in the top of a tree >:(
me & a buddy ran through stickers and briars through a field once to 'save' a woman screaming "help!" - it was peacocks.
Load More Replies... In the cold death version of the universe where everything just gets further and further apart and energy ebbs away, this entire 'bright' phase with stars and galaxies etc is so brief as to be almost unmeasurable. "Forever and ever" is actually a nasty curse to wish on someone.
This, Chich, brings passive aggression to a whole other level!
Load More Replies... Aluminum is an excellent heat sink, so putting a piece of frozen meat on a heavy aluminum cookie sheet will cause it to defrost much faster than a piece of meat lying on your counter. It acts like its sucking out the cold, but it's really conducting the heat of the air into the vacant energy of the meat
I wondered how that "magic defrosting tray" worked. thanks.
Load More Replies... Borborygmi. It's a real thing. The noise your abdomen makes (technically, your lower GI tract) as it digests food ---- the noise of gas and liquid and matter moving merrily along. (One hopes, anyway.)
I am so confused by many of these. My brain hurts! Hell who knows, I may not even have one.
Obviously you're thinking about stuff, and that's good. Don't worry about feeling confused, lots of us are with you on that. Lots of these facts just boggled my mind as well.
Load More Replies... Why do I get so distressed by some of these facts? It shouldn't bother me that there are more card shuffles than atoms, or more water atoms in a teaspoon, than teaspoons of water in the ocean, but it does. I think my brain gets troubled by things that are too big or too small for me to actually experience and observe.
As I stated above sometimes I learn more from the comments of other people on here than I do from the original posts. And even if not some things are really really funny which makes it worth reading. This is a posting site so if you don't like to read posts or you don't like to post this might not be the right site.
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