57 facts, each with a source
Science facts
Science facts that sound like a prank until you read the source. Tardigrades survived ten days in open space, a strong enough magnet can float a live frog, and time runs measurably faster at your head than at your feet. Short, sourced and picked for the double take.
Physics
- A magnet can make a live frog float in mid-air.
- Time runs faster at your head than at your feet.
- Strip the empty space out of every human and we would fit in a sugar cube.
- Water can boil and freeze at the same instant.
- A uranium deposit in Gabon went critical on its own about 1.7 billion years ago and ran as a natural nuclear reactor, in pulses, for a few hundred thousand years.
- Cold War nuclear tests spiked the world's carbon-14, tagging every cell built afterwards.
- Absolute zero can never actually be reached.
- A funnel of pitch in Queensland has been dripping since 1927 and has produced about nine drops.
- Every rainbow is a full circle.
- Atoms are 99.9999% empty space, so you have never touched anything.
- Water is strange for expanding when it freezes.
- The speed of light can no longer be measured more accurately, because the metre is defined as the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458 of a second.
- In 1967 the second stopped being a fraction of a day.
- The coldest place in the universe is a lab on Earth.
- Water ice has at least twenty crystal forms.
- For over a century the kilogram was a metal cylinder in a Paris vault, and it kept drifting relative to its own copies.
Chemistry
- That same chemist had already solved another problem by adding lead to petrol.
- A chemist was hired to find something safer.
- The result was the first synthetic drug that attacked a specific pathogen, and the principle underneath chemotherapy.
- A German physician noticed that some of these dyes stained one kind of bacterium and left the surrounding tissue clean.
- He got a black sludge.
- Roughly half the nitrogen atoms in your body were pulled out of the air by an industrial process invented in 1909.
- Helium was discovered on the Sun before anyone found it on Earth.
- What ended the slaughter was not conscience but price.
- Chlorine trifluoride sets fire to sand, glass, asbestos and concrete.
- Those early refrigerators ran on ammonia, sulphur dioxide and methyl chloride.
- Technetium decays too fast to survive in Earth's crust, yet it shows up in the spectra of certain old stars.
- In 1856 an eighteen-year-old student tried to build quinine out of coal tar over his Easter holiday, in a laboratory he had rigged up at home.
- Quinine, stripped from the bark of a South American tree, was the only thing that treated malaria.
Biology
- Tardigrades survived ten days of open space vacuum.
- Enzymes can turn one blood type into another.
- T. rex lived closer to you than to Stegosaurus.
- Frozen for 30 years, a tardigrade woke and laid eggs.
- A tardigrade's trick: dry out and turn to glass.
- The largest living thing on Earth is a fungus the size of a town.
- There are more trees on Earth than stars in the Milky Way.
- The bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans shrugs off about a thousand times the radiation dose that would kill a person.
Quantum
- The Sun's core is not actually hot enough to fuse hydrogen.
- Chilled below about 2 kelvin, liquid helium climbs the walls of its container as a film one atom thick and siphons itself out over the rim.
- Neutrinos interact so weakly that a wall of lead a light-year thick would stop only about half of them.
Genetics
Climate
- Earth's magnetic poles have swapped hundreds of times.
- Lightning is five times hotter than the surface of the Sun.
- One hurricane releases the energy of 10,000 nuclear bombs a day.
- A glacier in Antarctica bleeds rust-red brine from a lake sealed beneath the ice for over a million years.
- The water in your glass has been through a dinosaur.
- Antarctica is the largest desert on Earth.
- The treaty that saved the ozone layer turned out to be one of the strongest climate actions ever taken.
Materials
- The replacement for spermaceti turned out to be a desert shrub.
- There is a solid so light it can sit on a soap bubble.
- Diamonds are not rare.
- Glass is not a slow-moving liquid.
- Electron microscopy of Damascus sabre steel found carbon nanotubes in the blade, formed by a forging recipe that was lost before anyone knew what nanotubes were.
- Below about 13°C, ordinary tin slowly converts to a brittle grey powder.