The world is a fascinating place. We should know-we live there.
In and above the world, we have so many exchanges of life; space; information; it feels impossible to ever fully grasp this incredible, strange thing called life that we live.
u/TheRebel2187 asked:
What's your favourite random fact?
Here were some of those answers.
It's Just A Dinosaur, NBD
In the production of the 2014 Godzilla movie the sound designers played Godzilla's roar through a whole lot of concert speakers and they got noise complaints from 3 miles away about people thinking there was an earthquake.
I'd Rather Watch Asparagus Grow
Asparagus grows so quickly during the spring (up to 10" in one 24 hour period, or almost half an inch per hour) that you could literally sit and watch it grow were you so inclined (or that bored).
Now I Can ALWAYS Get There
Alexander the great once built a permanent bridge to an island just because he was upset when they laughed at his offer for surrender on their part because he couldnt get there.
Tried To Eat Some Bugs But Then I Got High
So certain millipedes secrete cyanide as a protective mechanism to kill predators. However lemurs are immune to this lethal effect and instead intentionally provoke millipedes to get them to excrete cyanide. The lemurs do this because instead of killing them, the cyanide produced by the millipedes gets them high (and I think they can also use it as insect repellent). TLDR: Lemurs eat millipedes cyanide to get high.
Bye Bye Miss Electron-Pie
Astronomer here! Magnetars are a type of neutron star (the core of a giant dead star where a ball of neutrons the mass of the sun are crammed into a 20km/12mi radius) that have the most extreme magnetic fields we know of in the universe. How extreme? Well if you got within a thousand kilometers/ 620 miles of one, the magnetic field itself would kill you, by basically pulling the electrons out of your very atoms.
Space is so cool!
A Mysterious Spice
There used to be three staple seasonings for tables in ye olden days, salt, pepper and nobody knows, table sets from back then have been found with 3 containers consistently but no one ever bothered to write down what was in the 3rd one bc? Common knowledge right? What idiot wouldn't know what to put in the third container? Us apparently. Just another random bit of knowledge lost through the ages.
That's What We Call COLD
During the Cold War, an American condom company was shipping, well, condoms to the USSR but they switched the sizes so that, for example, a XL size was labeled under medium on the box so that the Russians would think Americans had big d!cks.
There And Back Again
There is approximately 2 meters of DNA packed into the average human cell. That means there is approximately 20,000,000,000 kilometers of DNA in the average adult human body, conservatively estimating 1013 cells in the body.
For reference, that is ~66 roundtrips between Earth and the Sun.
Salt Fat Acid Heat
Tomato is a vegetable and a fruit. Vegetables is a culinary term while fruits are botanical.
The age-old question actually has an answer—it's both! Tomatoes are fruits that are considered vegetables by nutritionists. Botanically, a fruit is a ripened flower ovary and contains seeds. Tomatoes, plums, zucchinis, and melons are all edible fruits, but things like maple "helicopters" and floating dandelion puffs are fruits too. For some reason, people got hung up on tomatoes, but the "fruit or vegetable" question could also work for any vegetable with seeds.
Now, nutritionally, the term "fruit" is used to describe sweet and fleshy botanical fruits, and "vegetable" is used to indicate a wide variety of plant parts that are not so high in fructose. In many cultures, vegetables tend to be served as part of the main dish or side, whereas sweet fruits are typically snacks or desserts. Thus, roots, tubers, stems, flower buds, leaves, and certain botanical fruits, including green beans, pumpkins, and of course tomatoes, are all considered vegetables by nutritionists.
There is no hard-and-fast rule that clearly designates a botanical fruit as a vegetable, but, given that tomatoes are generally not used in desserts and are closely related to other fruit-vegetables (e.g., eggplants and peppers), it is not too counterintuitive for tomatoes to be classified as vegetables. So go ahead and call a tomato whatever you want—it's super tasty either way.
A Natural Radiation Site
There existed a natural nuclear reactor in Africa 2 billion years ago. And 30 km from the site of the reactor were find the oldest fossils of animals, also aged of 2 billion years ago. There doesn't appear to be any link though.
