Curious facts around us. Amazing facts about the world around us
Today, the editors of "Me and the World" have prepared for you 15 real facts about life on our earth, which are absolutely true, but may surprise you a little with their unpredictability!
Some of them are historical, scientific and even tricky. Do you want to know something new? Then enjoy your viewing!
1. Your body today is 98% new atoms compared to last year.
Thus, it can be said that every year you become a completely different person.
2 The Great Pyramids Were Older To Cleopatra Than Cleopatra Is To Us
It may seem that they are from approximately the same era, but in fact there are 2500 years between them.
3. You were once the youngest person on the planet.
Even if only for a few seconds.
4. There are more options for shuffling a standard deck of cards than there are atoms on earth.
If there are 52 cards in the deck, then the number of options is: 52!=1*2*3*4*5*…*51*52. "52 factorial" is a lot, approximately you get a number consisting of eight and 67 zeros.
5. Everything in the universe can be divided into potatoes and not potatoes
Can not argue with that!
6. The person closest to you on the right is the person farthest from you on the left
Magic round earth.
7. People who study atoms are just a bunch of atoms trying to understand themselves.
8. If bees were paid the minimum wage for their work, one liter jar of honey would cost 127 million rubles.
The average honey bee makes about 1/12 teaspoon of honey during its lifetime, which is usually 120-150 days. Bees are active only in certain periods, and they begin to collect nectar only 22 days after birth. Having calculated all this, one can understand that honey would cost, to put it mildly, much more if the bees did not work for free.
9. Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire and the first printing press
The education of students at this university began in 1096, the Aztec Empire appeared 100 years later. And the printing press was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439, while Oxford students had been studying with the help of handwritten books.
10. If you think about it, it turns out that the brain gave a name to itself. Here's a sly one!
11. Two children born at the same time in Kaliningrad and Vladivostok may have different dates of birth, and one will be older than the other
All because of the difference in time zones.
12. In fact, we never really touch anything.
Due to the structure and composition of atoms, the laws quantum physics and that electrons have a negative charge, electrons in our bodies never "touch" other electrons, they just get very, very, very, very, very close to each other.
13. In a lifetime, a person secretes so much saliva that it could fill two pools.
Achievement, of course, unpleasant, but true!
14. The difference between one million seconds and one trillion seconds is almost 32,000 years!!! One million seconds is 11 and a half days.
One billion seconds is 31 and 3/4 years. And one trillion seconds is already 31,710 years! Blimey!
15. The fact that the Sun and Moon appear exactly the same size from Earth during a solar eclipse is just an incredible cosmic coincidence.
The Moon has a certain size and is at a certain distance from the Earth, which fantastically combines with the size of the Sun and its distance from us, so during an eclipse they look exactly like that. Unthinkable!
John Lloyd, John Mitchinson, and James Harkin of the British TV show Quite Interesting have an incredible amount of information and facts in their line of work. Some facts surprised even them, scientists and researchers of our wonderful world. When a lot of facts accumulated, John, John and James put them together and published a book - "1227 facts from which you will be stunned."
“Ten years of joint use of the QI Research Method can be summed up in one line. Here it is: "Read everything, including footnotes, but write down only what you personally find interesting." Such an approach not only reduces the scale of the seemingly infinite information in the universe by several orders of magnitude, but also produces the delightful effect of “comprehension of something new every day.”
- Uranium is 40 times more common than silver and 500 times more common than gold.
- If one vampire were to eat once a day and turn their victims into vampires each time, the entire population of the planet would turn into vampires in a little over a month.
- White rhinos and black rhinos are the same color.
- Female plant aphids give birth to female aphids already pregnant with female aphids.
- 40% of the bottled water sold in the world is tap water.
- Between 1838 and 1960, more than half of the photographs featured infants.
- In the 19th and early 20th centuries, removing all teeth and replacing them with false teeth was a popular 21st birthday present.
- In the XVIII century, the French fleet buried their dead in the holds.
