WTF science

[Absol-lutelty awesome!]

Basically, post any ridiculous science fact you know here...

These can include anything from how a single cell can do something crazy, to how a single tick almost killed all humans in Europe.

[Absol-lutelty awesome!]

Now, something I learned.

Hysterical strength

Adrenaline is our basic power up, it allows us to use more and more oxygen the more we have, and hardens our muscles to increase strength greatly, now something you might've not known, is the fact that with enough adrenaline, and a strong scenario, such as your child trapped under a car, you can gain so much strength from the rush at that given moment that you can lift that car off given person.

Another odd strength fact

Yelling does make you stronger. It's a proven fact that grunting, screaming, and producing any loud sound of rage will raise your adrenaline levels so high, that you can accomplish some pretty amazing feats in this hyped up state.

[Gyaradoskiller]

A single bolt of lightning contains enough energy to cook 100,000 pieces of toast.

Edited August 23, 2014 by Gyaradoskiller

[Sutoratosu]

^A single bolt of lightning is also 3x hotter than the sun.

95% of all matter in the universe is actually invisible. It's called Dark Matter.

The mass of the entire earths atmosphere is estimated to be 5.5 quadrillion tons.

Edited August 24, 2014 by Stratos

[Snap Crackle Pop]

Heh, suicide sacs, false feet, the link between types of ear wax and body odour, places that are perpetually under a lightning storm... So much...

[Tempest]

A teaspoon of the toxin botulinum could kill around a million people.

We only need to know pi to the 36th digit to calculate the circumference of the universe to an accuracy of one hydrogen atom. Yet we've calculated it to trillions of digits.

It's impossible to balance a pencil on its tip, assuming it's sharp. Even if it was perfectly balanced in a vacuum, as air movement of air will cause it to fall over, the vibrations of the particles in the pencil will cause it to fall over in just under 3 seconds.

There's a cloud of alcohol in space that would be enough to produce quintillions of beers.

There's also a planet of pure diamond (probably a core of a dead star) that's worth quadrillions of dollars.

There's a supermassive blackhole that was launched out of a galaxy at millions of miles per hour. This thing has a tonnage a billion times more massive than our sun. The forces involved are insane.

There's something called the great attractor beyond the observable universe. It has to be unfathomably large because a good chunk of the universe is being pulled towards it, including the local group: our galaxy and all the one's near us.

Magnetars are massive remnants of dead stars. They're a kind of neutron star; one that is the mass of the sun packed into an area the size of Chicago. Here's the catch though: the magnetic fields of the star can rip the iron from your body before you even see the star.

Stars undergo earthquakes too. Neutron star quakes are some of the most intense phenomena in the universe. If one were to happen within 1000 lightyears of us or 6.56 quadrillion miles, it would destroy earth.

There is an object in deep space putting out huge amounts of radio waves; so much so, that the object must be going 4x the speed of light.

I'll keep updating when I get a chance.

[Felicity]

I can cook toast. That's a fact, right?

[Guest]

Yelling does make you stronger. It's a proven fact that grunting, screaming, and producing any loud sound of rage will raise your adrenaline levels so high, that you can accomplish some pretty amazing feats in this hyped up state.

Oh so THAT'S why anime characters yell their attacks' names so much.

One person CAN actually turn invisible, but the problem with that is because of how physics work, the invisible person wouldn't be able to see anything at all either.

Edited August 28, 2014 by Telos

[Tempest]

Things can actually teleport. It's called quantum tunneling. The sun couldn't exist without it. So in theory, the entire sun could just teleport away. Of course, the chance is so minuscule, it wouldn't happen in a billion billion billion years.

If the universe is indeed infinite, or even above 10^70 meters across, there is statistically an exact copy of you.

If the LHC we're to produce a black hole, it would evaporate in less than a second.

If the LHC produced a strange quark however, the entire planet would change to stranglets. In other words we all die. But the outer atmosphere gets bombarded with much higher energies than the LHC could ever produce.

If a pin was heated to the temperature of the core of the sun, everyone within a 1000 miles would die.

Scientists actually cooled something below absolute zero. Measurements put it below absolute zero, but the actual temperature was nearly infinite.

There'a actually an absolute hot. All particles above absolute zero produce radiation. Eventually it's so hot, the radiation it produces has a wave length of the plank length - the smallest distance possible in the universe. After that, we don't know what happens. We assume it's absolute hot.

The only truly random thing in the universe is particle physics itself, like whether or not an unstable atom will decay or whether or not a particle changes states.

If we managed to split a proton or nuetron, the energy release would be insane, potentially even more than a matter-antimatter collision and certainly more than a nuclear fusion. However the resulting quarks will simply create another quark to create mesons.

There are only four fundamental forces in the universe: gravity, electromagnetism, weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force.

Electromagnetism is what gives us friction and most of the "forces" we perceive.

The weak nuclear force is the weakest and causes protons to change to neutrons and vice versa when a neutrino passes within one thousand of the size of a proton.

