50 Science Facts that Will Shock You

science it's what makes the world go round more specifically when the primordial cloud of gas and dust that eventually formed to our solar system began to collapse under its own gravity and it started to spin as that cloud formed concentrated edies of swirling matter that would eventually become planets like Earth while they continued to rotate and it is that initial angular momentum from the primordial clouds that makes the Earth go round quite literally you're welcome if scien bits like that what Entertain You well you're in luck because today we got 50 of them so let's go ants outnumber humans 2.5 million to one there are over 12,000 known species of ants in the world and some experts believe the total number may be as high as 20,000 different species it's possible to get an accurate count on exactly how many individual ants there are but the best scientific estimates put the number at about 20 quadrillion that's a conservative estimate so it could be considerably more than that but with that many ants in the world it means that there are 2.5 million ants for every single single person you may have heard the claim that the total mass of all ants is equal to the total mass of all humans though that's not actually the case the initial claim was based on Research from 1994 and it relied on the average weight of an ant being about 10 times higher than it actually is the world population also is increased by over 2 billion since 1994 and the average weight of a person has increased as well so even if it had been true at the time it would not be true anymore still while humans do outweigh ants since 71% of ant species are venomous it would probably end poorly if every person had to fight 2.5 million ants in hand-to-hand combat the good news is we don't see that happening anytime soon half of your cells are bacteria the human body is a complex organism made up of tens of trillions of cells on average men have about 36 trillion cells in their body while women have about 28 trillion with the main reason for the difference being the average height of men versus wind these cells create your circulatory system nervous system and everything else required to make your body function however there's something else required to make your body function properly and that's bacteria though the numbers aren't quite as skewed as were once believed there are slightly more bacteria cells on and in your body than there are human cells these bacteria live on your skin and in your nose mouth and specifically your gut the bacteria's most obvious role is to aid in digestion though they affect things like your appetite and immune system as well of course it's not necessarily accurate to say that you currently have more bacteria cells than human cells in your body right now since the bacteria so heavily concentrated in your digestive system a single bowel movement can be enough to temporarily shift the number back in the favor of human cells instead of bacteria but as numerous as they are all the bacterial cells living on and in your body only weigh about 2 to 6B for an average person metallic hydrogen The Alkali mels are soft shiny and highly reactive elements that are grouped together on the far left of the periodic table these are elements like lithium potassium and sodium sodium and they are grouped together because they all have a single electron in their outermost shell while all of the other alkali metals are in their solid state at normal temperature and pressure at the very top of the list of alkaline metals is hydrogen now obviously we don't think of hydrogen as being a metal as it rarely exists outside of its gaseous State here on Earth hydrogen doesn't become liquid until it falls below 33 Kelvin and it doesn't become solid until 14 Kelvin those temperatures are approaching absolute zero so creating liquid or solid hydrogen requires very specialized equipment however because the alkali metals have the most homogenous behavior of any group on the periodic table the existence of metallic hydrogen has been theorized for nearly 100 years and we might even know where it is it's believed that at extremely high temperatures and pressures metallic hydrogen could be created and that liquid metal hydrogen exists in large quantities at the cause of gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn the massive gravitational pressure on the planet's Interiors creates heat and these conditions would be perfect for metallic hydrogen since metallic hydrogen is an electrical conductor this would potentially explain the powerful magnetic fields that these planets have there is no definitive proof yet since we can't just land on Jupiter and have a bit of a look see but there is a lot of evidence to support the theory of metallic hydrogen in these planets bananas produce antimatter now to be fair this fact isn't exclusive to bananas though bananas are the traditional example the same is true of spinach lensel apricots and most other fruits and vegetables because the key to producing antimatter isn't something special about bananas it's just their potassium over 99.9% of all pottassium comes in the form of three different isotopes pottassium 39 40 and 41 both 39 and 41 are stable isotopes with 39 being far more abundant these two isotopes make up over 99% of all potassium but most of what remains is radioactive potassium 40 of course it's very weakly radioactive and poses no real Danger but because it's radioactive that means that it does Decay sometimes the Decay comes in the form of positrons a particle of antimatter in the case of bananas each banana will only produce one antimatter particle every 75 minutes when these antimatter particles come into contact with regular matter the two particles will annihilate and release a tremendous amount of energy relative to the amount of matter that is so does this mean that you need to steer clear of fruits and vegetables for fear of total Annihilation well no definitely not while bananas are the most common example when discussing antimatter there's a lot more potassium in your body than there is in a banana there's so much potassium in you that the average person's body produces about 180 antimatter particles every hour people are basically all the same kind of you probably noticed throughout your life that people are very different they come in all different heights and sizes different skin tones eye colors hair textures and so on going Beyond just visually notable differences some people are smarter than others While others are more athletic people even have different allergies and different levels of susceptibility to various diseases it may come a surprise then that all humans have 99.9% identical DNA or maybe it doesn't because admittedly that number is a little bit misleading after all there's a lot more to people than their hair color or their nut allergies there are also your organs nervous system ideally 10 fingers and toes and all of the other things that need to be included in our DNA to create a functioning human body from that perspective it's not surprising then that so much of our DNA would need to be the same it's also why we have 96 to 99% of the same DNA as chimpanzees depending on which metric is being used to calculate the number since much of our physiology is the same however we do have three billion base pairs of DNA even if 99.9% of it is required to be identical and create the framework for a human body that remaining. 