this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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For me it is the fact that our blood contains iron. I earlier used to believe the word stood for some 'organic element' since I couldn't accept we had metal flowing through our supposed carbon-based bodies, till I realized that is where the taste and smell of blood comes from.

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[–] [email protected] 147 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (12 children)

A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus. One day takes 243 Earth days, while a year takes 225.

Maybe it's not "well known", but still interesting in my opinion.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I mentioned this one to my friends the other day and it took so much convincing before they actually believed me! Definitely an interesting one. Venus also spins the opposite direction to all the other planets in the solar system, meaning the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.

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[–] [email protected] 125 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (12 children)

Planets and stars and galaxies are there. You can see them because they're right over there. Like, the moon is a big fucking rock flying around the earth. Jupiter is even bigger. I see it through a telescope and think "wow that's pretty," but every once in a while I let it hit me that I'm looking at an unimaginably large ball of gas, and it's, like, over there. Same as the building across the street, just a bit farther.

The stars, too. Bit farther than Jupiter, even, but they're right there. I can point at one and say "look at that pretty star" and right now, a long distance away, it's just a giant ball of plasma and our sun is just another point of light in its sky. And then I think about if there's life around those stars, and if our star captivates Albireoans the same way their star captivates me.

And then I think about those distant galaxies, the ones we send multi-billion dollar telescopes up to space to take pictures of. It's over there too, just a bit farther than any of the balls of plasma visible to our eyes. Do the people living in those galaxies point their telescopes at us and marvel at how distant we are? Do they point their telescopes in the opposite direction and see galaxies another universe away from us? Are there infinite distant galaxies?

Anyway I should get back to work so I can make rent this month

If I point my finger at one of those galaxies, there's more gas and shit between us within a hundred miles of me than there is in the rest of the space between us combined

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

What's even more fascinating is that most of the stars we see in the sky are afterimages of primitive stars that died out long ago yet they shine as bright as the stars alive today

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (4 children)

That doesn't seem right. The galaxy is only 100,000 light years across (give or take) and the life span of stars is measured in billions of years.

Most of the stars we see are in our galaxy, so at most, we are seeing them as they were 100,000 years ago, which means that the vast majority of them will still be around, and looking much the same as they did 100,000 years ago.

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[–] whileloop 112 points 1 year ago (6 children)

There's a giant ball of extremely hot plasma in the sky and we aren't supposed to look at it. What is it hiding? Surely if someone managed to look at it long enough, they would see the truth!

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

I often used to look at it as a child, however the adults wouldn't let me. I knew there was some ulterior motive behind it.

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[–] [email protected] 88 points 1 year ago (14 children)

Time relativity always boggles my brain, I accept the fact but I find crazy that if I strap my twin and his atomic clock to a rocket and send them out to the stratosphere at the speed of light, when they return he'll be younger than me and his clock will be running behind mine. Crazy

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

It's even crazier because you don't need to reach the speed of light. It'll happen in a smaller degree for any speed. Even in mundane conditions.

For example, if your twin spent four days in a 300km/h bullet train, for you it would be four days plus a second.

Usually this difference is negligible, but for satellites (that run at rather high speeds, for a lot of time, and require precision), if you don't take time dilation into account they misbehave.

(For anyone wanting to mess with the maths, the formula is Ξ”t' = Ξ”t / √[1 - vΒ²/cΒ²]. Ξ”t = variation of time for the observer (you), Ξ”t' = variation of time for the moving entity (your twin), v = the moving entity's speed, c = speed of light. Just make sure that "v" and "c" use the same units.)

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[–] [email protected] 84 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

Not exactly bizarre, but it’s fun to learn that the delicious fragrance of shrimps and crabs when cooked comes from chitin, and chitin is also why sautΓ©ed mushrooms smell/taste like shrimps.

And since fungi are mostly chitin, plants have evolved defenses against fungi by producing enzymes that destroy chitin, which is how some plants eventually evolved the ability to digest insects.

EDIT: a previous version of this post mistakenly confused chitin with keratin (which our fingernails are made of). Thanks to sndrtj for the correction!

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Chitin is not produced by mammals.

Fingernails are composed primarily out of keratin (same as hair and skin).

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[–] CADmonkey 76 points 1 year ago (15 children)

Speaking as someone who grew up in the 1980s...

Micro-SD cards almost don't make sense to me. I'm not saying I don't believe in them, because of course I have a few of them. Obviously they exist and they work. But. They're the size of a fingernail and can hold billions of characters of data. I uwve a camera that ive put a 128 GB microSD card in. A quick tap on the calculator tells me that's over 91,000 3.5" floppy disks. Assuming they're 3mm thick, that's a stack of disks 273 meters tall. But this card is so tiny that I have to be careful not to lose it.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (4 children)

How about the new 2Tb m.2 drives? Not only vastly larger yet still, transfer speeds are also insane. I once had a computer with a 20Mb hard drive, current drives transfer 600-1200mb per second.

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

That "I" am pretty much just the construct of electrons flying around my brain.

That you need to lay down K.O. for many hours every day, otherwise you get insane.

That we are always only 2min or so away from death, if we stopped breathing.

That everything I eat actually gets digested into mousse and bacteria are in my body, digest it and I get the elements into my blood.

That our world is so big, but you could also walk to China ~~Japan~~ from the EU, if you had enough time. But also its crazy how huge our common trade routes are.

That a weird minicomputer in my pocket can store 128GB of information, access a wireless network from across the whole planet, and can remember so much more than my brain

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Walking through the Sea of Japan is a bit of a challenge, though.

