Tooth enamel is the hardest and most highly mineralised substance in the body. It is 96% mineral, with water and protein accounting for the other 4%. This high mineral content gives it strength and hardness, but also brittleness!
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Turritopsis dohrnii, the immortal jellyfish:
T. dohrnii begin their life as free-swimming tiny larvae known as planula. As a planula settles down, it gives rise to a colony of polyps that are attached to the sea-floor. The polyps form into an extensively branched form, which is not commonly seen in most jellyfish. Jellyfish, also known as medusae, then bud off these polyps and continue their life in a free-swimming form, eventually becoming sexually mature. When sexually mature they have been known to prey on other jellyfish species at a rapid pace. All the polyps and jellyfish arising from a single planula are genetically identical clones. T. dohrnii jellyfish can revert to the polyp stage, forming a new polyp colony. It does this through the cell development process of transdifferentiation, which alters the differentiated state of the cells and transforms them into new types of cells.
Theoretically, this process can go on indefinitely, effectively rendering the jellyfish biologically immortal.
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Some nemathelminthes (cilindrical worm parasites like Ascaris Lumbricoides) make what is called Loos cycle. When they infect a human through ingestion of their eggs, in the intestines larvae hatch and perforate the intestinal wall, going through the bloodstream to the lungs. In the lungs they mature to another larvae state and they perforate the alveolar walls. Then they climb through the respiratory airway up to the glotis and go through the esophagus into the stomach and finally intestines, where they mature to their adult forms.
Its really scary and awesome if you think about it. Also, don't google ascaris lumbricoides unless you are up to it.
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That's an interesting cycle, thank you.
Whitelisted!
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did you know that at 1999 we reached 6 billion people?
i suck at that :(
hi D:
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There are more trees on Earth then there are stars in our galaxy. However there are more stars in the observable universe then there are grains of sand on Earth.
Voyager 1 needs to travel another 73775 years before having traveled the distance between the sun and the most nearby star (Proxima Centauri). However, Voyager 1 is travelling in another direction so for his first encounter with another star (Barnard's Star) he needs to travel 105003,57 years.
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Shhhhh, we must not pressure little ol' Voyager 1 or she may get nervous.Whi
whitelisted!
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Dolphins Have "Names," Respond When Called
Past studies have shown that individual dolphins have a unique whistle, called a "signature whistle," that they often use in big group settings, like when several pods of dolphins meet at sea.
The idea that dolphins have a name in the form of a whistle has been around since the 1960s, and studies of captive dolphins have shown that the animals are responsive to the whistles of dolphins they know.
But a new study takes the theory a step further by asserting that a dolphin will respond when it hears the sound of its own signature whistle, repeating that whistle back in a way that seems to say, "Yup, I'm here—did you call my name?" explained Whitney Friedman, a dolphin-behavior expert at the University of California, San Diego.
more http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/07/130722-dolphins-whistle-names-identity-animals-science/
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Dogs detect cancer in humans http://edition.cnn.com/2015/11/20/health/cancer-smelling-dogs/
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10 Quick Scientific Facts that Will Blow Your mind
Why aren’t there that many people into science? Personally, I believe it has something to do with how it’s being communicated and, not least, how it’s being taught in school. Raw science and data do not drive people – fun, emotional and persuasive narratives do. We live in a world where we need people like Bill Nye to get up and be scientific, but also silly and fun. Is this so wrong? It’s debatable, but honestly I can understand why some hardcore scientists cringe at the idea of ‘popular science’. Nevertheless, what some of these top scientists might forget is that they got into their fields because of some popular science movement in the first place, be it the Apollo missions, a computer science program on PBS or one inspiring afternoon working out back when your neighbor explained how a car works.
With this in mind, here are just ten amazing things that I’ve come to learn thanks to the progress of science. It’s this sort of knowledge that’s inspired me to learn more every day and it’s my deepest hope that something similar might happen to you as well. This list is much too short though, so I’m counting on you to keep it growing by adding your own in the comments section.
- There is enough DNA in an average person’s body to stretch from the sun to Pluto and back — 17 times
DNA length
The human genome, the genetic code in each human cell, contains 23 DNA molecules each containing from 500 thousand to 2.5 million nucleotide pairs. DNA molecules of this size are 1.7 to 8.5 cm long when uncoiled, or about 5 cm on average. There are about 37 trillion cells in the human body and if you’d uncoil all of the DNA encased in each cell and put them end to end, then these would sum to a total length of 2×1014 meters or enough for 17 Pluto roundtrips (1.2×1013 meters/Pluto roundtrip).