If you were to go faster than the speed of light, time would flow in reverse.

We actually do have a way to go faster than the speed of light, because space itself can go faster.

As the universe expands, it eventually will expand faster than the speed of light, and we will be unable to see other galaxies. However the night sky won't look horribly dull because most of what we see is in our own galaxy or our neighboring galaxies which are tethered by gravity.

Graham's number is a number so large, if you were to imagine it in your head, it would collapse into a black hole.

0.999... actually equals one.

Obviously I'm a physics and astronomy person rather than a biology person,

[片思い]

It's impossible to balance a pencil on its tip, assuming it's sharp. Even if it was perfectly balanced in a vacuum, as air movement of air will cause it to fall over, the vibrations of the particles in the pencil will cause it to fall over in just under 3 seconds.

sauce please? or elaborate because "as air movement of air" not making sense and also i was under the assumption there "in a vacuum" implies there is not air to be moved

just interested

[Maelstrom]

he was saying that in a vacuum (since normally air currents would affect it and topple it), it would still fall over due to the particle movement of the pencil.

[Bluewolf]

Time for some random biology facts that you may or may not know (you probably know):

Human's will die if they consume a polar bears liver, for our bodies cannot handle that much Vitamin A.

A full head of human hair is strong enough to support 12 tons.

Honey does not spoil.

There was a ten foot tall ape named Gigantopithecus that is now extint. It's fossil record indicates that the species very likely buried their dead, which indicates a cognitive level only one ape possesses.

The T-Rex lived closer in time to humans than the Stegosaurus

A group of Ferrets is called a buisness.

The acid in our stomachs is strong enough to dissolve zinc, fortuneatly the cells lining our stomachs renew to quickly to be dissolved.

When you sleep, you grow by about 8mm (0.3in). The next day you shrink back to your former height. The reason is that your cartilage discs are squeezed like sponges by the force of gravity when you stand or sit.

Each kidney contains 1 million individual filters. They filter an average of around 1.3 liters (2.2 pints) of blood per minute, and expel up to 1.4 liters (2.5 pints) a day of urine.

The focusing muscles of the eyes move around 100,000 times a day. To give your leg muscles the same workout, you would need to walk 80km (50 miles) every day.

A single human blood cell takes only 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.

we have about the same number of hairs on our bodies as a chimpanzee, it's just that our hairs are useless, so fine they are almost invisible.

Edited August 28, 2014 by Bluewolf

[Tempest]

You got most of those from the top website when you search strange science facts. >.<

sauce please? or elaborate because "as air movement of air" not making sense and also i was under the assumption there "in a vacuum" implies there is not air to be moved

just interested

That was badly worded, basically, if it wasn't in a vacuum, the air currents would push it over. Even if it was in a vacuum, the particles in the pencil would vibrate and cause it to fall off balance.

[Arkhi]

Each kidney contains 1 million individual filters. They filter an average of around 1.3 liters (2.2 pints) of blood per minute, and expel up to 1.4 liters (2.5 pints) a day of urine.

As hilarious as "a day of urine" sounds, I think the wording is a bit wonky.

[Absol-lutelty awesome!]

People with arthritis can sense coming rain storms.

Proof: arthritis builds tension as air density rises, meaning if it hurts like a sonofab****, get ready for some rain.

[Absol-lutelty awesome!]

New fact: in a study it was found that if we lost our "humanity" and became completely feral, our strength would triple or even more.

[Omega_Ra1der]

Mind-blowing: more humidity it is, a baseball can move faster. Reverse is true.

Edited September 6, 2014 by OmegaRa1der

[Deleted User]

http://nation.foxnews.com/culture/2011/03/04/study-staring-breasts-increases-heart-health

[Snap Crackle Pop]

Check out the YouTuber VSauce. He has some really good videos of this subject.

[wallacethepig]

I'm just gonna leave this here.

http://xkcd.com/

Science facts, science facts...Well, there's a protein called Pikachurin in your eyes that is essential for for the fast responses of vision cells.

The Andromeda Galaxy is likely to crash into our own Milky Way galaxy sometime in the distant future.

If you wanted to turn the Earth into a black hole, you'd have to force all of its mass together until it was around the size of a pea.

[Tempest]

The moon most likely used to be part of earth.

The huge large quasar group is the largest known structure in the universe. It contains a grand total of 73 supermassive blackholes and is 4 billion light years across, or about a million million billion (sextillion) miles across, which is four times bigger than anything in the universe should be.

There's actually something even bigger called the Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall. It's 10 billion light years across. If the sun were a ping pong ball, this structure would be about a billion miles long.

If two plates are in a vacuum, and they were close to each other, they would eventually be pushed together. Not by gravity, but by the casmir force, which is when virtual particles push on the plates.

Virtual particles pop in and out of existence randomly and are a mystery to science. They may be the cause of the expansion of the universe.

There are thousands of particles flying through you're body every second.