- 40% of humanity did not live to see their first birthday.
- The human brain takes in 11 million bits of information per second, but is only aware of 40 bits.
- At least 99% of all species that have ever existed have left no trace in the fossil record.
- Gerbils smell adrenaline, and for this they are kept by airport security - to figure out terrorists.
- Aerosmith made more money from the Guitar Hero video game than from any of their albums.
- The first London Underground trains were nicknamed "sewer trams".
- British retailers make £250m a year in bulk gift certificates.
- In Arabic, words are written from right to left, and numbers are written from left to right. owning Arabic when reading texts abounding in numbers, they are forced to read in both directions at the same time.
- The screwdriver was invented a hundred years before the screw. She originally picked out nails.
- Aboriginal people, whose culture dates back to the Ice Age, can name the mountains (and determine their location) that have been under water for the last 8000 years.
- A coal-fired power plant releases 100 times more radioactive waste into the air than a nuclear power plant, while producing the same amount of energy.
- 90% of crimes in the Afghan province of Helmand are committed by local police.
- Human saliva contains the painkiller opiorphin, which is six times more powerful than morphine.
- In French, Hungarian, Spanish, Gaelic, Italian, Portuguese, Latvian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin and Tagalog, the words for "weather" and "time" are the same.
- A conventional microwave oven uses more electricity to keep the digital clock on standby than it does to reheat food.
- There are no cubes in cubism. According to the theory of post-impressionist Paul Cezanne, any object can be visually divided into cylinders, spheres and cones.
- 10% of electricity in the US comes from dismantled Soviet atomic bombs.
- There are nearly 250,000 individual patents behind the smartphone manufacturing technology.
- Chemotherapy is a by-product of mustard gas used in World War I.
- Caffeine is made up of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen - just like cocaine, thalidomide, nylon, TNT and heroin.
- Since 1990, the percentage of people in China living in poverty has fallen from 85 to 15.
- Spiritual seeker and vegetarian Sir Charles Isham invented garden gnomes in 1847. He hoped they would lure real gnomes into his garden.
- Typewriters were once called "literary pianos".
- In Lord Byron's correspondence, there were often curls sent to him by admirers. He answered them with similar messages, but the curls contained in them came from Boatswain, Byron's Newfoundland.
- In 1811, crimes punishable by death included stealing a sheep, impersonating a pensioner british army, "serious manifestations of malignancy" in children 7-14 years old, living with gypsies for a month and stealing cheese.
- By age 18, the average American child has already seen 200,000 murders on TV.
- The London Underground has made more money with its famous card than it has with its transportation.
- Before the Renaissance, three-quarters of all books in the world were in Chinese.
- The feathers of an average bird weigh more than twice as much as its skeleton.
- Over the past 60 years, more than 23,000 citizens North Korea moved to the South. Only 2 Koreans did the opposite.
- In 2011, Nobel laureate in economics Daniel Kahneman conducted a study of the 25 biggest traders on Wall Street, and it showed that their success was no more stable than that of a coin tossing chimpanzee.
- Nearly half of Americans these days are considered "living in poverty" or "on the brink of poverty." 46.4% pay no income tax.
- Since the 2004 smoking ban, mackerel has become the main currency in American prisons.
- The gypsy word for "television" is "dinilo's dikkamengro", which means "fools' staring box".
- In Finnish, "pedant" is "pilkunnussija", which literally means "comma f*ck".
- In Irish, a jellyfish is called "smugairle róin", which literally means "seal snot."
- In French, cotton candy is called "barbe à rara" ("daddy's beard").
- Zeus had five wives. One is his aunt, the second is his older sister, and the third he ate.
- Studies with experiments on rabbits received 26 Nobel Prizes in physiology and medicine.
- In 1875, the King of Fiji, during an official visit to Australia, picked up measles, brought it to the island and thereby killed a quarter of his subjects.
- 90% of everything written in English uses only 1000 words.