- The average human body carries ten times more bacterial cells than human cells
bacteria human body
It’s funny how we compulsively wash our hands, spray our countertops and grimace when someone sneezes near us—in fact, we do everything we can to avoid unnecessary encounters with the germ world. The truth of the matter is that each and every one of us is a walking petri dish! All the bacteria living inside you would fill a half-gallon jug or 10 times more bacterial cells in your body than human cells, according to Carolyn Bohach, a microbiologist at the University of Idaho. Don’t worry, though. Most of these bacteria are helpful; in fact, we couldn’t survive without them.
For one thing, bacteria produce chemicals that help us harness energy and nutrients from our food. Germ-free rodents have to consume nearly a third more calories than normal rodents to maintain their body weight, and when the same animals were later given a dose of bacteria, their body fat levels spiked, even if they didn’t eat any more than they had before. The gut bacteria is also very important to maintaining immunity. (image source)
- It can take a photon 40,000 years to travel from the core of the sun to its surface, but only 8 minutes to travel the rest of the way to Earth
photons from the sun
A photon travels, on average, a particular distance, d, before being briefly absorbed and released by an atom, which scatters it in a new random direction.From the core to the sun’s surface (696,000 kilometers) where it can escape into space, a photon needs to make a huge number of drunken jumps. The calculation is a little tricky, but the conclusion is that a photon takes between many thousands and many millions of years to drunkenly wander to the surface of the Sun. In a way, the light that reaches us today is energy produced maybe millions of years ago. Amazing! (image source)
- At over 2000 kilometers long, The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth
Coral reef
Coral reefs consist of huge numbers of individual coral polyps – soft-bodied, invertebrate animals – linked by tissue. The Great Barrier Reef is an interlinked system of about 3000 reefs and 900 coral islands, divided by narrow passages, just beneath the surface of the Coral Sea.Spanning more than 2000 km and covering an area of some 350 000 sq km, it is the largest living structure on Earth and the only one visible from space. But this fragile coral colony is beginning to crumble, battered by the effects of climate change, pollution and manmade disasters. (image source)
- There are 8 times as many atoms in a teaspoonful of water as there are teaspoonfuls of water in the Atlantic ocean
water molecules
A teaspoon of water (about 5 mL) contains 2×1023 water molecules, but each water molecule is comprised of 3 atoms: two hydrogen and one oxygen. Moreover, if you’d laid down end to end each water molecule from a teaspoon full you’d end up with a length of 50 billion km or 10 times the width of our solar system. (image source)
- The average person walks the equivalent of five times around the world in a lifetime
walk around the world
The average moderately active person take aound 7,500 step/day. If you maintain that daily average and live until 80 years of age, you’ll have walked about 216,262,500 steps in your lifetime. Doing the math; the average person with the average stride living until 80 will walk a distance of around 110,000 miles. Which is the equivalent of walking about 5 times around the Earth, right on the equator. (image source)
- When Helium is cooled to almost absolute zero (-460°F or -273°C), the lowest temperature possible, it becomes a liquid with surprising properties: it flows against gravity and will start running up and over the lip of a glass container!
superfluid helium
We all know helium as a gas for blowing up balloons and making people talk like chipmunks, but what most people don’t know is that it comes in two distinct liquid states, one of which is borderline creepy. When helium is just a few degrees below its boiling point of –452 degrees Fahrenheit (–269 degrees Celsius) it will suddenly be able to do things that other fluids can’t, like dribble through molecule-thin cracks, climb up and over the sides of a dish, and remain motionless when its container is spun. No longer a mere liquid, the helium has become a superfluid—a liquid that flows without friction.
“If you set [down] a cup with a liquid circulating around and you come back 10 minutes later, of course it’s stopped moving,” says John Beamish, an experimental physicist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Atoms in the liquid will collide with one another and slow down. “But if you did that with helium at low temperature and came back a million years later,” he says, “it would still be moving. (image source)
- If Betelgeuse would explode transiting from the red super giant stage to supernova then our sky would light continuously for two months. It can happen anytime, within a couple of thousand years, tomorrow or even now
supernova explosion
Betelgeuse lies some 430 light-years from Earth. Yet it’s already one of the brightest stars in Earth’s sky. The reason is that Betelgeuse is a supergiant star – the largest kind of stars in the Universe. Betelgeuse has a luminosity about 10,000 times that of the Sun and its radius is calculated to be about 370 times that of the sun. If it were positioned at the center of our sun, its radius would extend out past the radius of Mars. Because it’s near the end of its lifetime, Betelgeuse is likely to explode into a supernova. (image source)
- An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body
blood cell
You have about 5 litres of blood in your body (at least most people do) and the average heart pumps about 70 ml of blood out with each beat. Also, a healthy heart beats around 70 times a minute. So, if you multiply the amount of blood that the heart can pump by the number of beats in a minute, you actually get about 4.9 litres of blood, which is almost your whole body’s worth of blood. In just a minute, the hearts pumps the entire blood volume around your body. (image source)
- The known universe is made up of 50,000,000,000 galaxies. There are between 100,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000 stars in a normal galaxy. In the Milky Way alone there might be as many 100,000,000 planets. Still think you’re alone?
http://www.zmescience.com/other/feature-post/10-quick-scientific-facts-will-blow-mind/
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Economy - if the supply of a good rises, demand decreases and vice versa.
