We’re surrounded by the most incredible things all the time, and sometimes we don’t realize how mind-blowing and amazing life is until it’s put in perspective.
Below are 28 awesome, jaw-dropping facts about this little world and life on it. Check them out! A source to even more can be found on the last page.
People who are born deaf and happen to be schizophrenic have some weird experiences. Someone born deaf, that has never been able to hear, uses Sign Language as their actual language. Not a representative language. Like the sign for water just is water, not the sign for water. When these people are schizophrenic and “hear” voices, they actually see disembodied hands floating in mid air signing to them.
Submitted by: CryoClone
Sources: 1, 2
The sound made by the Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 was so loud it ruptured eardrums of people 40 miles away, travelled around the world four times, and was clearly heard 3,000 miles away.
That’s like you standing in New York and hearing a sound from San Francisco.
Submitted by: sev45day
Source
That the Pillars of Creation, of which the first Hubble pictures were taken in 1995, hasn’t existed in 6,000 years.
Submitted by: bradleyklaw
Source
Naked mole rats just don’t get cancer.
Yes, like Rufus from Kim Possible. They live exceptionally long for a rodent (like 30 years) at least partially because they don’t naturally develop cancer (and it’s tough to give them cancer in a lab).
We like to think of cancer as a family of diseases and that it’s naive to anticipate a singular “cure” for all “cancer.” But Mother Nature figured it out.
Submitted by:
Source
From the time it was discovered (1930) to the time it was declassified as a planet (2006), Pluto didn’t complete even one revolution around the sun.
Submitted by: Knobull
Source
You can hear the difference between hot and cold water while it is pouring.
Submitted by: Conspiracycat1
Source
The Library of Babel
It’s a project online that aims to contain every combination of all of the 1,312,000 characters (lower case, commas, spaces etc).
It would contain every book that ever has been written, and every book that ever could be – including every play, every song, every scientific paper, every legal decision, every constitution, every piece of scripture, and so on. At present it contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 104677 books.
Submitted by: TheGreenLandEffect
Source
The 2% margin of error the Chinese government allows when they take their census is larger than the population of Australia.
Submitted by: Medafets
Source
How the Mars lander landed.
Basically, once it reached orbit, the ship dropped the lander. It freefell for a while, then released a parachute. The Mars atmosphere is much thinner than Earth’s, so it was still going many miles an hour.
At this point, it releases the parachute and ignites rockets to stop its fall. At just a few meters above the surface it hovers. Then it lowers the lander about the size of a minivan down on cables until it rests on the surface. At this point the bolts holding the cables to the lander explode, and the rockets fly off and crash land safely away from the lander.
The lander starts its mission.
Submitted by: Luder714
Source
Genghis Khan and his Mongolian Empire would kill so many people he caused an actual drop in CO2 levels and lands were scorched and forests replaced them.
Submitted by:
Source
The modern day BBC series of Sherlock did not have to change Dr. John Watson’s backstory of him being a former army medic injured in Afghanistan.
This was originally stated way back in 1887 with A Study in Scarlet.
Submitted by: killingjoke96
Source
We didn’t really know what a hurricane looked like until the 1960’s.
Submitted by: AltBlutReinhardt
Source
That Cumulus clouds weigh 1.1 million pounds. Old, but still crazy that much water is floating above us at times.
Submitted by: suicideprince97
Source
The symbol for division () is just a blank fraction with dots replacing the numbers.
Submitted by: casualfriday902
Source
The T-Rex lived closer in time to us than it did to the Stegosaurus. Millions of years is an extremely hard thing to grasp with my incredibly mortal mind.
Submitted by: CeriseArt
Source
Lobsters live forever if nothing kills them. They don’t age. There’s other things too that don’t age but they are simpler organisms. Lobsters are reasonably complex.
It sounds simple but the implications of this are immense. There is a genetic combination where it is possible to regenerate cells indefinitely and live forever under the right conditions. Medical technology is nowhere near this right now but the fact that it exists on Earth under laws of nature means immortality is not sci-fi. It is simply a matter of technology which can be achieved at some point in the future. It’s like finding a cricket that can jump back and forth through time and no one noticed this whole time. It’s proof it’s possible.
Submitted by: welcome2urff
Source
The US made approximately half a million Purple Heart medals in anticipation for the number of casualties in the planned Invasion of Japan. In 2003, 120,000 of those medals had yet to be handed out.
In 58 years, there hadn’t been as many wounded as there were expected in one invasion.
Submitted by: TheIncredibleHork
Source
All planets in the solar system fit between the Earth and the moon, the Sun does not.
Submitted by: soufian395
Source
When it’s so quiet you can hear snow falling, you’re actually hearing the static discharge of the snowflake hitting the ground. It gathers the electricity while it’s falling to Earth.
Submitted by: DeadNotSleeping143
Source
You never actually listen to your true voice, because of bone conduction. When you speak, you hear your own voice through “vibrations inside your skull set off by your vocal chords,” according to the BBC. “Those vibrations travel up through your bony skull and again set the ear drum vibrating. However as they travel through the bone they spread out and lower in pitch, giving you a false sense of bass. Then when you hear a recording of your voice, it sounds distinctly higher.”
That’s why you always it always sounds like crap when you listen to your recorded voice.
Also you have a false image of yourself in your mind because you are used to seeing an mirrored image of yourself, that’s why you always prefer to “flip” your selfie, some phones/apps have this turned on by default.
So basically your mind doesn’t even know itself.
Submitted by: Tushar_007
Source
Nuclear power.
The magnitude of nukes are insane. The tsar bomba that was dropped in Russia caused a 5 magnitude earthquake whose waves traveled around the world 3 times. And it was detonated 4.2 km above the surface.
We have the power to cause devastation beyond imagine and natural disasters.
Submitted by: Vaxtin
Source
That if Wayne Gretzky never scored a goal, he would still be the all time leader in career points scored.
Submitted by: abaz28
Source
France was still executing people by guillotine when Star Wars was released.
Submitted by: Mogar_the_Bear
Source
That Niagara Falls has stopped flowing twice in recorded history naturally.
Submitted by: AFTER_THAT_LION_DUDE
Source
That in 1947 in Texas City, Texas. There was a ship fire that was so hot, the sea water was boiling. When the ship finally exploded, it created a 15 foot wave detectable 100 miles away, leveled 1000 buildings, knocked two planes out of the sky, was felt in Louisiana 250 miles away, had a 2 ton anchor blown 1.62 miles inland, a second 5 ton anchor blown half a mile inland, exploded a second ship which sent a propeller nearly a mile inland, destroyed a seaport, obliterated 362 freight cars, left 2,000 people homeless, tons of other damage, people killed, and resulted in the first class action lawsuit against the United States government.
Submitted by: kasahito
Source
The Sun is 400 times wider than the Moon, but also 400 times as far away, so they appear to be the same size in our sky.
Submitted by: senatorskeletor
Source
Cleopatra began her reign 2086 years ago. The youngest of the three pyramids at Giza was finished 2441 years before she ascended the throne.
Submitted by: kungtotte
Source
Orcas are natural predators of moose.
When moose swim between islands in Alaska, the orcas eat ’em.
Submitted by: FormalChicken
Source
Electricity and magnetism are basically opposite forms of the same force and scientific laws. If you fluctuate a magnetic field, it induces an electric current, and if you run a current through a conductor it will create a magnetic field. This one principle is the basis of all modern machinery and electronics, and was discovered by a man who could not read.
Submitted by: GauntletsofRai
Source