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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
I don't think it's not allowed, just were unable to with our current understanding of science
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"Light" the ultimate diet drink and now with 0 degrees as well as 0 calories
Load More Replies... At 0 Kelvin, atoms 'freeze' in place while they normally vibrate (or so my brain from highschool tries to remember)
You're quite right. Which is also why you can't pour liquid light in to a glass, as it would run through it. Also, there is no such thing as °K, it's plain Kelvin, without the °.
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I do find it strange that we hold up experimental examples that are measured in fractions of a nanosecond, and compare them to massive sustained things like stars. Surely there are particles of iron flying around a blackhole right now at a hefty percentage of lightspeed that will collide/heat up that we'll never be able to detect? Just because we didn't see it doesn't mean it didn't happen.. like that tree that fell over in the woods! Sure as hell made a sound!
"Light turns into a liquid you can pour into a glass." What? How? So many questions!
I think this part of the original post is BS. A citation is definitely required.
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I fail to understand how 5.5 trillion degrees Celsius can be contained without damaging anything though.... but fascinating none the less !!
It didn't really need special containment because it was an instantaneous collision, and dissipated almost immediately. If you want to contain a high energy plasma to study it at length, that's done with magnets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak
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Maybe a stupid question but wouldn’t such temperature (even in a flash) simply melt the surroundings? The Large Hadron Collider should have been destroyed from it, burnt in a moment....? Can someone explain, how come this didn’t happen? Thanks!
key words - "ever recorded in the known universe". Gee, it kind of sounds stupid that we're saying its all on earth. Kind of like how every Miss Universe seems to be a human from earth, too? Am I right?
We can observe other locations in the universe though. It would be more accurate to say that the temperature they achieved is the lowest known temperature scientists have ever been able to measure.
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And all this time I thought I lived through absolute zero during my youth in Buffalo winters!
Not sure our brains/senses would recognise it. It would be utterly alien to our biology. The closest analogy I can think of is that we would either react to it like acid or it would alter our DNA. Atoms contain or are made of light but in recognsiable stable form. So this liquid light would react with our stable atomic structure and turn us into something very different but our biological logic wouldn't be able to process it. I suppose it would be like waking up and discovering you had become the sky.
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Actually absolute zero is impossible to create because to cool something down you need a substance colder than the temperature you are trying to reach. But because there is nothing colder than absolute zero, it is impossible to achieve.
but surly 0 Kelvin absolute zero is the coldest temperature ever since ya know...thats what the coldest temperature is
And for years I thought I experienced absolute zero by growing up in Buffalo.
Because if we lost our curiosity we wouldn’t be human. Plus, we would stay still and never advance, and humans HATE to stagnate like that. If we didn’t hate stagnation, we never would’ve crawled out of the slime a billion+ years ago. So, what you should be saying is that we just need to be hyper-careful when messing with this stuff, but not stop learning what we can about it.
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Science do science things. Read for more information XD.
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Another dumb one. They are the lowest and highest temperatures recorded BY HUMANS. So of course they would be in that tiny part of the universe we can actually observe.
It says "in the known universe" above. Try actually reading a text before commenting sometimes.
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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)
Note: this post originally had 65 images. It’s been shortened to the top 35 images based on user votes.
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.
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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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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