1% still contains 3 million base pairs it may not be a lot as a percentage but it still leaves a lot of room to create individual differ es crows are amazing many people consider crows to be Omens of bad fortune or agricultural pests but crows are also extremely intelligent animals they are excellent at solving puzzles using tools and communicating with one another while bird brain was often used as an insult to indicate a person at a particularly small brain and was therefore Dum it turns out that birds have better brains than mammals do although a crow's brain is only about the size of a human thumb which is still massive for the size of its body it has over 40 times as many neurons packed into that space than the same mass of human brain their brains are also far more energy efficient using only a third of the energy that our brains require for the same number of neurons that's not to say that an adult Crow is as smart as a human adult but according to a 2014 paper published in the journal plus one an adult Crow is as smart as a human child more specifically a seven-year-old crows can even understand somewhat abstract Concepts like analogies or the use of the number zero as a quantity they also have exceptional memories which brings us to our next fact and that's crows are terrifying not only do crows have great memories but they can recognize and distinguish human faces they also never let go of a grudge if even a single Crow Witnesses a human cause harm to another crow that can be enough to condemn the person to years of harassment and attacks by crows thanks to their social nature and complex communication they're able to spread word of exactly which humans to hate since the best offense against future wrongdoings from that human is a good offense crows will strike first dive bombing the offending party it's not actually clear how much of the information shared is communicated through vocalizations or if they just see a crow take the offensive against a human and follow suit but the spread of information is extremely effective in a sample population a small group of crows were terrorized by a researcher wearing a gorilla mask once per year following this he'd go outside with a mask on and see what percentage of the crows recognized and attacked him the first year he was was recognized by 26% of the crows but by the third year 66% of the crows immediately identified the mask these shared grudges can be so pervasive that it has led to speculation that there is an epigenetic components which is a generational hatred of specific individuals being passed down to a crow's Offspring through their genes though there is no conclusive research on that matter it's rainning Diamonds the ice giant planets Neptune and Uranus don't really get a lot of attention they're seen as being being cold and boring and most importantly they're really really far away however there may be something fascinating going on beneath the surface in the form of diamond rain ice Giants get their name because they are composed primarily of water methane and ammonia which we most commonly see throughout the Universe in ice form however the interior of these planets aren't as frigid as their surface thanks to the immense pressure Neptune's core is as hot as the surface of the Sun and at these temperatures the molecules we mentioned they break down most importantly methane inside the planet's mantle breaks down into its constituent carbon and hydrogen atoms the Rogue carbon atoms link with each other to form chains as they rise up to the top of the mantle and under the intense pressure These Chains will form with the structure of diamonds as the diamonds get larger and heavier and the temperature cools higher up in the mantle the diamonds will then rain back down through the mantle toward the core where the heat breaks them apart and the process is repeated now we can't see this happening as nearly all images of the ice giants have been taken from Earth but we have recreated the conditions in a lab using poyene which is also made up only of carbon and hydrogen but is easier to work with than gaseous methane and scientists were able to use high powerered lasers to simulate the heat and pressure of Neptune this created diamonds on the Nano scale although the lasers were only turned on for a fraction of a second much larger diamonds are expected to be raining inside Neptune where the heat and pressure never get turned off a cloud is four whales when you look up at the sky during calm weather there's a good chance that you'll see cumulous clouds floating around these clouds look so light and fluffy like pillows or marshmallows and they're able to float in the air so how much could a cloud actually possibly weigh it might surprise you that the answer is actually a lot shocking as that may be by looking at them the maths is actually pretty simple the average density of a cumulus cloud is 0.5 G of water per cubic meter and the average side of a cumulus cloud is about 1 cubic kilm which is a billion cubic M multiply these two together and the average weight of a cloud is 500 ,000 kg or 1.1 million pound that means each Cloud weighs approximately the same as four adult blue whales the largest animals on the planet they're able to remain afloat because the weight density of the cloud is actually lower than that of the air around it of course anybody who's been pelted with hailstones may not be quite so surprised that clouds have some serious Mass gambling with the Galaxy if you're familiar with exponential growth you probably know that it gets out of hand really rather quickly for example you may recognize that 2 to the^ of 8 is 256 which is how many different possible values one bite of binary data can have another similarly absurd means of growing numbers is through factorials where you multiply a number by every number lower than it for example if we wanted to know how many different ways the were to shuffle a standard poker deck that would be calculated as 52 factorial so 52 * 51 * 50 all the way down to 1 usually when doing card odds you can divide by some number afterwards to lower the total results for example being delt 2 3 4 5 6 of Hearts is the same as being dealt 5 6 432 of hearts for the purposes of a poah hand so the total number of possible poke hands gets divided by all of the hands that contain the same cards dealt in a different order however since the exact position of every Unique Card in the deck matters for our purposes those tricks don't apply in this case that means it turns out that there are 8.1 * 10 to the power of 67 different ways to shuffle a deck of cards that's more than three times as many atoms as there are in the entire Milky Way galaxy and every time you properly randomize a deck of cards it likely ends up in an order that has never been seen before turnabout is fair play there's a reasonable chance that you suffer from allergies estimates vary but anywhere from 25 to 50% of adults suffer from some sort of allergy even if it's just a very minor seasonal allergy that is mildly annoying but doesn't really impact your life these allergies are caused by an overreaction of the immune system to various substances such as pollen nuts bee venom or animal dander however this condition isn't exclusive to humans if you have different types of pets such as both a cat and a dog it's possible that one of the animals could be allergic to the other but something most pet owners never consider is the possibility that your pet might be allergic to you like it or not humans are still animals which means we produce dander that can act as an allergen While most research suggest that the prevalence of human allergies in pets is extremely low perhaps only 2% it's still a very real possib are these pants dry yet when presented with a seemingly obvious question a person might sarcastically reply with the rhetorical question is water wet other breaking news water wet the obvious answer is meant to be yes though this is actually a matter of debate within the scien ofic Community thanks to a pedantic disagreement on how exactly wetness is defined but regardless of that debate the question remains is water wet and if so how do you know if you're thinking you obviously know whether or not something is wet because you can feel it the truth is no you actually can't human skin does not have hydro receptors the type of receptor cells that would be necessary to detect humidity even though we all have a clear understanding of how it feels to us for something else to be wet we can't actually feel moisture in that way instead our brains are essentially using a combination of temperature texture and pressure to guess whether or not something is supposed to feel wet you've always certainly experienced your brain guessing incorrectly before it's as well if you've fallen asleep or gone to run errands while you ear your clothes in the dryer and when you finally checked on the laundry hours later you may have found it difficult to