50 mind-blowing science facts about our incredible world
SOURCE:Live Science|BY: Laura Geggel
If you're looking for weird facts about animals, gross human body facts or just something a bit random, get ready to geek out with these fascinating bits of trivia.
(Image credit: Alona Horkova/Getty Images)
The world is a mysterious place, which gives Live Science plenty of fodder for our popular Life's Little Mysteries series that runs every weekend. We've been writing mysteries since 2004, and we still haven't run out of weird things to cover. Each mystery comes with a multitude of facts, like which animals are evolving the fastest and why Australia has so many venomous animals. Honestly, we could go on, but we'd have to link to our thousands of mysteries. So, for your geeking-out pleasure, we've pulled out 50 of the most impressive facts here.
3. Evacuating your bowels stimulates the vagus nerve, which can lower your blood pressure and heart rate — no wonder it feels so good to poop.
12. The slowest-moving land animal is likely the banana slug, which moves at the extremely leisurely pace of 0.006 mph (0.0096 km/h), or a tenth of an inch per second (2.7 millimeters per second). By comparison, the common garden snail glides along at a relatively speedy 0.03 mph (0.048 km/h), or half an inch per second (1.3 centimeters per second).
16. Even though the Colorado River toad releases the chemical 5-MeO-DMT — one of the most potent psychedelics around — from poison glands in its head, you can't get high by licking it.
21. A bullet fired from a 223 Remington leaves the weapon at up to 2,727 mph (4,390 km/h) — fast enough to cover 11 football fields in a single second.
25. Despite evidence to the contrary, Christopher Columbus continued to claim the lands he "discovered" were parts of Asia, likely so he'd get paid.
26. The primary mirror on the James Webb Space Telescopeis 21.3 feet (6.5 meters) in diameter, giving it a total collecting area of more than 270 square feet (25 square m).
28. There are roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in the observable universe.
29. It takes five to 10 years for a body in a coffin to completely decompose down to a skeleton.
30. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is a web of ocean currents that loop through the Atlantic Ocean, moving 600 million cubic feet (17 million cubic meters) of water per second and 1.2 petawatts of heat — roughly the same amount of heat put out by a million power plants running at the same time.
31. The deepest place on Earth is the bottom of the Mariana Trench, which lies about 35,876 feet (10,935 meters) below the surface. That makes it about 7,000 feet (2,100 m) deeper than Mount Everest is tall.
32. Researchers have shown that octopuses can be fooled by a version of the "rubber hand illusion," by stroking a real octopus arm hidden from view and a visible fake octopus arm at the same time. When the fake arm was pinched, the octopus reacted as if its own arm had been attacked — by changing color or pulling back.
34. Roughly half of all eukaryotic species on Earth are insects.
35. Mount Everest is only the tallest mountain by altitude, at 29,031.69 feet (8,848.86 m) above sea level. If you measure Mauna Kea, an inactive volcano in Hawaii, from base to peak, it's actually taller, at 33,497 feet (10,211 m) in altitude.
42. Dragonflies are one of nature's most effective hunters, catching prey up to 97% of the time. By comparison, tigers have a success rate of only 10%.
46. On average, a person produces about 30 to 91 cubic inches (500 to 1,500 cubic centimeters) of gas every day, regardless of their diet. Thankfully, over 99% of those gases are odorless.
48. The record for the most times a piece of paper has been folded in half is 12. If you were to fold it 42 times, it would be more than 273,280 miles (439,800 kilometers) high — more than the average distance between Earth and the moon.
Laura is the managing editor at Live Science. She also runs the archaeology section and the Life's Little Mysteries series. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Scholastic, Popular Science and Spectrum, a site on autism research. She has won multiple awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association for her reporting at a weekly newspaper near Seattle. Laura holds a bachelor's degree in English literature and psychology from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in science writing from NYU.
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