Protons and Neutrons can actually be broken down even farther into quarks. There are 6 different types of qaurks, and protons and nuetrons, which are baryons, have three. That means there could be 216 different types of particles like protons; except they all decay within millionths of a second. Even nuetrons are unstable if they aren't in a nucleus. Protons are the only stable one.

There are 17 particles in the standard model - six quarks which make up protons, six leptons, which include electrons, and five bosons which mediate the various forces.

Particles can act as a particle and a wave at the exact same time.

If you know the exact speed and direction of a particle, then you can't know it's position, and if you know the exact position, you can't know the direction it's moving. It's called the Uncertainty Principle.

What you do now can actually affect the past. If you passed a light through a double slit, and then observed the particle, it effectively has to choose which slit it went through right at the moment you looked, causing it to change the past. (This is badly explained but I dunno how to explain it better)

If you put a cat in a box with a bomb that may or may not go off (it's completely, truly random), until you look, the cat is both dead and alive at the same time. It's called Schrodinger's Cat.

You can send information instantaneously across the entire universe without breaking the speed of the light using quantum entanglement. If two particles are created, as particles are always created in pairs, they're properties always cancel each other out. So if someone were to force one of the particles to change properties, the other one would instantly change too, even if they were infinitely distant from each other.

Special Relativity states that time is different for everyone. There is no past, present, or future because of it. Only what each individual body undergoes as time changes depending on the speed one travels at.

Until we observer particles at the subatomic level, they are just energy with an infinite amount of possibilities, and by looking, we force it to choose a state.

The sun would explode without quantum mechanics since classical mechanics says it would give off an infinite amount of energy.

If you converted all the mass in you into energy, it would be the same as 30 fusion bombs.

- This has been Physics with Tempest

[Tempest]

It's not /always/ bad. Dehydrated dihydrogen monoxide is actually good for you.

[Andi]

If you ask someone for something, like "can I go before you in the line" and you add "because". then it's more than 70% chans that they will let you go in front, you don't have to say any more, but if you don't say "because" it falls to 10% chans. amazing how you can maipulate people. I use this all the time.

The time from the rising of the kheopspyramid in Giza to the birth of Kleopatra is 500 years longer than the time from Kleopatras birth to today. Time becomes longer the farther one gose back in time. time will be from our perspectiv senter around our self, becaus the past is to long and the futher have yet to happen. and we are to self opesest.

An googol plex is a nr that is so big that if you wroth an zero on every atom in the univers it still would not be enough. so if a an univers was big enough to have so many atoms the chanc of getting and exsakt copy of your self, because all atoms are atoms and they will by one point act just like som other atoms. it will be so eksakt that maybe and probely you and the kopi will think alike.

If humanity won't to survaive on this planet one most let go of the humanity. because humanity is a trap. and we need a plague or we will die out, we are a living planet the chans of us living at all is so littel that we have a responsebilety to survive. the dinosurs lived for millions of years befor die out

we will die out after just som ten tousens of years.

if no a wormhole can make stoff travel faster then light the Einstien was wrong. but if ligth goes trow the wormhole ligth will be faster then light itslef making Einstien both rigth and

wrong. but he was a person of sciens and can not say anything it true, if he did he would be a beliver, and belives belongs to superstision and religion.

but talk about Einstein he himself was born smart, because of his conected brain. a normal brain is split in left-, rigth brain, the litel brain and cortex. but Einstein brain were hard

wierd all over the brain so he could conect toughts/ signal more and faster the a normal brain. it's very rear to find.

if light is wawes and partical but not at the same time then what if one could stop ligth in and open space. making ligth stay still full of energi. then one could build a

wall of ligth by turning on the ligth. this will also make the light wall impossibel to see sins we use ligth to see, and all ligth that would reflect of the wall would just stop in the wall the only way to know it's there would be to touch it if possibel.

wow, i most stop no. this went over to my theoris. Sorry, for my typing I suck at wrigting I'm more of a talker when it comes down to stuff i know or have thougth. Again sorry for the typing.

[Tempest]

Actually wormholes would be valid under the theory of relativity, as nothing truly would be going faster than the speed of light. Space itself is folded in a sense, kind of like folding the corners of a peice of paper together. You wouldn't move any faster, but the distance would be shorter,

Also, if a particle had an imaginary mass, it would have to go faster than the speed of light, which is also valid under relativity and lorentz factors. But they can never slow down to below the speed of light.

The speed of light actually changes. In some substances, such as a rubiduim compound, strange things can occur. When cooled to just a centigrade above absolute zero, the compund changes to become a bose-einstien condinsate, which is when quntaum effects become macroscopic. The speed of light is just 38 m/s in this supercooled compound.

Light can actually be stopped too. We trapped a photon for several minutes before it escaped.

[Mikzal]

If you like funny science facts watch Vsauce and QI

The most radioactive thing humans eat is the brazil nut from the para tree. It's 1000 times more radioactive than other foods.

The more gender equality a country has, the more sex the population has.

Good thing I live in a coutry that is ranked in the top three there. And on the top of a ton of other lists