Another trivia list! This list explores a variety of fascinating scientific facts that you probably are unaware of. Science is still a very mysterious subject so there are millions of trivial facts about it – this will be the first of many scientific fact lists in the future.
Facts 1 – 5
1. There are 62,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body – laid end to end they would circle the earth 2.5 times
2. At over 2000 kilometers long, The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth
3. The risk of being struck by a falling meteorite for a human is one occurrence every 9,300 years
4. A thimbleful of a neutron star would weigh over 100 million tons
5. A typical hurricane produces the energy equivalent of 8,000 one megaton bombs
Facts 6 – 10
6. Blood sucking hookworms inhabit 700 million people worldwide
7. The highest speed ever achieved on a bicycle is 166.94 mph, by Fred Rompelberg
8. We can produce laser light a million times brighter than sunshine
9. 65% of those with autism are left handed
10. The combined length of the roots of a Finnish pine tree is over 30 miles
Facts 11 – 15
11. The oceans contain enough salt to cover all the continents to a depth of nearly 500 feet
12. The interstellar gas cloud Sagittarius B contains a billion, billion, billion liters of alcohol [JFrater is planning to move there in the near future]
13. Polar Bears can run at 25 miles an hour and jump over 6 feet in the air
14. 60-65 million years ago dolphins and humans shared a common ancestor
15. Polar Bears are nearly undetectable by infrared cameras, due to their transparent fur
Facts 16 – 20
16. The average person accidentally eats 430 bugs each year of their life
17. A single rye plant can spread up to 400 miles of roots underground
18. The temperature on the surface of Mercury exceeds 430 degrees C during the day, and, at night, plummets to minus 180 degrees centigrade
19. The evaporation from a large oak or beech tree is from ten to twenty-five gallons in twenty-four hours
20. Butterflies taste with their hind feet, and their taste sensation works on touch – this allows them to determine whether a leaf is edible
Thanks
FIRST!
YES FINALLY I BEAT EVERYONE! GREAT LIST THOUGH.
yeah, and i beat your mother. hallelujah!
i think its supposed to be Rompelberg.
I’m pretty sure number 16. According to http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/spiders.asp, this type of urban legend was started by a columnist who, in order to prove how gullible the internet has made people, said that people eat 8 spiders a year in their sleep. I believe this claim is an extension of that assertion.
The only way I can see this to be true is if:
A. The word “bugs” are applied liberally to microscopic organisms, in which case we eat millions of bacteria anyway.
B. This includes people who eat insects to subsist, but then that would eliminate the “accidentally” part of the claim.
C. There is a portion of the global population (probably in jungle areas) that accidentally eats large amounts of insects which offsets most people’s little to no ingestion.
Anyway, I hope for a response on the origins of this one.
Hmmm, that post looks odd. It was supposed to read “I’m pretty sure number 16 is an urban legend” without all that stretching.
Deep is right. It’s Rompelberg.
#14 should be considered speculation…not fact. There is literally NO way to honestly prove that…
yes there is, its called Paleontology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleontology
thanks guys!
its corrected to the right name now and page loads fine for me. anyone else having problems?
if so….try clearing cache or hit page refresh.
WOW, glad to know that we won’t be running out of salt anytime soon
I would love to see a polar bear jump, sounds cute!
I love number 4. Astronomy stuff always blows my mind.
I’m movin’ with JFrater to Sagittarius B too, gonna be one kick ass party:)
It’s funny, #16 says you accidently eat 430 bugs a year, today i was running and took a breath,A FLY FLEW IN MY MOUTH!!!, I threw up like 3 times, but my friend laughed, looks like #16 may be right:)
Number 4 riminded me of a fact my science teacher taught me. If we took the space out of every atom or molecule that made up the washington monument, it would be the size of a one pound bag of flour (but of course would still have the same weight).
I don’t understand this ‘first post’ thing. It’s hardly a worthy challenge.
How aboout trying to get the last post?
Currently, I’m winning on this list…
I agree with the first post thing it never made any sense. it must be just a natrual competition and because of it first posts on most websites are useless and uninformative. now you want a challenge i say shoot for first post BUT with somethig to contribute to the list in general its almost impossible because you always have somebody saying…FIRST POST. I find it hillarious when the 2nd and 3rd posts say FIRST POST.
oh yah….. now im winning
I love trivia list that is why I love this site!!
the first one doesnt make sense to me.
winning.
wooooooooooooooooooo
Please explain #4, I can’t wrap my head around it. I am trying to visualize it and am struggling!
“13. Polar Bears can run at 25 miles an hour and jump over 6 feet in the air”
Horses can run 45, jump over 7, and are also better.
Haha, really interesting list though, love it! What about the larget organism on Earth being a mushroom (or some sort of fungus) living in Washinton or Oregon in a state park? That’s pretty cool. I don’t remember what it’s called though, and I’m too lazy to go look it up at the moment.