- Beavers have transparent eyelids so they can see underwater with their eyes closed.
- In 1187, as a sign of friendship between the two countries, Richard I the Lionheart, King of England, spent the night in the same bed with Philip II, King of France.
- In 1999, a gang of thieves was forced to do community service along a highway in Rotherham. The next spring, the daffodils planted along the road bloomed and formed the words "fuck" (shag) and "shit" (bollocks).
- In 1915, millionaire Cecil Chubb bought Stonehenge for his wife. She did not like the gift, and in 1918 Chubb gave it to the British people.
- The first published crossword was called the Word Cross.
- Museums and galleries in the UK are visited every year by seven times more people than Premier League football matches.
- Half of the biological species in the world live in the crowns of tropical forests.
- The opposite of plankton are nekton, creatures that move arbitrarily through the water rather than just drifting. Fish, dolphins and humans are nekton.
- Every five days, a new skyscraper is erected in China. By 2016, there will be four times as many as in the US.
- Three-quarters of the French holiday in France.
- The secret service MI5 kept special teapots in stock - to steam sealed envelopes.
- Within a mile, a carrier pigeon is faster than a fax.
- 46% of American adults believe the Earth is less than 10,000 years old.
Much of what we learn in school will never come in handy. Most from this greater part we will never even remember. And yet, some crumbs of "useless" information will remain in memory. Paradoxically, it is thanks to them that we feel like educated people. The luxury of keeping in mind not only vital information, but also “information surplus” increases self-esteem and gives a sense of intellectual consistency.
And “unnecessary information” surprisingly turns out to be the most interesting. This interest can become for children a magical key to the vast world of science, which is often hidden behind boring formulas and incomprehensible definitions.
In this article, we have collected nine scientific facts, which can be used in the lessons of mathematics, physics, geography, chemistry and biology, to clearly show that science is not something abstract from real life, but situations that we face every day.
Fact number 1. On average, an ordinary person travels a distance equal to three equators of the Earth in his life
The equator is approximately 40,075 km long. Multiplying this figure by three, we get 120,225 km. With an average life expectancy of 70 years, we get about 1717 km per year, which is a little more than five kilometers per day. Not so much, but it runs for life.
On the one hand, this information has no practical application. On the other hand, it is much more interesting to measure the distance traveled not in meters, steps or calories, but in equators. And calculating the percentage of the length of the equator will draw attention not only to geography, but also to mathematics.
The following two facts may come in handy in mathematics lessons. Using the first, you can calculate the number of children in parallel or even in the entire school who were born on the same day.
Fact #2: If there are 23 random people in a room, there is over a 50% chance that two of them will have the same birthday.
And if you put together 75 people, then this probability reaches 99%. A 100% chance of a match can be in a group of 367 people. The probability of a match is determined by the number of pairs that can be made from all the people in the group. Since the order of people in pairs does not matter, total number such pairs is equal to the number of combinations of 23 by 2, that is, (23 × 22) / 2 = 253 pairs. Thus, the number of pairs exceeds the number of days in a year. The same formula calculates the probability of matches for any number of people. So you can estimate the number of children born on the same day in parallel or even in the entire school.
Fact number 3. The number of living organisms in a teaspoon of soil is greater than the entire population of our planet
One square centimeter of soil contains billions of bacteria, fungi, algae and other organisms. About 60 million bacteria live in just one gram of dry soil. Nematodes, or roundworms (the most famous of which are roundworms and pinworms) in the same amount of soil are much smaller - only 10 thousand. A figure that is incommensurable with the human population, but no less unpleasant for that.
Practical application of the information: Wash your hands thoroughly after taking care of your houseplants and after working in the garden. A zone of increased bacterial danger is a sandbox on any playground.
Fact #4: The average toilet seat is much cleaner than the average toothbrush
The bacteria on your teeth live at a density of about 10 million per square centimeter. The number of bacteria on the skin varies depending on the part of the body, but in any case it is much less than in the mouth.