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This is pretty basic, but it isn't a science anyways.
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As economist I am offended that you don't consider economics as a science. The definition above is like a basis of it. So I'm completely disagree with you.
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The world’s first nuclear reactor was built in a squash court beneath a Chicago football stadium on December 2, 1942. While it only generated enough power to light a flashlight, it proved that nuclear power was feasible.
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It's a small charge for a single reactor, a big jump for energy nerds.
Whitelisted!
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Do you know that a well trained dog can undestand over than 160 words ! In fact, a Border Collie called Chaser was considered as the smartest dog in the world, he could understand a lot of words and phrases, they owner says that he can understand as may words as a 2 or 3 years old toddler, this is almost 300 words, there is a CBS article about it, if you want to know more about it, I can give you the link if you want =)
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I wish dogs i've seen could understand "no" :/
Whitelisted!
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Woo! :D I love interesting facts so this should be great for me. Here are some of the best I've got that haven't been said yet:
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It is possible to have ice water that is so hot it would literally burn your face off if you went anywhere near it.
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In orbital mechanics you need to speed up to slow down, and slow down to speed up.
Meaning that wherever you are in an orbit, if you speed up in the direction you are travelling, it won't change your velocity at that point (too much) but it will cause the opposite side of the orbit to "grow" from whatever body you're orbiting, and your velocity there to decrease. If you reduce your velocity at a point, it will again most affect the opposite side of the orbit, causing it to decrease toward the body being orbited, and the closer it gets the faster you will go there (like a sling-shot effect). -
I checked, but this one might have been said already, or you might know it, because it's pretty popular. But all the other planets in our solar system could fit within the average distance between the Earth and the Moon. This includes Pluto with some room to spare. Here's an illustration!
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More people drown in deserts than die of dehydration. This is because of floods. When they happen in deserts, there's a lack of drainage, which causes the floods; when they happen, to be huge.
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"If a disease infects 2% of a population, and a test is developed that is 95% accurate (and no false negatives), then if you are tested positive, the chance you actually have the disease is only 29%"
"This is assuming you were chosen at random. Here's the maths:
Population = 1000.
People who have disease X = 20.
People who don't have disease X = 980.
False positive rate = 5%.
False negative rate = 0%.
Of the 20 people who have disease X, they all receive a correct positive reading.
Of the 980 have don't have disease X, 49 of them will receive an incorrect/false positive reading.
69 people tested positive, yet only 20 of them are actually positive. That's a 29% chance that if you tested positive, you're actually positive, for a test that is 95% accurate."
"Now let's say you have a 99% accurate test, for a disease that infects 1 in a million people.
Population = 1,000,000.
People who have disease X = 1.
People who don't have disease X = 999,999.
False positive rate = 1%.
False negative rate = 0%.
1% of the 999,999 people who don't have disease X will receive a false positive. That's 10 thousand people (rounded).
10,001 people tested positive, and 10,000 of those are false positives.
So there's a 99.99% chance you don't have it, if tested positive on that 99% accurate test." Wiki
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The last fact is disturbing.... thank you kindly.
Whitelisted!
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but but how do I know how much YOU know? how do I know if you already know what I'm about to say? what if I say it and then you make it look like you already knew, but didn't actually?! oh no oh nooo I'm stressed now!! OMG!
Jokes aside, I already own Shadows of Mordor, so this drama-free-bait kinda doesn't work on me, sadly. I've could had said something sciencey like "Dying is only natural, but there's only so little we know, we must learn...people have to die, so die, for science. You monster"
not-so-fun facts: Did you know most people instead of studying like they should, are now either playing games or burning time here in SG forums?
yes is true!, I should just do what I oughtta...or else...
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I should probably be sleeping in my day off, yet here I am!
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Nah, you'll sleep when you're dead, besides life is way too short to waste it sleeping XD
yeah I know how cozy and nice can be, but I just do it for the dreams!