figure out if the clothes were still damp or just cold sitting on a cold metal chair is another way to leave your brain guessing as to whether or not you just sat in something wet another missing sense not only do humans lack the hydro receptors that are common among many types of insects but there's another sense that's seen across the animal world that humans don't have and this one isn't one that our brains can reasonably deduce like wetness e either that other missing sense is Magneto reception the ability to detect the Earth's magnetic field for nearly 150 years it's been believed that many animals such as migratory birds and sea turtles may have some sort of innate biological Compass until recently however all of the evidence was essentially anecdotal at this point it's all but an established fact that many animals possess Magneto reception which they use for navigation though there is one very obvious question how are they doing it and for that we don't have an answer but there are three main theories any or all of which might be utilized by different animals the most basic answer is that they use iron which is naturally magnetic iron deposits are found in the beaks of many migratory Birds who may be able to use their beaks as compasses another possibility particularly with Aquatic Life is electromagnetic induction many aquatic animals have Electro receptive organs and it's believed that they could be used to detect magnetic fields then there's cryptochrome the protein found in the eyes of many migratory Birds this Theory gets really weird and complicated and it actually involves quantum entanglement but there is experimental evidence to support the theory you can't come back you're probably familiar with the idea of an event horizon as it pertains to black holes this is the point of no return from which nothing not even light can escape the black hole's gravity however there is a cosmological Event Horizon as well it's the point at which once reached something can never return to Earth not even by traveling at the speed of light though traversable wormholes might still let you cheat the system not only is the universe expanding in all directions but it's doing so at greater than the speed of light the short explanation is that all of SpaceTime is expanding so the further apart two points are the more space time there is between them that can expand and thus the faster the distance between them will increase the cosmological Event Horizon is located 7.2 billion light years away from us and if a spaceship were to travel there from Earth the increasingly accelerating expansion of the universe would make it impossible to return even when traveling at the speed of light you can't go there either unsurprisingly it's not just return trips that the expansion of the universe is going to hinder the observable universe extends 46.1 billion light years in all directions if there are celestial bodies that we can calculate are moving away from us faster than the speed of light then it would be impossible to reach those locations even if we had the ability to travel at light speed because the expansion of the universe would have us Running With The Wind to our back so to speak this impossible to reach distance is more than twice as far away as the cosmological Event Horizon but not by much even traveling at the speed of life light the furthest we could ever go from Earth is a point that was 17 billion light years away from Earth when we started our journey that means that without either violating the laws of physics or discovering reversible wormholes that provide shortcuts through SpaceTime it's scientifically impossible for Humanity to ever visit about 86% of the observable universe it'll only get lonelier one more shocky fact related to the expansion of our universe is that life on Earth is only going to get lonelier as time goes on the observable universe is going to shrink at least in a manner of speaking even if the observable universe continues to extend 46 billion light years from Earth for the rest of time there's going to be a lot fewer things that we can actually see in that area since SpaceTime is expanding in all directions everything in the universe is moving away from us the distances between stars and galaxies will continue to expand and stars that once lit up the night sky will vanish from existence never to be seen again in fact most of the observable universe is already on its way to that ultimate fate for example the star Arendelle was by the Hubble telescope in 2022 the star is calculated as currently being about 28 billion light years away from us well within the observable universe but because it is past that 17 billion-year light marker the light currently being emitted by the star will never reach Earth as the universe continues to expand more celestial bodies will cross that threshold and Earth will slowly become more and more isolated from the rest of the universe humans are bioluminescent when we think of bioluminescent creatures the first things that come to mind are probably fireflies glowing algae or jellyfish or maybe you thought of those bioluminescent cats that scientists made about a decade ago as the byproduct of research into feline AIDS however a 2009 study published in plus one showed that humans are also bioluminescent the light is just far too faint for our own eyes to perceive this has long been suspected of being the case we just lacked sensitive enough cameras to detect the light being emitted that is no longer a problem and research showed that the human body emits light in the visible spectrum it's just a thousand times dimmer than our eyes are capable of detecting the images that were produced by the researchers look like infrared photos at first glance however the areas of the body that emitted the most photons do not correspond to the areas that would be most lit up in an infrared image of course such dim bioluminescence has no evolutionary purpose and it appears to be a byproduct of our body's metabolism and it's likely shared with all animals cell respiration creates highly reactive free radicals and these particles can interact with lipids and proteins in the body to emit photons oxygen is blue in its gaseous form oxygen is colorless and thus invisible to the naked eye this is true of most gases though chlorine gas is yellowish brown color and dine gas is violet however most elements also retain their colorless trait when they become liquids liquid hydrogen helium argon neon and most other liquid elements lack color even liquid carbon is colorless at standard temperatures and pressure though increases in temperature or pressures can cause liquid carbon to become black or brown but of all the elements liquid oxygen is one one of the few that breaks this pattern even though we think of it as the invisible gas that we breathe to make life possible liquid oxygen is a pale blue color it's basically the same color as the sky on a clear Sunny Day dragon sex is optional kodo dragons are the largest lizards in the world and they're a bit of an unusual species they're one of the few species of venomous lizards and their venom is strong enough to kill a human dragons also are monogamous and will pair off for Life something rarely seen among lizards like many other lizards the male of the species also has two p es though they can only use one at a time while this may call into question if the male's idea of monogamy involves a different exclusive Mage for each of its two appendages it turns out that the men aren't even required at least not in the short term female kodo dragons are capable of asexual reproduction through a process called parthenogenesis when they produce an egg the process also creates something called a polar body which contains identical DNA as the egg cell usually these polar bodies break down and disintegrate but in pathog Genesis the polar body instead acts as a sperm and inserts DNA into the egg to fertilize it female dragons have zedx chromosome so the resulting egg will either be zed z which does not produce a viable Offspring or XX which produces a male offspring it's not a viable solution for long-term propagation of the species as all the children will be male and there will be