But there are no bacteria on the skin of frogs at all. The reason for this is the mucus secreted by the frog and contains the strongest antibiotics. This is how frogs protect themselves from the aggressive bacterial environment of the swamps in which they live.
A person in this regard is much less adapted, so toothbrushes are advised to be changed every couple of months.
Fact number 5. In the evening, a person becomes 1% lower compared to his "day" height
Under the influence of loads, our joints tend to shrink. With a normal lifestyle, by the evening a person's height decreases by 1-2 cm, which is approximately 1%. The decrease is not permanent.
The maximum decrease in height occurs after weightlifting. Changes in growth can be three or more centimeters. This is due to the compaction of the vertebrae.
Fact #6: Using very high pressure, diamonds can be made from peanut butter.
Scientists from the Bavarian Research Institute of Geophysics and Geochemistry tried to simulate in the laboratory the conditions of the Earth's lower mantle, where at a depth of 2,900 kilometers the pressure is 1.3 million times higher than atmospheric pressure. During the experiment, some innovative ways of producing diamonds were discovered. According to one hypothesis, diamonds are formed from carbon under the influence of very high pressure. Carbon is found in almost all foods. And since the researchers had only peanut butter on hand, they tried it out. Unfortunately, the hydrogen, which is bonded to carbon in peanut butter, slows the process down significantly: even a small diamond takes weeks to produce. Thus scientific thought proves that the most incredible transformations are quite possible.
Fact number 7. The height of the Eiffel Tower can change by 12 centimeters depending on the air temperature
An iron rod 300 meters long expands by 3 mm when the temperature rises environment one degree.
This is exactly what is happening with the Eiffel Tower, which is approximately 324 meters high.
In hot sunny weather, the iron material of the tower can heat up to +40 degrees, and in winter in Paris it cools down to about 0 degrees (great frosts are rare there).
Thus, the height of the Eiffel Tower can fluctuate by 12 centimeters (3 mm * 40 = 120 mm).
Fact #8: A conventional microwave uses much more energy to keep the built-in clock running than it does when reheating food.
While in standby mode, a modern microwave consumes approximately 3 watts per hour. Already 72 watts come out per day, and if we multiply this number by thirty days, we get an energy consumption of 2160 watts per month.
If we assume that we use the microwave every day for 5 minutes, we get 150 minutes or 2.5 hours per month. Modern stoves consume about 0.8 kW / h in heating mode. It turns out that with this use, the energy consumption directly for heating food is 2000 watts. If you buy a more economical model that consumes only 0.7 kWh, we get only 1.75 kW per month.
Fact #9. The first computer mouse was made of wood.
Sometimes it's just curious to know the fate of the items that we use every day.
The computer mouse in the design familiar to us was introduced to the world in 1984 by Apple. Largely thanks to her, Macintosh computers have become incredibly popular. But my true story this small but necessary device starts 20 years before.
In 1964, Stanford engineer Douglas Engelbart designed a manipulator to work with the oN-Line System (NLS) operating system. Initially, the device was a handmade wooden box with two wheels inside and a button on the case. After some time, the device has a third button, and a couple of years later Engelbart receives a patent for his invention.
Next, Xerox enters the business, but its modification of a computer mouse costs about $ 700, which by no means contributes to its mass distribution. And only the company of Steve Jobs is able to develop a similar device with a cost of $ 20-30, which was included in everyday life billion people.
Newborns usually have about 270 bones, most of which are very small. This makes the skeleton more flexible and helps the baby move through the birth canal and grow quickly. As we grow older, many of these bones fuse together. The skeleton of an adult consists of an average of 200-213 bones.
2. The Eiffel Tower grows 15 centimeters in summer
The huge structure is built with temperature expansion joints, thanks to which the steel can expand and contract without any damage.
When steel is heated, it begins to expand and takes up more volume. This is called thermal expansion. Conversely, a decrease in temperature leads to a decrease in volume. For this reason, large structures such as bridges are built with expansion joints that allow them to change in size without being damaged.