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Humans cannot see more than 30 frames per second, because we see objects by reflecting the light off them and back to our eyes. When they move too fast the brain cannot process that information (cannot acknowledge the light reflection) so it creates motion blur)
The reason we see on the moniitor 30+ fps is because it is a 2D plane where objects have artificial lighting, motion blur is generated by the game's world, coniclusion being: you do not have to employ your eyes as much and that might be why you can see 30+ fps
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Dicks are really different between animals
some have some spike to make the female ovulate (cats)
some use it as swords to fight and inseminate (nubibranch)
some other are like darts and so the male can penetrate the female anywhere.
and for more : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcD3e7fhwZE (french video)
"funny" isn't it :)
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Most plants genetically modification done to plants in the U.S. is done to allow the plants to handle more herbicides and is done by Monsanto to increase their sale of herbicides.
It is recommended to farmers in the U.S. to spray their crops with round-up to make all the crops be ready to harvest at the same time, again by Monsanto.
The Borrelia bacteria can change between three forms, one of which is unkillable by your body or antibiotics.
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hi. thank you for the train. i cant remember nothing in particular right now, but i can recomend the book "400 pequeñas dosis de ciencia". is a science divulgation book oriented to short fun facts. bye!
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Do you know about memristors? It "is a hypothetical non-linear passive two-terminal electrical component relating electric charge and magnetic flux linkage"! So, it works this way: "The memristor's electrical resistance is not constant but depends on the history of current that had previously flowed through the device, i.e., its present resistance depends on how much electric charge has flowed in what direction through it in the past; The device remembers its history—the so-called non-volatility property. When the electric power supply is turned off, the memristor remembers its most recent resistance until it is turned on again."
I had a little explanation about it being non-volatile and some works from 2014 of a machine made of memristors that the memories would act like CPUs, so they would be able to "change themselves", but the wikipedia explanation was simpler and the english used was better than mine... I don't know if you will wishlist me for this, but I keep talking about memristors since 2012, so I thought it would be nice if I say about it with people from SG and took this opportunity! :P
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Also you can straighten a pig's tail (that is curled and of course the pig is alive) by passing your finger on his back!
Here's a video to show how it's done;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTXEnE37FyM
Though it get's curled again some seconds after! :P
PS: I couldn't embbed the video, don't know the syntax! Is the embedding result of using ESG only? It's a nice feature! :P
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It's literally impossible for me to wishlist you here!
Whitelisted you though :)
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Wow, I was too sleepy to write wishlist instead of whitelist... and it wasn't the first time! :/
Thanks for wl! (This way I won't write the sentence wrong! :P )
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Free bump!
Also, Internet is "sticked together" thanks to intra-net routing protocols such as RIP and OSPF and the BGP inter-net routing protocol. All implemented in the Network layer of the Internet's protocols stack: Application, Transport, Network, Link and Physical layers.
Without BGP Internet would not work as it does!!
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Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation
Which is to say that they don't use the stars in the Milky Way, but the Milky Way itself to navigate in straight lines at night. Really impressive, especially considering it's an insect.
Exotic manure is sure to lure the dung connoisseur
Dung beetles prefer dung from omnivores, especially humans and chimpanzees. Dung that would be considered "exotic" to the area that the dung beetle is native to is also preferred.
Owners of firearms are more likely to have more than five drinks on one occasion, have more than 60 drinks per month, and to drink and drive. Heavy alcohol users are more likely to carry a gun for protection, and to keep a gun at home loaded and not locked away.
Imitation Improves Language Comprehension
Imitating another person's accent makes it easier to understand them and others who use the same accent.
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If you put a little bit of salt in an ice cube, it will become colder and maybe burn you =s
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WELCOME TO YOUR ENERGETIC DRAMA-FREE SALBT!!!! (I've seen worse acronyms)
Well, this train had a different purpose originally, but drama ensued, and I dislike drama, because it creates stress.
Unlike movies, drama is bad in a lot of ways. Actually, I did a little research about stress and found a nice article about the side effects stress may have in the human body.
GIVEAWAYS LINKS AND WHITELIST RULES BELOW
Because I know some of you don't care about the text above.... which is fine, worrying about it would create stress anyways
SALBT!
All cd-keys in the SALBT are actually row, if that matters.. sorry about the region restriction ;_;
3 COPIES OF SHADOW OF MORDOR GAME OF THE YEAR EDITION
Also drama-free
HOW CAN I BE WHITELISTED?
Just tell me something sciencey. It must be something I don't know to qualify, so avoid commonly known facts. It can be related to any science field, and the information must be written in your comment, just linking something won't work.
I don't care if you're level 0 with 1040 wins, so don't worry about your ratio.
Giveaways will be running until July 10th. Good luck everyone!
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