very low genetic diversity but since kodo dragons are often violent isolated creatures sometimes this form of reproduction becomes a necessity a cat almost became a university Professor Jack heatherington was a physicist and Professor working out of the University of Michigan in 1975 he wrote a paper discussing low temperature physics particularly as it pertained to helium but there was a problem when Jack sent the paper to a friend for review before attempting to get it published his friend pointed out that Jack had written the entire paper in the first person plural using we instead of I since Jack was listed as the sole author of the paper this would have normally resulted in the journal immediately rejecting the paper for procedural reasons regardless of how good it was rather than editing the entire paper to the first person singular Jack decided it would be easier to list his best friend Chester as a co-author for the paper but since many of his colleagues knew that Chester was Jack's pet a Siamese cat the name had to be disguised Chester's name was added to the paper as FDC Willet the first initials came from felis domesticus the scientific name for a house cat and Willard was Chester's father's name the paper was accepted and it took three years for the truth about the co-author to finally be revealed before that happened Jack received a letter requesting that he offer his friend FDC willed a job as a professor at the University of Michigan of course it's possible that the chairman of the department who extended this invitation was in on the joke but that remains unclear Chester went on to be published Again In 1980 this time as the sole author of a research paper stars versus trees if we asked you to guess right now which do you think is greater the number of stars in the galaxy or the number of trees on Earth it's a bit of a strange question but most people believe there's an obvious answer the M8 Galaxy is over a 100,000 light years wide and a thousand light years tall and Earth is just Earth surely there must be more stars than trees right that's the more commonly guessed of the two answers but it turns out that's incorrect at least we're pretty sure it's incorrect according to our best estimates there are between 100 and 400 billion stars in our galaxy while there are three trillion trees here on Earth of course these are just estimates using sample sizes and extrapolation and whatnot nobody has time to sit down and count every Star or tree so it's certainly possible the numbers are a little off however since the estimates state that there is an order of magnitude more trees than Stars it's unlikely that the margin of error in the estimates would swing the numbers back in the favor of stars stem cells can be manufactured when stem cell research first was being explored it created a lot of controversy there are different types of stem cells and some can only give rise to specific types of other cells however embryonic stem cells are known as plop poent stem cells which means they can turn into any type of cell in the body this made them the most important type of stem cells for research though the source of such cells being embryos carried with it a fair amount of ethical concerns given the amount of public discourse that existed over the ethics of This research you may be surprised to learn that scientists can just manufacture those cells now Professor shinya yanaka from Kyoto University won a 2012 Nobel Prize for his discovery that plop potent stem cells can be created from mature cells by injecting a specific cocktail of viruses into skin cells Professor yamanaka discovered that they transformed into what he called induced plop poent stem cells these stem cells can then be cultivated meaning that every person can have an unlimited supply of stem cells coded specifically with their DNA This research has huge implications and it's currently being used in attempts to grow replacement organs using a person's own stem cells so the organ won't be rejected while eliminating the need for donors random walking photons it takes about about 8.5 minutes for a photon to travel from the surface of the Sun to the Earth but how long does it take a photon to travel from the center of the Sun to the surface of the sun the sun may be big but it's nothing compared to the distance between it and earth based on the radius of the Sun you probably assume it takes about 2 seconds for a photon to make the journey however it actually takes a 100,000 years or longer possibly even millions of years at least it sort of does it's actually a bit more complicated than that the core of the Sun is extremely dense plasma so dense that photons are constantly bouncing off of things this forces them to take a probabilistic path known as a random walk toward the surface the fact that it's all based on probability is why there isn't an exact number for how many years it will take but it's also never the same Photon either photons are constantly being absorbed and new ones created so it really is the change in heat that is traveling to the surface rather than a specific particle if the sun's core were to let out a burp of photons metaphorically speaking it it would take a 100,000 years or longer for the corresponding burp to escape from the sun's surface but none of these escaping photons would be the same ones that created the initial burp most life on Earth is unknown how many species of animals do you think exist on our planet now the first things that come to mind are like humans and other large mammals but animals include Birds insects fish and more there is a staggering diversity of life so much so that we don't actually know how many species there are the one thing scientists seem to agree on is that most of them have yet to be identified estimates for the total number of animal species once ranged from 3 million to 100 million though that range has shrunk dramatically the estimates are based on extrapolations of observations of biodiversity but we're still not sure currently the best guess is that there are about 8.7 million different species of animals give or take 1.3 million it's still a large range but it's not nearly as wide as the old range was however even taking the low end of that estimate which would be 7.4 million species we still haven't identified even 1/3 of them as of 2022 only 2.16 million species of animals have been described and identified but even if there are millions of species yet to be discovered there's still already over 2 million animal species we know of living on Earth and that's before we add in plants and bacteria Marie C's Nobel Legacy there are few awards that are as wellknown or prestigious as the Nobel Prize especially when it comes to science given the notoriety of some scientists you may assume that somebody like Albert Einstein won numerous Nobel prizes in physics for his seemingly countless contributions to the field however Einstein only won once and that was after a decade of failed nominations because his work had yet to produce experimental results despite individuals who seem to have made numerous important advancements in their fields only five individuals have ever won the Nobel Prize twice when Marie curri won the Nobel Prize of physics in 1903 for her work on radiation she became the first woman to ever win the prize just 8 years later in 1911 she again made history by winning the Nobel Prize in chemistry for discovering radium and polonium not only did she become the first person man or woman to win two Nobel prizes she Remains the only person to ever win for two different sides of disciplines of the other four double winners three received duplicate prizes in either physics or chemistry and lonus Pauling received nobels for both peace and chemistry banana peels and no joke we're going to jump now from the Nobel Prize to the IG Nobel Prize you've seen it a million times in cartoons or in Mario car someone steps on or drives over a banana peel and Spins wildly out of control while this isn't realistic for cars at least not when driving over a single banana peel it is true for a person researchers showed that the coefficient of friction between normal surfaces and a banana peel was just 07 on average that is close