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 year ago (14 children)

Let's stick with the iron in your hemoglobin for some more weirdness. The body knows iron is hard to uptake, so when you bleed a lot under your skin and get a bruise, the body re-uptakes everything it can. Those color changes as the bruise goes away is part of the synthesis of compounds to get the good stuff back into the body, and send the rest away as waste.

In the other direction, coronaviruses can denature the iron from your hemoglobin. So some covid patients end up with terrible oxygen levels because the virus is dumping iron product in the blood, no longer able to take in oxygen. I am a paramedic and didn't believe this second one either, but on researching it explained to me why these patients were having so much trouble breathing on low concentration oxygen... the oxygen was there, but the transport system had lost the ability to carry it.

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 year ago (12 children)

Queuing theory can have some fun surprises.

Suppose a small bank has only one teller. Customers take an average of 10 minutes to serve and they arrive at the rate of 5.8 per hour. With only one teller, customers will have to wait nearly five hours on average before they are served. If you add a second teller the average wait becomes 3 minutes.

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Calcium is a metal. We have metal bones.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

From Wikipedia on bones:

Bone matrix is 90 to 95% composed of elastic collagen fibers, also known as ossein,[5] and the remainder is ground substance.[6] The elasticity of collagen improves fracture resistance.[7] The matrix is hardened by the binding of inorganic mineral salt, calcium phosphate, in a chemical arrangement known as bone mineral, a form of calcium apatite.[9]

So the statement is a bit faulty, not only because of the relative low amount of calcium in our bones, but also because it appears as a mineral. We distinguish between salts and metals because of their chemical properties being quite different (solubility, reflectiveness, electrical conductivity, maleability and so on).

Edit: I do realize the point of the comment was not to be entirely factual, so if I am allowed as well I would say science is pretty metal.

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago (9 children)

The mitochondria in all but your blood cells are a different species than us with their own separate DNA.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago

You mean the power house of the cell?

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago (3 children)

There is about 8.1 billion people in the world. Assuming romantic cliches to be true and that we all have exactly one soulmate out there, we would have a very hard time sifting them out. If you were to use exactly one second at meeting a person it would take you 257 years to meet everyone alive on earth at this moment, which due to human life span being significantly shorter and the influx of new people makes the task essentially impossible without a spoonful of luck. Moral of the story: If you believe you have found your soul mate, be extra kind to them today.

[–] [email protected] 81 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Soul mates are made, not found. You get with someone compatible to you, and through the sharing of experiences and affection, if nothing goes excessively wrong, they become unique for you.

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[–] Selmafudd 55 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Don't know if it's bizarre but I was shocked when I found out I'd been lied to my whole life... a leap year isn't every 4 years.

So leap years happen when the year is divisible by 4, but not when the year is divisible by 100 but then they do again when the year is divisible by 400.

So the year 2000 is a perfect example of the exception to the exception. Divisible by 100 so no leap year, but divisible by 400 so leap year back on..

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No one (!) alive today experienced a year divisible by 4 that was not a leap year. The oldest living person was born in 1907.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (9 children)

The sun could've gone nova 8 minutes ago and we wouldn't know for another 20 seconds or so.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Interesting fact: the sun becomes 1 million tons lighter every second.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Diet specialists hate this trick.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago (19 children)

there's people that don't like music.

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (14 children)

Alaska is simultaneously the northernmost, westernmost, and easternmost US state.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The hell that giving birth can be.

A lot of women endure having a baby...and holy. shit. No.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Their bodies produce chemicals that cause them to forget how bad childbirth was.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Exactly. I was there and saw my wife having the worst pain of her life. Really without exaggeration. It was incredibly hard and painful.

Then, 10 minutes after it's all over, she looks at me and says "Well, that wasn't so bad".

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[–] rtxn 29 points 1 year ago (11 children)

We can't touch objects, ever. Most of the space "occupied" by an atom is emptiness (which is another rabbit hole I'm not willing to go down), and when we "touch" an object, it's just a force field pushing the atoms apart. It's the same reason why we don't fall apart into atoms - some invisible force just really wants our atoms to stay together.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Your asswhole can stretch up to 8 inches without permanent deformation.

Also an adult raccoon can fit into a 4.5 inch hole.

Do with that info as you wish

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Here's one: Iron doesn't have a smell. It acts as a catalyst in the reaction of bodily fluids or skin oils, which is why you can't smell coins after washing them

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (10 children)

There’s no such thing as tides. Gravity holds the water as the earth rotates

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago

You mean in the same way that there is no centrifugal force?

Technically right, but doesn't matter if you are in the rotating frame of reference.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That stuff about metal is really counterintuitive, because normally when we talk about iron, gold, copper, nickel, zinc, magnesium, aluminium etc it’s usually about the element in its metallic form. However, when you study chemistry a bit more, you’ll come to realize metals can be dissolved in water and they can be a part of a completely different compound too.

Calcium, sodium and potassium are basically the exact opposite in this regard. Normally when people talk about these metals, they are referring to various compounds that obviously aren’t metallic at all. This leads to people thinking of these elements as non-metallic, but it is possible to purify them to such an extent that you are left with nothing but the metal.

In the case of Ca, Na and K, the resulting metal is highly reactive in our aggressive atmosphere, so that’s why we rarely see these elements in a metallic form. Our atmosphere contains water and oxygen, which makes it an incredibly hostile environment for metals like this. Imagine, we’re breathing this stuff that attacks so many elements mercilessly.

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[–] alokir 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (19 children)

Using engine brakes can cause your car to not use fuel in some cases.

I've read and heard this from different sources (even driving instructors) and I don't get how it's possible. Your engine is still running, doesn't it use at least as much as it does while it's idling?

Edit: thank you all for your answers. I knew how the engine brake effect worked, my confusion was about exactly why the engine didn't consume fuel in the process. I now understand so thanks all.

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