People Share The Best Science Facts They've Ever Learned

Incredible.

"You can build a device at home for about $30 to see subatomic particles. It's called a cloud chamber, and muons from cosmic rays, or alpha particles from americium taken from a smoke detector will leave trails of condensation that you can see with your own eyes."

Bumst3r

"Here is a video of a piece of uranium in a cloud chamber. The slower, larger particles (mainly alpha particles aka helium nuclei) leave the shorter fatter trails."

"And here is a guide to building a cloud chamber at home. How much you see depends on things like whether or not you are indoors, and your altitude. In order to increase the amount of radiation you see, you can take the americium out of a smoke detector. Americium is radioactive (you are totally safe unless you do something stupid like swallow it, and even then choking is probably* your bigger concern), and will randomly release alpha particles that your cloud chamber will pick up."

Bumst3r

I'd drink that.

"Near the centre of the Milky Way, there's a dust cloud known as Sagittarius B2. This dust cloud is really, really big -- almost 150 light years across -- and has a mass about 3 million times that of the sun. Spectrographic analysis has shown what it's made of, and it has fairly high concentrations of both ethanol (which is what gives you the buzz when you make a cocktail), and ethyl formate -- a compound which has a distinct smell of rum, and is also one of the compounds that gives raspberries their taste."

"If you could condense it down to a level where it was detectable, then, the centre of the galaxy would smell not dissimilar to a raspberry daiquiri."

Portarossa

Mind. Blown.

"You have probably heard that there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on Earth."

"But what I find more amazing is that there are more atoms in a single grain of sand than grains of sand on Earth. Just shows you how small they really are."

Thomas_Chinchilla

Say its name three times.

"If Betelgeuse, a fairly nearby giant star, goes supernova, it will light up our sky for 2 months."

Murreno1234

"The really freaky thing is that if it went supernova today, because of its distance, the light wouldn't reach the earth for over 600 years."

Ravenblack65

She thicc.

"The mass of the Sun makes up 99.98 percent of the total mass of our solar system."

ballena8892

"And Jupiter takes up most of the remaining mass."

AwesomeKiller820

Just some confused particles.

"If you take two different types of metal and hold them together in Space they will bond together in a process called "cold-welding".

callmedemorex

"I loved how a friend of mine explained it:"

"Then the two metals touch and there is nothing in between. So the electrons start going out for a walk and they become confused because they don't know where one piece of metal ends and where the other one begins. So they wander around both and BOOM now it is just one piece of metal because the electrons don't know where they are."

deterministic_lynx

Mud world!

"Sharks existed before trees!!!"

MaterialImportance

"And grass. Right? Grass wasn't around either. All those dino movies with lush grassy floors. IT WASN'T THERE! MUD WORLD!"

Empty_Allocution

Beautiful.

"Humans are bioluminescent and glow in the dark, but the light that we emit is 1,000 times weaker than our human eyes are able to pick up."

-eDgAR-

"Poor humans, their glow is so lovely and they can't even see it."

ExceptForThatDuck

The past is in the past.

"The images your eyes give are 1/100th of a second in the past."

"Because of the time it takes your brain to process inputs from all senses, what is happening in front of you is 1/100th of a second behind."

Death_By_Orange

"Yeah. It's crazy how the present doesn't actually exist."

Twisterlord

Amazing.

"Water can boil and freeze at the same time:"

"It's called the triple point, and it occurs when the temperature and pressure is just right for the three phases (gas, liquid, and solid) of a substance to coexist in thermodynamic equilibrium."

Back2Bach

This sounds fake.

"If you move backwards at the speed of light, you will see a still of the very thing you saw before you started moving, until you slow down."

FutureKnife

Terrifying.

"The Amazon rainforest, which is quickly being destroyed, produces 20% of all oxygen on Earth. If the amazon rainforest is cut down, breathing difficulties will become much more common and much more threatening. Just shows how much we are killing ourselves by killing our planet."

TheFemaleDoctor

We'd all be so tiny!

"Supermassive black holes have masses millions to billions times greater than the sun and have such a great gravitational pull that IF it would swallow the earth we would be compressed to the roughly size of a marble."

Datboip3p3

Pretty colors.

"Mantis shrimps can see in 12-15 different colours, while humans can only see in 3."

"Bonus colour fact: you have no way of knowing that the colour you know as red is the same as the colour everyone else knows as red."

"Bonus mantis shrimp fact: when they "punch", their fists move at around 50mph; bubbles caught near the punch have hit temperatures exceeding 4000 Celsius, nearly the surface temperature of the sun."

MerylSquirrel

Woah.

"If you compact a human's atoms, it would all fit inside the head of a pin."

WiseFyreWolf

There is so much out there to learn! Do you have similar things to share? Let us know.