to being a frictionless surface and the average coefficient of friction of a sneaker on the same surface was4 the researchers discovered this slipperiness was because of the Sachs of polysaccharide under the Banana's skin which they refer to as polysaccharide follicular gel however unlike other IGN noal research which is often genuinely useless this may actually have a benefit the slippery polysaccharide substance is similar to the sinovial fluid that lubricates our joints this discovery could potentially have implications for the creation of better artificial joints a strawberry By Any Other Name speaking of bananas did you know that bananas are berries but strawberries are not blackberries and raspberries aren't berries either at least botanically speaking there are three key elements required for something to be considered a berry first it must contain three distinct layers an outer skin a middle fleshy part and a somewhat mushier Center that contains the seeds the next requirement is that each Berry must contain at least two seeds this means that fruits like cherries cannot be considered berries as they only have one seed at the center finally the berries must grow from a flower that has a single ovary while the other requirements are things that anybody could easily look at and identify this requires a bit more knowledge essentially the bumps you see on raspberries and strawberries each come from a separate ovary making them considered aggregate fruits rather than berries since they were grown from so many different ovaries this scientific classification wasn't created until centuries after strawberries and blackberries got their names so the berry Moma will be attached to those fruits forever of course the fact that strawberries aren't but bananas eggplants and watermelons are is unlikely to affect or even be accepted by the general public people are no more likely to consider banana as a berry than they are to consider tomatoes a fruit although tomatoes are also technically berries museums are getting it wrong there are a lots of different types of museums and Museum exhibits and these are a great place to learn about the world around us at least they're supposed to be but a recent study conducted by Oxford University in the rawal Botanical Garden Edinburgh tell a different story they examine plants from the Natural History exhibits of at 40 museums in 21 different countries and found that over half of the specimens were labeled incorrectly even if they weren't completely incorrect the labels were often incomplete listing only a Genus or family but no species however there isn't really any one person or organization to blame for this as we said earlier there are over 2 million different species of animals that have been identified and then there's all the plants it's a staggering number and there's only estimated to be about 10,000 working taxonomists in the entire world things are reclassified all the time as well and an ire genus May suddenly be changed without warning beyond all that sometimes it's just hard to tell a specimen in a museum might only be labeled by its family because local experts are in the midst of a yearslong argument over exactly which species it actually is turning lead into gold Alchemy was essentially the Prototype of chemistry it used a lot of the same techniques and knowledge and much of modern chemistry was derived from Alchemy however Alchemists had a nasty habit of working backwards instead of studying elements to understand them and figuring out how they react with other elements Alchemists would often start with an almost arbitrary grow and then try to find a way to make that possible the most famous example of this Quest was to turn lead into gold the two elements are both heavy metals and they're really close to each other on the periodic table not that the table existed when Alchemists were prominent despite spending centuries as one of the most common goals of scientists and pseudo scientists alike nobody was ever able to turn lead into gold however in 1980 Nobel prize-winning chemist Glenn seaborg turned bisou into gold bismo is another heavy metal directly next to lead on the periodic table mercury has also been turned into gold though the Bismuth was transmuted into a stable isotope while the Mercury became a radioactive isotope of gold of course while possible neither of these processes are remotely practical both required using a particle accelerator to strip protons and neutrons from the nucleus of the atoms and they are extremely slow and expensive processes for all the effort seaborg's experiment only produced a few thousand atoms of gold Green Leaf vol there's nothing quite like the smell of freshly cut grass for humans it elicits a nostalgic response bringing back memories of lazy summer vacations or sporting events it's even been shown that the smell can create an increased sense of trust and reduce stress and yet for the grass the scent is actually a desperate Cry for Help the smell is caused by Green Leaf volatiles a type of organic compound used as a means of communication between plants the smell you detect after cutting grass is a plant distress call being used as a warning to other plants of impending danger obviously the plants being immobile are powerless to defend themselves however neighboring plants can detect the defense mechanism being triggered and release their own Green Leaf volatiles to amplify the scent again the grass can't save itself from the power of a lawn mower but this is an evolutionary tactic developed to defend against habous insects the scent emitted by the plants not only triggers other plants to follow suit but it attracts predatory insects that will prey on the ones that are eating the plants smells like teen memories as we just mentioned the scent of freshly cut grass usually has a nostalgic response from humans this is because your sense of smell is the sense most closely linked to memory it's long been known that smell and memory were heavily linked but it's only through more recent studies that scientists have begun to understand this link better new research shows that the link is merely the result of simple brain anatomy the portion of the brain that processes Al Factory signals just happens to be the closest sensory input to the lyic system the part of the brain that regulates emotion and memory since smells reach the lyic system first they essentially get to call Dibbs on being associated with that memory of course this works best with specific types of memory particularly episodic memories from a firstperson perspective the scent of fresh baked cookies may make you vividly remember being in your grandmother's house or the smell of a dead body might take your mind bag to that thing you said you'd never talk about not only are the memories associated with smells usually scenes from a first-person point of view but they are typically very emotionally evocative as well as such dowsing flash cards with different perfumes is unlikely to help you remember the material better for your next exam for that matter it's worth noting that memories associated with smell aren't intrinsically better in any way human memory is very fallible and while memories linked to sense are much more emotionally evocative they are by no means more accurate who done it everybody knows that no two people have the same fingerprints not even identical twins at least we assume this is true it hasn't actually been scientifically proven but it is considered a statistical impossibility that two two people would have identical fingerprints however because they are so heavily associated with humans and particularly human criminals we often neglect the fact that other animals have fingerprints as well many other primates have fingerprints though few are as elaborate as human prints only the other great apes gorillas chimpanzees bonobos and orangutangs have fingerprints that are similar to humans at least that's what we all thought until the mid 1990s when polish Australian Anthropologist and comparative anatomist Mar hanberg was working with some koalas and happen to look at their fingers somehow nobody had noticed before that day but koalas are the only non primate animals to have