Ashley – your first thought was that the polar bear jumping sounded cute, my first thought was about how screwed i would be if i ever met a polar bear. 25 mph? those things are badass, and they even get two of the twenty amazing facts
Number one…what dimensions are you talking about? Surely you aren’t saying all humans have the same dimensions of blood vessels? Not trying to call you a liar (for I do believe it is true), but a little qualifying is in order.
hey if you dont appreciate being number one to a post that is fine, just wait a few minutes until one of us post first! It is just a fun competition type thing.
As far as how cool it is? Well it sure beats the hell out of 23!
Kelsi: We can’t ride polar bears!!! Only horses, camels, and elephants!! That’s what makes them so cool.
“The interstellar gas cloud Sagittarius B contains a billion, billion, billion liters of alcohol”
how is this possible?
it is amazing
First Post.
I used to run a salad bar and I would bet that on average every salad had at least a 50/50 chance of having some sort of critter in it, no matter how well we washed it. Bon appetite!
You could ride a polar bear if you could somehow convince him not to eat you first, a big male polar bear is certainly strong and big enough to carry an adult human.
Bugs in salad, or most often in our beers, for some reason dont seem to worry us much here in Australia. Cries of “dont worry mate, he wont drink much”!! will resound around the room, the bug removed, and the festivities continue. What doesnt kill us makes us stronger eh? Cheers, Kate
WOW. I must say its extremely refreshing to run into posters who are critical and run everything they hear past snopes first. My friends are constantly sending me emails about missing children from 1994 and Bill gates sending out a penny for every person forwarded! That said, the bug thing (16) I would think is the most impossible thing to figure out. It would really depend on climate, diet, and sanitary conditions, all vary greatly in north america. This is an amazing list tho!! Great job!!
No. 14, doesn’t make sense to me.
I we had a common ancestor 60 million years ago, then surley we still have a common ancestor?
It’s like saying ‘Earlier on I got out of bed 20 minutes ago’.
Discuss.
semantics, semantics
should have said we share a common ancestor that lived 65 million years ago…..
the blood vessel thing includes capilliaries, those suckers are microscopic, but plentiful
fgds, this morning I got out of bed.
Did I still get out of bed if it isnt morning still?
See, same thing
fgds: I think it means that the common ancestor existed 60 million years ago. In which case, your statement would be something like, “I was in bed 20 minutes ago.” ? haha, right?
Ahh I see. It’s stated a bit confusingly I suppose. But I can’t really be pedantic considering most of my posts look like they’ve been sprayed with an anit-grammer machine gun.
sdggrant, you kind of made my own point better than I did there! How about this, It’s like saying ‘Twenty minutes ago I had been out of bed for twenty minutes’ instead of saying ‘I’ve been out of bed for 40 minutes’
In other news, Polar bears are awesome.
Polar bears are awesome, and extremely threatened,
global warming is reducing/removing the ice pack, where they hunt for seals…
I thought seals where threatened too.
Catch 22.
lol, i agre polar bears are awesome.
FGDS, the english language is supposedly the hardest language to learn because of all of the crazy rules and different meanings. This is an example o something worded more or less correctly, and still being confusing.
16. The average person accidentally eats 430 bugs each year of their life
I would love to know how people come up with that number cause does some scientist follow people around secretly checking if there’s a bug in their food? And if so, to that scientist I’d like to say “GET A LIFE DUDE!!”
I think it is safe to say that people eat a lot of bugs during their life time, intentional or not. It would be nice to find out how somebody came up with the number 430 though.
P.S. I agree with Mike (post 7). That’s the theory of evolution being referred to as a fact, as usual. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the process of evolution, but as Mike said, a theory is a theory, and should not be written as if it was a verified law.
that theory will soon be law…
it's been proven that all dna that creates an 'eyeball' for instance is exactly the same up to a certain point until further evolved eyes contain more information in the dna.. that is why all life shares so much dna info. this can be traced through time on an evolutionary scale with fossils. In essence, when an eyeball was first formed, it was only formed once and then branched out from there. therefore yes we all share the same common ancestor and this has been proven scientifically.
scientific theory is a thing that explains Facts, so its not a guess, or un unverrified. The earth going around the sun is a theory, would u have the same criticisim for someone talking about that as fact.
If you sum that number with the amount I intentionally eat, then my annual total is in the thousands.
mike and reg123456- we CAN and DO KNOW for FACT about these things due to DNA! And “theory” does not mean “best guess” I’m sorry science threatens your world view.
Also, 430 bugs a year? that’s more than one a day. I doubt it would be that many accidentally eaten, but it is probably more than we’d like to know.
teacherman (#19): To (very) roughly answer your question, a neutron star is (funnily enough) made up almost entirely of neutrons, with a few other particles. If you think of the amount of space in an atome, then take out all that space (and the protons & electrons), you have a neutron star.
From wikipedia:
“neutron stars have overall densities of 8.4×1016 to 1×1018 kg/m³, which compares with the approximate density of an atomic nucleus of 3×1017 kg/m³.”
