Do you know that we have absolutely no idea what most of our universe looks like? All the stars, planets and galaxies we can observe today make up just 4% of the universe while the other 96% is made of dark matter and dark energy astronomers can’t see, detect, or even comprehend. The most popular explanation of this gap based on our knowledge is that these substances are formed by certain particles that don’t interact with regular matter, and that’s why they stay invisible. However, even our own planet has many hidden secrets that we continue to discover every single day.
We collected 17 mind-blowing scientific facts you definitely didn’t learn in school.
Table of Contents
Part 1
- You lose about 0.5 kilograms a day by farting. It’s estimated that the total mass of a fart is 0.0371 grams, and the average person farts about 14 times a day.
- Polar bears can’t be detected by infrared cameras. These animals are heated perfectly due to a thick layer of blubber under their skin and a dense fur coat covering their body. But their outer layer stays the same temperature as the snow around them, that’s why they are invisible in infrared cameras that are aimed to detect the heat lost by a living subject.
- Sunflowers can clean up radioactive waste. Certain radioactive isotopes are similar to the nutrients sunflowers normally need. So as they grow, they take up radiation out of the soil.
Part 2
- A flea accelerates faster than a space shuttle. A jumping flea reaches dizzying heights of about 8 cm in a millisecond which is 50 times faster than a spaceship’s acceleration.
- Stomach acid can dissolve a razor blade. Within 24 hours, a swallowed double-edged blade in your stomach becomes fragile and easily-breakable due to highly corrosive acid with a low pH level of 2-3.
- Babies have about 64 more bones in their bodies than adults. Newborn babies have about 270 bones in their body making their skeleton more flexible. With age, many of those bones fuse together, leaving 206 bones that make up an average adult skeleton.
- It’s impossible to burp in space. When you burp on Earth, gravity keeps down the solids and liquid from the food you’ve just eaten, so only the gas escapes from your mouth. In the absence of gravity, the gas can’t be separated from the liquids and solids, and it becomes impossible to burp without also throwing up.
- Animals can also dream like we do. According to some studies, rats have dreams about getting to food or running through mazes. Most mammals also go through REM sleep, the cycle in which dreams occur.
Part 3
- Scorpions glow under UV light. Their soft blue-green glow comes from a substance found in the cuticle, a very tough coating in a part of their exoskeleton. However, scientists still don’t know what purpose the fluorescent glow serves — they think that it might help scorpions find each other, protect them from sunlight, or confuse their prey.
- You have 2 body parts that never stop growing. Human noses and ears keep increasing in size even when the rest of the body’s growth has come to a stop.
- It can rain diamonds on other planets. The atmospheres of Neptune, Uranus, Jupiter, and Saturn have such high pressure that they can crystalize carbon atoms and turn them into diamonds.
- Atoms consist of 99.99999999% empty space. An atom consists of a tiny nucleus surrounded by a cloud of electrons that spread over a proportionately vast area. So, if you were to remove the space from all the atoms of all 7 billion human beings, they would fit inside a single sugar cube.
Part 4
- Hot water freezes faster than cold water. The Mpemba effect assumes that the velocities of hot water particles have a specific disposition that allows them to freeze more readily.
- Bananas are radioactive. Bananas contain potassium that makes them slightly radioactive. But don’t worry, you’ll die of radiation poisoning only if you eat about 10,000,000 bananas at once.
- Human blood is similar to seawater. The composition of our blood has approximately the same salt content as sea water. Apparently, this fact proves the assumption that life came from the ocean.
- The length of your DNA can stretch from the sun to Pluto and back 17 times. The human body contains about 37 trillion cells with 23 DNA molecules encased within each of them. So if you were to uncoil all of the human cells and lay them out end-to-end, a row would reach up to 34 billion miles.
- A day on Venus is longer than a year. It takes about 243 Earth days for Venus to rotate on its axis just once while it can orbit the Sun within only 225 days.
Source: brigtside.me, steemit.com, spaceplace.nasa.gov