fingerprints not only that but their fingerprints are completely indistinguishable from those of a human this raised some initial concern since police have no way to differentiate between a human and a koala fingerprints but it's unlikely that koala prints would show up at the scene of a crime so we guess that's okay pruny fingers are one of science's greatest Mysteries if you've ever spent too long in a bath pool or in the ocean which is undoubtedly everybody then at some point you've noticed that your fingers start to look all pruny or wrinkly the obvious assumption is that your skin absorbed water and the extra water has caused the fingers and toes to temporarily look swelled indeed this is what scientists believed as well for a long time though it's not actually the case while some substances are capable of being absorbed through the skin our skin is impermeable for most foreign substances including water individual cells on the outermost layer of skin May absorb some amount of water but it can't get deeper than the first cell layer since the outermost layer of skin the stratum corium is basically just a stack of 15 to 20 dead skin cells it was believed that those dead cells absorbed water in the pruning effect that we are all familiar with however newer research has shown that your fingers become pruned from a decrease in Mass rather than an increase when submerged in water the blood vessels shrink decreasing the volume of blood in your fingers this drop in Mass causes the skin to fold over the blood vessels creating the prune effect we also know this is some sort of involuntary process controlled by the ner system rather than a physical effect of the water itself as test subjects who had nerve damage in their fingers did not experience pruning that just leaves the question of why the hell it happens and we really have no idea it was widely theorized that pruned fingers may increase friction and make it easier to grip wet objects but experimental evidence has shown that it has completely the opposite effect so again we just don't really know a 6 billion ton teaspoon stars are giant balls of hydrogen and helium that act as a natural nuclear fusion reactor hydrogen atoms are fused into helium atoms resulting in a massive release of energy once one of those giant Stars has run out of hydrogen in its core the intense pressure and heat will be enough that it can continue the fusion process now turning helium into carbon as lighter elements are depleted the star will work down the periodic table fusing heavier elements until it is fusing silicon atoms into iron the iron builds up at the core until the core reaches what is known as the trar limit which is 1.4 times the mass of our sun once the core reaches this Mass the fusion taking place is unable to overcome the force of gravity and the core implodes violently collapsing in on itself the intense gravity causes it to superheat kickstarting a runaway nuclear reaction this results in a massive shock wave that ejects the outer layers of the star leaving behind either a neutron star or a black hole neutron stars are incredibly dense so much so that a teaspoon of neutron star would weigh 6 billion tons that's a thousand times more than the Great Pyramid of Giza in a teaspoon unfortunately there's no comparable calculation for black hle since most of the volume Beyond the eveng Horizon of a black hole is empty and the entire mass of the black hole is located at its infinitely dense Singularity humans as neutron stars if a parent or teacher ever called you a waste of space it may not have been an angry display of disapproval they may have actually just been trying to teach you about the nature of atoms what makes neutron stars so heavy and dense is that as the might suggest they are made up almost entirely of neutrons the star is essentially just one giant nucleus but that's not how atoms are composed the atoms that your body's composed of have a tiny nucleus orbited by electrons and the vast majority of that atom is just empty space in fact only 4 10 trillionths of an atom is actually mattera rather than empty space so what if we were to take a person and remove all of that wasted space the result would obviously be tiny it would be so so tiny in fact that if you were to do the same thing to every human on the planet the entire human race could fit into the volume of a single sugar cube space is empty too it's not just atoms that are comprised almost entirely of empty space it's the entire universe this is somewhat counterintuitive because of how many celestial bodies are estimated to exist there are potentially two trillion galaxies in the universe and each Galaxy averages at least 100 billion stars each star averages 1 to two planets so that's another 1 to 200 billion planets in each of the two trillion galaxies now these are extraordinarily large numbers on a scale that we really can't properly comprehend so it certainly seems like the universe just has a crap load floating around everywhere but these numbers don't actually tell the full story which is the unimaginable vastness of space if you were to fire off a rocket in any random Direction and travel for billions of years at the speed of light the chances that you would ever collide with a planet star asteroid or anything besides erant particles is effectively 0% you could fly off into space in a straight line for all of eternity and never collide with anything just because of how far apart everything is this isn't some mathematical trick or Illusion exploiting the fact that Rockets are small and we're only using one of them either to give you an even wider example the Milky Way is currently on a collision course with our nearest neighbor the Andromeda galaxy in about 5 billion years these two galaxies are going to crash together and make a new Galaxy however despite what sounds like it would be a massive catastrophic event scientists predict that no stars will actually collide with one another when this happens but it's also full of booze even though the universe is mostly empty space that doesn't mean there isn't plenty of cool stuff out there for example just 6,500 light years away is a region of space known as W3 it's a section of the larger W3 region an area of space that is heavily studied due to the large number of massive stars being formed there in w30 scientists noticed a massive Cloud but this wasn't a cloud of gas dust or water it was a giant cloud of alcohol it's not the only one either near the consternation of quiller about 10,000 light years away is a cloud of alcohol a thousand times the diameter of our solar system it contains 400 quintilian lers of alcohol far more than Humanity could ever figure out what to do with to give you some sense of scale if every single person drank 300,000 lers of pure alcohol every single day it would take us a billion years to cons consume the entire Cloud unfortunately this would never be possible and not just because nobody could drink 3,000 times their body weight each day the alcohol in these clouds is methyl alcohol or wood alcohol rather than ethyl alcohol it would basically be like drinking antifreeze disappointing as that may be observing these clouds of forbidden alcohol may still help scientists better understand the process by which massive stars are formed Venus spins backwards as we mentioned at the top of today's episode our solar system was formed from a spinning cloud of primordial dust when viewing the solar system top down from directly above the sun's North Pole the Sun and all of the planets rotate in a counterclockwise direction or at least we believe they used to but Venus and Uranus are a little bit different Uranus is rotating sideways while Venus is rotating counterclockwise since the Sun and all planets formed from the same spinning cloud of dust it's assumed that they all formed spinning in the same direction that the initial Cloud was we can't say for certain what happens with Venus and Uranus but we do have some guesses it's believed that very early in the Solar System's life all of the planets were rotating in the same direction however if Uranus collided with something roughly the size of Mars that could have knocked it onto its side causing the sideways spin