Weird Facts

Weird Science 3

Weird Science Weird Science 3

  1. If you put a mirror half a light year away from Earth and you looked at it through a telescope you could see a year into the Earth’s past. Source 1 2

  2. Astronauts must have good airflow around them when they sleep, otherwise they, “…could wake up oxygen-deprived and gasping for air, because a bubble of their own exhaled carbon dioxide had formed around their heads.” Source

  3. NASA is currently working on a warp drive that could get us to Alpha Centauri in 2 weeks. Source
  4. A car traveling at a constant speed of 60 miles per hour would take over 48 million years to reach the nearest star (other than our sun), Proxima Centauri. This is about 685,000 average human lifetimes.
  5. Scientists are working on a “GPS” that works in space. It uses x-ray’s emitted by pulsars to get a position anywhere, accurate to 5km. Its called XNAV. Source
  6. A researcher at Cornell University has created a robot that “evolves”. Through a clever algorithm, it spends its days creating better versions of itself. Source
  7. Scientists recently announced the discovery of a new planet orbiting a star that's practically next door - relatively speaking. There's also the possibility that the system might contain a second planet. The star, Epsilon Eridani, is only 10.5 light years away — which is just down the block in astronomical terms — making it the nearest star known to have such a planet. The new planet appears similar to Jupiter, but half again as big. The discovery was made by a team of researchers led by scientists at the McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas at Austin.
  8. A cosmic year is the length of time it takes the sun to complete one revolution around the center of the Milky Way galaxy. That's approximately 225 million earth years.
  9. The sun is estimated to be between 20 and 21 cosmic years old.
  10. If the Sun was scaled to the size of basketball; Mercury would be the size of a grain of sand-33 feet away, Earth would be the size of a BB shot-86 feet away, Jupiter would be the size of a gumball-445 feet away, and the nearest star would be another basketball-5000 miles away. Source
  11. It takes a plastic container 50000 years to start decomposing.
  12. For a Manhattan Project experiment Albert Stevens was secretly injected with what was expected to be a lethal dose of plutonium, and paid for providing samples of his urine and feces. Source
  13. Quaker Oates and MIT conducted an experiment on unsuspecting, mentally retarded children. They tricked them into eating radioactive cereal by telling them they were in a “science club.” Source
  14. Lab tests can detect traces of alcohol in urine six to 12 hours after a person has stopped drinking.
  15. Sound at the right vibration can bore holes through a solid object.
  16. The color black is produced by the complete absorption of light rays.
  17. There are 3 golf balls sitting on the moon.
  18. The Sun has a diameter of 864,000 miles.
  19. Air is denser in cold weather. A wind of the same speed can exert 25 percent more force during the winter as compared to the summer.
  20. An iceberg contains more heat than a match.
  21. Every cubic mile of seawater holds over 150 million tons of minerals.
  22. A temperature of 70 million degrees Celsius was generated at Princeton University in 1978. This was during a fusion-ism experiment and is the highest man-made temperature ever.
  23. Bacteria can reproduce sexually.
  24. The pressure at the center of the Earth is 27,000 tons per square inch.
  25. There are five trillion atoms in one pound of iron.
  26. German chemist Hennig Brand discovered phosphorus while he was examining urine.
  27. The densest substance on Earth is the metal "osmium."
  28. When placed on maps using food sources as cities, slime molds have almost perfectly replicated major train systems in Europe, the USA, Tokyo, and Canada. Source
  29. The clock at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., will gain or lose only one second in 300 years because it uses cesium atoms.
  30. Vinegar was the strongest acid known in the ancient times.
  31. A shrimp has more than a hundred pair of chromosomes in each cell nucleus.
  32. About 500 meteorites hit the Earth each year. The largest known meteorite was found at Grootfontein in Namibia, southwest Africa, in 1920. It is 9 feet (2.75m) long and 8 feet (2.43m) wide.
  33. According to experts, large caves tend to "breathe"; they inhale and exhale great quantities of air when the barometric pressure on the surface changes, and air rushes in or out seeking equilibrium.
  34. Because of a large orbital eccentricity, Pluto was closer to the sun than Neptune between January 1979 and March 1999.
  35. The whirling cloud, a flat cloud hovering over the peak of an extinct volcano, Mount Jirinaj in Indonesia, affected by hot air rising from the crater, spins swiftly around and around.
  36. The Earth gets heavier each day by tons, as meteoric dust settles on it.
  37. The earth rotates on its axis more slowly in March than in September.
  38. The first man-made insecticide was DDT.
  39. We are in the middle of an ice age. Ice ages include both cold and warm periods; at the moment we are experiencing a relatively warm span of time known as an "interglacial period." Geologists believe that the warmest part of this period occurred from 1890 through 1945 and that since 1945 things have slowly begun freezing up again.
  40. A cloud to ground bolt of lightning carries between 100 million and 1 billion volts. It can reach 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit that is  3-4 times hotter than the surface of the sun!
  41. Lightning strikes somewhere on earth 100 times a second. And every time lightning strikes, it generates Ozone gas. This strengthens the Ozone Layer in the upper atmosphere.
  42. Our universe may be inside a larger universe, as evidenced by this model. Source
  43. If a piece of a neutron star the size of a dime landed on earth, it would weigh about 100 million tons.
  44. The acceleration rate of a flea jumping off a dog is 20 times the acceleration of the space shuttle during launch!
  45. Radio waves travel faster than sound waves a person listening to a speech by radio broadcast can hear the words 18,000 kilometers away before a person sitting at the back of a hall would.
  46. Astronauts in space cannot belch, without gravity the gas cannot separate from liquids in their stomachs.
  47. The vikings used a stone to be able to tell what direction the sun was in, even when the sun wasn’t visible, and we may have found one. Source
  48. Sonic Hedgehog is a protein critical to mammalian development. Its inhibitor? Robotnikinin. Source
  49. Time-travel, faster-than-light travel and “sliding between parallel worlds” are theoretically possible if there are multiple time dimensions. Source

Side menu