3. 20% of oxygen comes from the Amazon rainforest
Flickr.com/thiagomarraThe Amazon rainforest covers 5.5 million square kilometers. The Amazonian jungle generates a significant portion of the Earth's oxygen by absorbing great amount carbon dioxide, which is why they are often called the lungs of the planet.
4. Some metals are so reactive that they explode even on contact with water.
Some metals and compounds - potassium, sodium, lithium, rubidium and cesium - exhibit increased chemical activity, therefore they can ignite with lightning speed upon contact with air, and if they are lowered into water, they can even explode.
5. A teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh 6 billion tons.
Neutron stars are the remnants of massive stars, consisting mainly of a neutron core covered with a relatively thin (about 1 km) crust of matter in the form of heavy atomic nuclei and electrons. The cores of stars that died during a supernova explosion were compressed under the influence of gravity. This is how superdense neutron stars were formed. Astronomers have found that the mass neutron stars can be comparable to the mass of the Sun, despite the fact that their radius does not exceed 10–20 kilometers.
6. Each year, Hawaii moves closer to Alaska by 7.5 cm.
The earth's crust consists of several huge parts - tectonic plates. These plates are constantly moving along with the upper layer of the mantle. Hawaii is located in the middle part of the Pacific Plate, which is slowly drifting in a northwesterly direction towards the North American Plate, on which Alaska is located. tectonic plates move at the same speed as human nails grow.
7. In 2.3 billion years, Earth will be too hot for life to exist.
Our planet will eventually become a vast desert, similar to today's Mars. For hundreds of millions of years, the Sun has been heating up, getting brighter and hotter, and will continue to do so. In about two billion years or more, temperatures will become so hot that the oceans that make Earth habitable will evaporate. The whole planet will turn into an endless desert. As scientists predict, in the next few billion years, the Sun will turn into a red giant and completely swallow the Earth - the planet will definitely come to an end.
Flickr.com/andy999
Thermal imagers are able to identify an object by the heat it radiates. And polar bears are experts at keeping warm. Thanks to a thick layer of subcutaneous fat and a warm coat, bears are able to endure even the coldest days in the Arctic.
9. It takes light 8 minutes 19 seconds to travel from the sun to the earth.
It is known that the speed of light is 300,000 kilometers per second. But even with such dizzying speed, it will take time to overcome the distance between the Sun and the Earth. And 8 minutes is not so much on a cosmic scale. To reach Pluto sunlight it will take 5.5 hours.
10. If you remove all the interatomic space, humanity will fit in a sugar cube
In fact, more than 99.9999% of an atom is empty space. An atom consists of a tiny, dense nucleus surrounded by a cloud of electrons that proportionally occupy more space. This is because electrons move in waves. They can only exist where the crests and troughs of the waves add up in a certain way. The electrons do not stay at one point, their location can be anywhere within the orbit. That is why they take up a lot of space.
11. Gastric Juice Can Dissolve Razor Blades
The stomach digests food thanks to the caustic hydrochloric acid with a high pH (hydrogen index) - from two to three. But at the same time, the acid also affects the gastric mucosa, which, however, is able to quickly recover. The lining of your stomach is completely renewed every four days.
Scientists have many versions of why this happens. The most likely: due to huge asteroids that have affected its course in the past, or due to the strong circulation of air currents in the upper atmosphere.
13. A flea can accelerate faster than a space shuttle.
Flea jumps reach breathtaking heights - 8 centimeters per millisecond. Each jump gives the flea an acceleration that is 50 times the acceleration of the spaceship.
And what Interesting Facts do you know?
- The displacement is called the vector connecting the start and end points of the trajectory The vector connecting the beginning and end of the path is called
- Trajectory, path length, displacement vector Vector connecting the initial position
- Calculating the area of a polygon from the coordinates of its vertices The area of a triangle from the coordinates of the vertices formula
- Acceptable Value Range (ODZ), theory, examples, solutions