that we observe today similarly if Venus collided with an object roughly the same size as it the force of that Collision could have been enough to cause it to rotate in the other direction interestingly this mostly uniform rotation isn't consistent throughout the Universe relative to our sun other stars and planets rotate in every direction imaginable and the universe does not appear to have any preferred Orient for this rotation the days keep getting longer on the topic of planetary rotation there's also the matter of Earth's rotation it currently takes the Earth 23 hours and 56 minutes to completely rotate on its axis of course it was also moving in its orbit around the Sun during that time so it takes another 4 minutes before the same spot on earth is tangentially to the sun again these two factors combine to give us the 24-hour day however it hasn't always been that way Earth used to spin much faster and just 600 million years ago one day was only 22 hours go back a few billion years and one Earth day was only 6 hours so why is our planet's rotation slowing down and making the days longer it's because of our oldest Nemesis the moon the tides created on Earth by the moon are slowing down the rate of which it rotates by about 1.7 milliseconds every Century that doesn't seem like a lot and in terms of how it will affect any one person's life it absolutely isn't but over time this does add up in fact given long enough the Earth will become tidy locked with the Moon the same way that it's tidy locked with us when that happens one Earth day would be extended to 29.5 days the amount of time it takes for the moon to orbit the earth luckily the sun will swallow us long before that's expected to happen so everyone will be dead yay fleas outperform space shuttles acceleration is generally measured in m/s squared and the numbers are often surprisingly low for example the average car can only accelerate at 3 to 4 m a second this is actually about the same range as your typical commercial jet the difference is that a jet can maintain that acceleration for longer however once things start accelerating more quickly they stop being measured in meters of seconds and they're just measured in G's 1 G is the acceleration due to Earth's gravity and it's roughly equivalent to 9.8 m/ seconds humans rarely experience accelerations greater than 1G and there's little need to it might be convenient if everything could be a little bit faster but the only time experiencing multiple G's is really necessary is when you're trying to escape Earth's gravity altogether even then the numbers don't don't get that crazy with space shuttles maxing out at about 5gs but that brings us to the mighty and annoying flea fleas have a special elastin protein above their hind legs where they're able to store large amounts of energy and release it all at once once a fle is primed itself it can leap 8 cm that's 3 in in a single millisecond that's 100 G's worth of acceleration and though the fleas remain unfazed by the pressure that this causes this would likely prove fatal to a human the 100 G's of flea routinely experiened is the same that the human body would be faced with in a particularly severe car crash babies have extra bones barring things like amputations it's safe to assume that an adult human will have 206 bones in their body this number is virtually the same for everybody and since teeth aren't actually bones you are unlikely to see that number change as you age however while the number of bones people have doesn't change once we're adults you are actually born with about 50% more bones than you currently have babies have about 300 bones in their body some of which which are made entirely of cartilage these bones are softer and more malleable than adult bones which is important for the fetus being able to be curled up in the womb being extra bendy also makes it easier for the baby to be delivered through the birth canal though it's still hardly a trivial task the difference in adult bones and babies bones is also one of the reasons that children often appear to be made out of rubber able to bounce off things without getting injured so that all answers why babies have 100 more bones than adults but the question Still Remains where did they all go did they all pass into a diaper unnoticed well no it turns out that the extra bones don't go anywhere as humans age the bones become more calcified making them harder and more rigid during this process many of the smaller bones also fused together into larger singular bones dropping the number down to 206 that we're all familiar with you are full of plastic plastic was first invented in 1907 and while the total production numbers dating that far back can't be ascertained for sure what we can tell you is that over 8 billion tons of the stuff has been produced since the 1950s and production keeps increasing year after year Plastics are not biodegradable so while they do break down they don't actually decompose they just break down into smaller and smaller pieces this can take decades or probably even centuries depending on the environmental conditions but the result is tiny pieces of plastic known as microplastics and nanoplastics and they are absolutely everywhere microplastics have been found in the snow at top Mount Everest deep in the Mariana Trench and even in the air that we breathe in recent years they've also been found in the lungs bloodstream and digestive tracks of humans so how terrified of this Revelation do we need to be well we don't actually know it's certainly not a good thing but we don't yet know whether or not it's actively bad microplastics are tiny and can easily pass through our digestive system without causing harm that they could also carry with them bacteria or other toxins numerous studies involving animals show that there could be potential dangers from microplastics in the body but research involving humans is virtually non-existent at this point of course given the ubiquity of microplastics good luck finding a control group for future studies icy heart in 2004 NASA Spritz a Space Telescope discovered an exoplanet just 33 light years away from us the planet known as GLE 436b was the first ever hot Neptune discovered a hot Neptune unsurprisingly is a planet similar in size to Neptune or Uranus but orbiting close enough to its star to be hot in this planet's case its orbital radius is only 30% out of Earth's meaning it is closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun because of this the giant planet has a surface temperature at about 800 kelv which makes its composition all the more interesting based on our observations the planet is too small to be mostly made of gas like Jupiter but it's too big to be a rocky planet like Earth as far as researchers can tell the planet seems to be covered in burning hot ice it's believed that the planet consists of an exotic form of water formed into ice by pressure rather than temperature preventing it from melting and boiling under extreme heat you can milk anything with nipples in the comedy Meet the Parents after Ben Stiller said that you could milk anything with nipples Robert daero defiantly asked I have nipples Greg could you milk me but surprisingly the answer to that question is yes mammals are the only animals to have nipples and they are present on all mammals male or female except for monotes like the dark build platypus in utero all mamalian fetuses begin as females it isn't until about 2 months along in human development anyway that the s gene on the Y chromosome will trigger essentially turning the ovaries and vagina inside out to create a penis and testicles which will then release testosterone to further affect fetal development but because we all started off as females nipples and the inner mechanism required to make them produce milk already in place that said it's still rare for men to be able to breastfeed the ability to lactate is controlled by the hormone practin which is usually only released as a response to having been pregnant but prolactin production is controlled Prim by the pituitary gland so tumors in that area of the brain can cause unregulated release of prolactin and stimulate milk production in men there are also numerous