Name one or more favorite scientific facts!
I'll start. :)
The stars you see in the sky at night are snapshots of the distant past, and the stars themselves could be long dead. |
Every one of your ancestors, in spite of the odds, lived long enough to reproduce.
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There is more carbon missing from agricultural soils worldwide than the extra carbon in the atmosphere causing AGW.
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ETA: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/ancient_stars.png ETA: The one major galaxy we can see is a couple million years old. |
Angle of incidence equals angle of reflection.
Useful in photography, billiards, racquetball, jai-alai, marbles, light waves, sound waves, radio waves, too much to count. |
When you turn your heater on in Winter you are not trying to get more hot, but trying to cool down at a more comfortable rate.
Norm |
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This e.g. is definitely not true in the case of ball games like the four you mentioned, except as a rough first order approximation. It neglects the rotational momentum of the balls. |
The non-existence of the intra-mercurial planet "Vulcan", a planet, first proposed over 100 years ago, in order to try to explain the errors in Mercury's precession measurements...
Turns out that Mercury's precession errors are caused by the massive gravity well of the Sun due to General relativistic effects. This is beautifully explained for the layman in this short missive by Isaac Asimov - an oldie but a goodie http://geobeck.tripod.com/frontier/planet.htm |
If you were to disassemble a man into his constituent atoms and then weigh those atoms, they would be about the same weight as the man. But if you disassembled the atoms into protons, neutrons and electrons and weighed each of those, they would only weigh about 5% of the guy.
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- About 1% of the static you saw when not tuned to channel on an old analog television set was background radiation from the Big Bang.
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Beats the hell out of me. The energy holding the particles together is somehow also mass. I got it from a book about questions science has yet to answer. |
Banana trees "walk"
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From the genetic standpoint we are more like yeast than unlike it.
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eta: Do you remember the name of the book? |
Per size and ratio, gonorrhea is the strongest (known) creature on earth.
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You have been alive for more than 4.5 billion years, sort of.
Literally every living cell in your body has been functioning continuously for all that time. |
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So in effect everyone over 7 is 7 years old |
Found it
7-10
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There were many facts in 'Living With The Stars' by Karel and Iris Schrijver - far too many to remember - but there was one about thousands of C4 atoms in each of our cels every second breaking down into something else, nitrogen iirc. Sorry to be a bit vague! :)
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The biomass of all humans is roughly equal to the biomass of all ants.
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Presumably with ants being so strong, that if every human sat together on every ant together the ants could all carry us to the pub. Would need to be a big pub though.......Actually we could get all the ants to build the worlds biggest anthill and the humans could fashion it into massive pub. Coasters and glasses might be an issue, but we could get the ants to collect nuts and other finger food |
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You might be thinking of the fact that every atom in our bodies was formed billions of years ago inside stars (one of my favourite facts). |
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Just quoting the (most) important bit for anyone that doesn't want to read the entire (fantastic) article. Quote:
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"a small proportion of the the atoms in your gold wedding ring/engagement ring/necklace/whatever were formed the the fires of supernovae, but the majority those atoms come from an even more spectacular event, the collision of two neutron stars." |
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What am I missing here? Did you mean "every atom" and not "every living cell"? ETA: ninja'd |
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Paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than with you or me.
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Not so much a specific fact but the way some things in the math keep turning up like pi, e and sequences like the Fibonacci series or sines and cosines or how often parabolas turn up. It's impressive to me how universal some of these things are.
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The male elephant has a motile penis.
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Most of what you call static is thermal noise generated in the receiver. Very little is picked up by the antenna as you could see when you disconnected it. Also I think there is only little background radiation from the Big Bang in the VHF and UHF range (up to about 1 GHz) that could be picked up by a TV receiver. I would be quite interested if you could prove me wrong. That would be one more thing I didn't get. |
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Will Ferrell has been funny to some people some of the time.
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The issue isn't that cells don't die, it's that the ones that are living are products of cell division, not of a brand new cell being created. |
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