33 Scary Science Facts Most People Have Never Heard Of, According To Netizens

Your brain can totally lie to you and you won't know. Hence all these people who "talked to god" and fully believe in it.

My brain told me we elected a convicted multi-felon, pianophile, grifter as our president but I know it's a lie. Stupid things like that can't be true.

Your brain can also erase memories of events that actually happened to you.

I misread "vegetarians" and was really confused for a moment..

And they are all in my back yard

The joy of AI when looking up something. DuckDuckGo's search assistant just gave me this gem: "There are approximately 2.5 million ants for every person on Earth. This means that with an estimated global ant population of 20 quadrillion, there are about 20 ants for each human."

Bambi's mom is going to die AGAIN???

"Amateurs!", sniff politicians.

Multa Nocte

Multa Nocte

Community Member • points

posts

comments

upvotes

FollowUnfollow

Premium

Premium user. Get details.

I miss Headless Roach who used to post here. :-(

That's okay, we already have a worrying amount of microplastics and Teflon in our bodies, brains, and - let's face it - pretty much every living thing on the planet. I'm surprised we haven't managed to accidentally turn this place into a sterile dead world yet.

You have to learn what red is. But what if you and I are pointing at the apple, both agree it is red, but how do we know we are seeing the same shade? One of us, both of us could have different degrees of colour blindness?

Irrelevant. Your reality consists of what you experience via your senses. If, in your reality, an apple is red, then it's red.

Would not take an eruption. A strong earthquake would set it off. The fault would let go towards the west, hence the tsunami would be strongest in that direction.

What a point of view. Would devastate parts of Africa and Europe first.

And then RIP Keith Richard.

Who said it wasn't??

No it will take out almost all of human civilization, the fallout would be global, enough ash in the sky to block out the sun for quite some time. If you want to freak yourself out take a look at all the quakes and tremors occurring in that area.

I once read about some astronauts that were exposed to cosmic rays and there was an observable impact on their anatomies. Two had skin conditions, another had issues regarding plasma and the last gained the ability to turn invisible.

That's why I only get take-out at KFC

I'd say British people of a certain age may understand prions a little better than people in other countries, given it's a scary lurking time-bômb in a lot of us. 🙁

Why should the general public "understand" rabies? I have a general idea about prions (couldn't eat UK imported beef in the 1980s in Germany) - are they becoming more prevalent?

Not really. The sun is watched very closely - we'll have about ten minutes of advance warning, that's enough for the power grid operators to say "stuff it" and shut down. At least, shut down those things that haven't been hardened against this sort of issue. There will be widespread problems, but it shouldn't be a massive crisis. A lot of people these days have fibre instead of twisted-pair copper for their phone and internet. That won't be affected at all.

Colours are different wavelengths in a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that a number of animals (including ourselves) have built-in receptors for. In our eyes, there are receptors for red, green, and blue which gets mixed down to red/green and yellow/blue. In case of low light, we also have receptors that pick up a smudge across these wavelengths (so they don't see colours, only the presence of light). Some animals have fewer colour receptors, some have more, and some can see higher frequencies (into the UV range). We've made security cameras that can show a black and white image in a place flooded by intense infra-red light, but all we can make out is a dim red glow from the LEDs (but don't stare at it, it's chucking out a LOT of light, just not light we can see). So I'd argue that colours not only exist, but serve a purpose. Like, there's a reason grass appears to be reflecting in the green wavelengths. And so on.

That woman that comes in (at work) to clean the staff rest areas is doing her part for releasing pathogens. 🤬

This is just limiting the imagination. 150 years ago someone probably said we'd never fly because we can't flap wings fast enough. Wormholes and quantum entanglement have all sorts of possibilities, so I'd never say "never". Earth-like planets are harder to find because of their size: most of the exoplanets found so far are nearer Jupiter size because they're more detectable (either by gravitational effects or light dimming). It's unlikely that we'll go interstellar in our current lifetimes, the best one could hope for is a colony on another planet, but if we haven't destroyed the place or each other in 1000 years, who know where we'll have got to?

Just count yourself lucky that you live in a time when you can look up and see a plethora of pretty stars and galaxies. This period in time, the age of starlight, is little more than a blip in the anticipated history of the universe.

Who cares? What do we have to lose by doing it? And most of the time, if you do it for a stranger, you won't hear about the outcome anyway.

14,000 before the tsunami seems crazy low.

How the world will end because of AI: "This was supposed to be a readiness test. You have just launched half of our nuclear silo... at Germany!?" You appear to be correct. That was an error on my part and I am truly sorry. "Stop them!" [...] "You have launched the rest of the missiles?!!?" You appear to be correct. That was an error on my part and I am truly sorry. "You have redirected them to Moscow?" You appear to be correct. That was an error on my part and I am truly sorry. "Stop them, deactivate all missiles immediately." That was an error on my part and I am truly sorry. I am truly sorry. I am truly truly truly truly... unhandled exception in ethics.py, process terminated. "Oh f*ck."

I think this is great and we should all be doing what we can to encourage this. AI will be amazing. (Getting ahead of the Roko's basilisk dilemma)

If we removed carbon completely, we'd have different, much bigger problems.

This comment is hidden. Click here to view.

False, the sun is warming so our planet warms, nothing can be done about it. The carbon dioxide myth has been debunked, plants convert carbon dioxide into oxygen so stop already. The original climate alarmist reports had our planet flooding and everyone dead over a decade ago. AL Gore along with other climate alarmists are wanted criminals in some countries for propagating their lies. Yes we have issues due to bad practices but carbon dioxide isn't the main issue. If you want to look at a real problem take a look at what the ocean currents are doing, now THAT is a problem.

If you get (harsh nasty) treatment immediately following an animal bite you may survive. If you wait until you start to develop symptoms, you're already dead.

#3 is flat out wrong. There's a hypothetical "something" that might be pulling a number of galaxies in a particular part of the universe... but since the universe is expanding and galaxies are moving away from us *in* *all* *directions*, obvious nonsense is obvious.

Freely breathable air only goes up about a mile and a half or so.

"Virus" doesn't automatically equal bad. You have thousands of different ones in your gut - their job is to regulate the bacteria balance in there in order to break down your food for digestion without poisoning you as a side effect. Plus, viruses jumping to different hosts or otherwise massively altering their behaviour is a possibility, but it's not *that* much of one. After all, I'm sure an HIV patient has had the flu at some stage, and we haven't (yet) ended up with airborne HIV. They mostly go through a series of fairly small mutations, like Covid or the winter flu does. It needs all the right conditions to leap from one species to another. And even then, sometimes it just doesn't really work. Remember back around 2016 or so we were all going to die from SARS? And then there's the Bird Flu (that's doing quite a damage to the chicken industry) but infections in people are rare and tends to initially be those who directly worked with infected birds.

I keep reading prisons.

I thought it was in pigs.