Which means that neutron stars are composed almost entirely of the particles in the nucleus of an atom.
I did not know about #1 and #20. They are very interesting facts.
randall, thanks for the back up
your welcome
bye and bye
i am not a bigot, i believe *****s come in all colours, religions, and every society ever created on this good earth
reg123456: Scientist can’t prove with DNA that 2 species shared a common ancester. There may be some similarities in our DNA that would point to that being the fact, but it is most certaintly not proven beyond a doubt.
teacherman: Every mass you see here on earth is made up of elements. These elements have protons and electrons (in addition to neutrons). Since protons and electrons have equal but opposite charges, they attract each other. The electrons then form orbits around the protons (with are located in the nucleus with the neutrons). These electron orbits take up millions of times the space of the nucleus. A neutron star doesn’t have many (if any) electrons so there is no waisted space, and everything is packed nice and tight. So like dangorironhide points out, they have amazingly large densities.
it's been proven that all dna that creates an 'eyeball' for instance is exactly the same up to a certain point until further evolved eyes contain more information in the dna.. that is why all life shares so much dna info. this can be traced through time on an evolutionary scale with fossils. In essence, when an eyeball was first formed, it was only formed once and then branched out from there. therefore yes we all share the same common ancestor and this has been proven scientifically.
Who invited the creationists?
reg123456;
evolution is not theory, evolution is fact…
the theory lies in what exactly evolved from what…nobody is sure of the EXACT steps but the pattern is undeniable (with a modicum of intelligence and education; and not an education at some yahoo fundamentalist school in the southern U.S.)
fgds; seals are doing just fine in Canada, at least since they stopped wearing fur. they are actually being blamed for the drop in the Cod stocks. (its not the seals, its overfishing with factory ships, both domestic and foreign). Elephant seals though are suffering great hardships due to the lack of pack ice; thousands have been crushed or otherwise injured because they are all stuck on the shore, no ice to spread out on….
ps; not that the seals stopped wearing fur, the humans….(if baby harp seals looked like wart hogs, we would still be wearing nice warm fur)
Jfrater-
Number 15 is wrong, or at least mis-stated. Polar bear fur is not “transparent”, and transparency would not make them invisible to infra red.
Polar bear hair is hollow giving it tremendous insulating qualities, therefrore they lose very little body heat. That fact is what makes polar bears difficult or impossible to thermally image or detect.
Mom424- Your gullible devotion to the global warming myth, despite a preponderance of scientific evidence to the contrary, is illustrative of why you would mis-state the status of evolution.
Evolution is in fact a theory- a well founded and supported theory, but a theory nonetheless. Science reaches concensus, and rarely a conclusion, particularly when there are more unanswered questions than those that are plausibly explained- as in the theory of evolution.
Oh, and before you make one of your bigoted statements- I am an agnostic, and a scientist. Stick with parenting “Mom”. or read more.
@Mom424
).
At least until somebody comes up with a better theory (creationism surely isnt one
number 3 is interesting. I once read somewhere that even if humans got to the point where they never aged we would still only live to about 500 becaus of the chance of having an accident
i love this list! i do love reading trivias and other interesting facts about nature, astronomy etc… i hope there would be more of these coming?
btw to kelsi, that thing you said about the mushroom? its true, ive read about it. the largest organism on earth extends a mile in length or more if im not mistaken. its called the honey mushroom and is found in oregon.
Alamo:
I somehow doubt that you are in fact a scientist. A scientist would understand that the terms “theory” and “fact” are not necessarily in opposition. The “theory” of Evolution is a model to explain the evidence we have at hand, and as such it explains the evidence so well, and to such an extent, that it can, actually, be taken as fact. And so it is; the evidence for the correctness of the theory is overwhelming. It is an established fact that organisms evolve; in complex organisms this usually happens over a great span of time, and is therefore difficult to observe… but in bacteria and other simple organisms, it has been very clearly empirically confirmed. The “theory” explains what is plain to see—and is in this sense *fact.*
The “fact” that you call global warming a “myth” and come out with the flat-out LIE that there is a “preponderance of scientific evidence to the contrary” indicates to me that you are not, in fact, a scientist—at least not one who is speaking for the field in which you’ve been trained.
Reading is something you might want to try yourself, therefore.
…. — Randall …!!!
——— Alamo is right…!!!! Global Warming is not true… It's a myth.. Government in some nation, supports for that myth for somehow it can help…!!! For sometimes crazy things help…
Yea, what Randall said!!!!
I believe it is safe to say that somewhere in the near future evolution will become a scientific fact, not a theory. I’m a christian and even I believe evolution makes a wholelot more sense than creationism. Plus evolution can back up it’s theory with science and DNA evidence, while creationism can’t.
alamo
global warming is a fact, what is in contention is weather it is a naturally occurring phenomenon or man made/influenced
and i never insulted you,or anyone, just schools that teach faith as fact
and being a mom is just one of the things i am successful at