examples both modern and historical of men being able to breastfeed after the mother has either died or become too sick to nurse their baby a life in review it's a saying you've probably heard a thousand times in film and television I saw my life flash before my eyes this phenomenon known as Life review is widely reported among people who have near-death experience es but is there actually any scientific basis for this or do people believe they experience it because of a shared cultural expectation about what happens when we die for a long time there was no way to answer this because it was difficult to study you can't just hook up a bunch of sick or elderly people to EEG scans and wait for them to die and if the researchers killed the test subject it would call into question the ethics of that experiment wouldn't it as a result it wasn't until 2021 until a group of researchers accidentally stumbled upon the answer to this question an 87-year-old epilepsy patient was hooked looked up to an EG as part of a study seeking to detect and treat seizures when he suddenly suffered a heart attack because the patient had do not resuscitate order the researchers continued the brain scan while he died what the scan showed was that for 30 seconds before the heart stopped beating and continuing until 30 seconds after the heart stopped the brain seemed to be rapidly replying memories so yes your life really does Flash before your eyes before you die everything wants to be crabs in biology there's something known as convergence Evolution as part of the process of evolution and natural selection there are certain traits that have evolved in different unrelated species multiple times thanks to similar environmental pressures for example our planet is covered in sunlight during the day so the development of photo receptor cells that use this light to generate a sense of vision provided a major competitive Advantage this led to eyes developing on Earth at least 40 different times all completely unrelated to one another there are countless examples of convergence Evolution across our planet but one of the most striking is crabs for reasons known only to them all Crustaceans seem to want to evolve into crabs it's so common that there's a word for this cariz creatures on earth have independently evolved into crabs no less than five times or six if you count pubic lice password protected Mafia Birds the brown-headed cowbird is a species of bird native to North America particularly the southern portion as it prefers warm climates they're also the cowbirds are brood parasites meaning that they lay their eggs in the nests of other birds so that those birds will raise their nestlings at the expense of their own offspring of course Cowbird eggs rarely look anything like the other eggs in the nest so host birds will often try to remove the parasitic eggs bury them in the nest so that they never hatch or even kick the nestlings out of their nests after hatching it's hardly an unreasonable response but it's not one that the adult cowbirds take too kindly to the adult birds will periodically check on the nests where they have deposited the eggs to make sure that the eggs or nestlings are doing okay if the parasitic eggs have been removed the adult cowbirds may result to what ornithologist s have dubbed Mafia Behavior they will ransack nests to remove eggs or kill their intended host Birds Offspring and even destroy the nests entirely forcing them to be rebuilt after teaching the host bird a lesson the cowbirds lay eggs in the rebuilt nests 85% of the time cowbirds also use what is referred to as a species recognition password pre-programmed into the brains of all nestling cowbirds at Birth when the nestlings here are the cowbirds vocalize the secret password it triggers them to abandon their host nest and join the flock of their own speech es two hearts beating as one have you ever felt really in sync with another person maybe it was a romantic partner relative or a close friend it turns out that you might be in sync with that person not just on an emotional or intellectual level but on a physiological level as well numerous Studies have been conducted on the topic but the most famous was conducted at the University of California Davis making headlines leading up to Valentine's Day in 2013 a bunch of couples were each seated at a table with Partners sitting across from each other while their breathing and heart rates were monitors they were instructed to look into each other's eyes but not to speak or move the experiment was then repeated with the couples mixed up and paired with strangers what the research showed was that the couples would match their heartbeats and respiration while strangers did not similar Studies have replicated these results demonstrating the same effect also exists in mothers playing with their babies or people having a really good blind date unfortunately for the ladies while your husband or boyfriend's body may be in sync with yours you still can't expect them to compromise the changes in heart rate and respiration were predominantly made by women's bodies adjusting to match their Partners a child accidentally discovered a molecule back in 2012 Kenneth bur handed his classroom of fifth grade students the standard ball and stick models used to build representations of molecules most students built simple molecules like CO2 or h2o as would be expected however 10-year-old Clara Len put together an extremely complex molecule with the formula C5 n412 Clara asked Kenneth whether what she built was a real molecule or not and like any good teacher in a situation like this he gave the honest answer that he didn't know rather than just ignoring Clara's complex model he instead took a photo of it sent it to his friend at humbal State University to ask the same question the surprising answer was that it wasn't a molecule yet but it certainly could be the molecule now known as tetron toxic carbon is perfectly viable despite never having been observed in nature there is another compound with the same chemical formula but the atoms are arranged so differently that this would qualify as a new molecule computer simulation showed that it potentially has multiple interesting properties such as the possibility of being used as either an explosive or for energy storage and both Clara and Kenneth were listed as co-authors on the eventual research paper that was published humans are still evolving when we think of evolution it's easier to think on a large scale fish crawled out of the ocean and evolved into mammals which then branched off and evolved into all sorts of different creatures chimpanzees are Humanity's closest living relative though not the closest relative we've ever had and we are clearly extremely different but even Works slowly over time the fish that is the common ancestor of all mammals didn't just suddenly give birth to a giraffe one day there are numerous examples of humans continued Evolution many of them in fairly recent history over the past 10,000 years since we started Living in permanent civilizations our brains have gotten smaller sometime between then and 6,000 years ago blue eyes evolved since blue eyes allow more light to pass through and thus blue-eyed people of better night vision this may have been an evolutionary adaptation to the long dark winters of Northern Europe all mammals drink milk from their mothers as babies but by adulthood they become lactose intolerant but in areas where dairy farming was common particularly in Europe humans evolved to have lactose persistence allowing us to drink milk into adulthood although it can have serious negative Health consequences CLE cell evolved in Africa to provide a competitive Advantage as it provided natural resistance to malaria even living in a city like Denver required humans to evolve as we were not naturally suited for high altitudes where there's less oxygen the list goes on and on and while each individual example of human evolution maybe a small change in the somewhat localized population that's how Evolution on our planet has always worked most of it just happened before we were around to [Music] watch

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Published: Sun Apr 07 2024