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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?"
Does anyone else have dreams that are a repeat of a previous dream? Yourself in the dream realises it's a repeat; recognizes the story, but instead of that waking you up, yourself in the dream goes 'I must play this out the way I did before and do all the same things as last time to get to the end of this dream'. Kinda like playing an online game.
My repeating dreams are nightmares. In the dream I kind of know what's going to happen next because I've seen it before and every time I am aware of this, the other part of the brain creates a new twist. How cool and creepy at the same time. I know some people have learned to direct their dreams, but I never could.
Load More Replies...This has definitely happened to me! I had a dream a wolf jumped up onto me so I started freaking out thinking I was being attacked by a wolf! But then I realized the wolf had a note tied to it and it was simply trying to get help. Can't believe my own dreaming brain surprised me with a plot twist only it knew was coming!
It's so nice that half the brain plays out stories for the other half.
Yes, I do that. Then I feel cross because I can't remember much of the plot, and I think it would make a great story if only I could remember.
Load More Replies...How is that in the cases you realize you're dreaming? I had that happen to me by coincidence a few times, and had learned how to increase the change of clear dreaming for a while, but lost interest in it when real life got more interesting again. After all, knowing that you fly only in your dream, or fück somebody in a public space, or whatever messed up stuff I did in my dreams ... doesn't feel THAT exciting.
I usually wake up almost as soon as I realize I'm dreaming.
Load More Replies...I had a dream one night where I died in a fiery car crash, then woke up as soon as I hit the fire.
OhSHIT. I woke up just as a giant fireball or something from space hit where I live. Another time I was trapped in a car being picked up by a crane for the compact yard, barely escaping that one.
Load More Replies...Yes we'll as someone who suffers from vivid dreams, I'd like these stories to get a bit more boring. Very tired.
Sometimes I know I'm dreaming, and I can make my dreams do whatever (does that make sense?)
I actually love this about dreaming. I find myself watching the dream like a movie and even rewinding like "wait, how did I get here".
It’s happened 3-4 times in the last couple of years that my dreams had famous actors in them, interesting story lines, and once a really good plot twist. Then I woke up before I knew how it ended! It’s stopped now though. Back to boring old dreams.
OMG! I frequently dream Ill get (sometimes freakily lol) familiar w famous ppl and canon is that I know them thereafter! Anytime I see that star in my dream after that I know I know them. It'll be super convoluted but yet completely 'normal' in-dream 😂😂😂 like hooking up w my fave singer bc I meet him at a bar and he's drunk and then in ANY other dream abt them, I'll know them and remember how we were drunk and the events from there on.
Load More Replies...Immediately that clip of Mr. Bean mailing himself a letter comes to mind.
I don't believe this is a 'fact,' we don't really know what's going on when we dream.
Crazy but I had a dream about a tornado just a few days ago real as hell dream. Could feel the breeze and everything knew it was a tornado was in a house that was not mine or any one I have ever remembered seeing but in the dream I see the tornado hitting the house I’m in I am flying up to the ceiling to the part above the door to a different room I don’t know what it is called and that is when I wake up in the dream I know I hit the wall above the door. I somehow knew in my dream I was going to die. I am 41 years old I have always been afraid of tornado so have always been terrified of storms. I am convinced I either witnessed someone’s demise or that was a past life and it’s end. Super creepy and my dreams can be so real sometimes it’s like I don’t get to sleep but I have another dimension to be awake
When im awake, one part of me creates a life story and another part of me witnesses the events and is really shocked by the plot twists, while the all of me in laying on the couch on the most boring life ever.
The other part of my brain is eating popcorn while watching the weird movie. lol
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)
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.
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.
Load More Replies...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.
Load More Replies...