this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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For me it is the fact that our blood contains iron. I earlier used to believe the word stood for some 'organic element' since I couldn't accept we had metal flowing through our supposed carbon-based bodies, till I realized that is where the taste and smell of blood comes from.

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[–] StinkySnork@kbin.social 150 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (13 children)

A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus. One day takes 243 Earth days, while a year takes 225.

Maybe it's not "well known", but still interesting in my opinion.

[–] loobkoob@kbin.social 51 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I mentioned this one to my friends the other day and it took so much convincing before they actually believed me! Definitely an interesting one. Venus also spins the opposite direction to all the other planets in the solar system, meaning the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.

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[–] starman2112@sh.itjust.works 124 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (18 children)

Planets and stars and galaxies are there. You can see them because they're right over there. Like, the moon is a big fucking rock flying around the earth. Jupiter is even bigger. I see it through a telescope and think "wow that's pretty," but every once in a while I let it hit me that I'm looking at an unimaginably large ball of gas, and it's, like, over there. Same as the building across the street, just a bit farther.

The stars, too. Bit farther than Jupiter, even, but they're right there. I can point at one and say "look at that pretty star" and right now, a long distance away, it's just a giant ball of plasma and our sun is just another point of light in its sky. And then I think about if there's life around those stars, and if our star captivates Albireoans the same way their star captivates me.

And then I think about those distant galaxies, the ones we send multi-billion dollar telescopes up to space to take pictures of. It's over there too, just a bit farther than any of the balls of plasma visible to our eyes. Do the people living in those galaxies point their telescopes at us and marvel at how distant we are? Do they point their telescopes in the opposite direction and see galaxies another universe away from us? Are there infinite distant galaxies?

Anyway I should get back to work so I can make rent this month

If I point my finger at one of those galaxies, there's more gas and shit between us within a hundred miles of me than there is in the rest of the space between us combined

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[–] whileloop@lemmy.world 110 points 1 year ago (6 children)

There's a giant ball of extremely hot plasma in the sky and we aren't supposed to look at it. What is it hiding? Surely if someone managed to look at it long enough, they would see the truth!

[–] zirzedolta@lemm.ee 26 points 1 year ago

I often used to look at it as a child, however the adults wouldn't let me. I knew there was some ulterior motive behind it.

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[–] Mothra@mander.xyz 102 points 1 year ago (16 children)

Time relativity always boggles my brain, I accept the fact but I find crazy that if I strap my twin and his atomic clock to a rocket and send them out to the stratosphere at the speed of light, when they return he'll be younger than me and his clock will be running behind mine. Crazy

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 39 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

It's even crazier because you don't need to reach the speed of light. It'll happen in a smaller degree for any speed. Even in mundane conditions.

For example, if your twin spent four days in a 300km/h bullet train, for you it would be four days plus a second.

Usually this difference is negligible, but for satellites (that run at rather high speeds, for a lot of time, and require precision), if you don't take time dilation into account they misbehave.

(For anyone wanting to mess with the maths, the formula is Ξ”t' = Ξ”t / √[1 - vΒ²/cΒ²]. Ξ”t = variation of time for the observer (you), Ξ”t' = variation of time for the moving entity (your twin), v = the moving entity's speed, c = speed of light. Just make sure that "v" and "c" use the same units.)

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[–] rakyat@artemis.camp 89 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

Not exactly bizarre, but it’s fun to learn that the delicious fragrance of shrimps and crabs when cooked comes from chitin, and chitin is also why sautΓ©ed mushrooms smell/taste like shrimps.

And since fungi are mostly chitin, plants have evolved defenses against fungi by producing enzymes that destroy chitin, which is how some plants eventually evolved the ability to digest insects.

EDIT: a previous version of this post mistakenly confused chitin with keratin (which our fingernails are made of). Thanks to sndrtj for the correction!

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[–] axont@hexbear.net 76 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are only 24 episodes of the initial run of The Jetsons and only 25 of Scooby Doo. They got aired as reruns for decades before more episodes were made. There are only 15 episodes of Mr. Bean.

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[–] CADmonkey@lemmy.world 73 points 1 year ago (14 children)

Speaking as someone who grew up in the 1980s...

Micro-SD cards almost don't make sense to me. I'm not saying I don't believe in them, because of course I have a few of them. Obviously they exist and they work. But. They're the size of a fingernail and can hold billions of characters of data. I uwve a camera that ive put a 128 GB microSD card in. A quick tap on the calculator tells me that's over 91,000 3.5" floppy disks. Assuming they're 3mm thick, that's a stack of disks 273 meters tall. But this card is so tiny that I have to be careful not to lose it.

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 28 points 1 year ago (4 children)

How about the new 2Tb m.2 drives? Not only vastly larger yet still, transfer speeds are also insane. I once had a computer with a 20Mb hard drive, current drives transfer 600-1200mb per second.

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[–] Urist@lemmy.ml 72 points 1 year ago (5 children)

There is about 8.1 billion people in the world. Assuming romantic cliches to be true and that we all have exactly one soulmate out there, we would have a very hard time sifting them out. If you were to use exactly one second at meeting a person it would take you 257 years to meet everyone alive on earth at this moment, which due to human life span being significantly shorter and the influx of new people makes the task essentially impossible without a spoonful of luck. Moral of the story: If you believe you have found your soul mate, be extra kind to them today.

[–] Damage@feddit.it 106 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Soul mates are made, not found. You get with someone compatible to you, and through the sharing of experiences and affection, if nothing goes excessively wrong, they become unique for you.

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[–] bradorsomething@ttrpg.network 70 points 1 year ago (14 children)

Let's stick with the iron in your hemoglobin for some more weirdness. The body knows iron is hard to uptake, so when you bleed a lot under your skin and get a bruise, the body re-uptakes everything it can. Those color changes as the bruise goes away is part of the synthesis of compounds to get the good stuff back into the body, and send the rest away as waste.

In the other direction, coronaviruses can denature the iron from your hemoglobin. So some covid patients end up with terrible oxygen levels because the virus is dumping iron product in the blood, no longer able to take in oxygen. I am a paramedic and didn't believe this second one either, but on researching it explained to me why these patients were having so much trouble breathing on low concentration oxygen... the oxygen was there, but the transport system had lost the ability to carry it.

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[–] Pantherina@feddit.de 68 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (14 children)

That "I" am pretty much just the construct of electrons flying around my brain.

That you need to lay down K.O. for many hours every day, otherwise you get insane.

That we are always only 2min or so away from death, if we stopped breathing.

That everything I eat actually gets digested into mousse and bacteria are in my body, digest it and I get the elements into my blood.

That our world is so big, but you could also walk to China ~~Japan~~ from the EU, if you had enough time. But also its crazy how huge our common trade routes are.

That a weird minicomputer in my pocket can store 128GB of information, access a wireless network from across the whole planet, and can remember so much more than my brain

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[–] evatronic@lemm.ee 67 points 1 year ago (9 children)

The sun could've gone nova 8 minutes ago and we wouldn't know for another 20 seconds or so.

[–] zirzedolta@lemm.ee 49 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Interesting fact: the sun becomes 1 million tons lighter every second.

[–] hstde@feddit.de 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Diet specialists hate this trick.

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[–] 018118055@sopuli.xyz 62 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Calcium is a metal. We have metal bones.

[–] Urist@lemmy.ml 53 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

From Wikipedia on bones:

Bone matrix is 90 to 95% composed of elastic collagen fibers, also known as ossein,[5] and the remainder is ground substance.[6] The elasticity of collagen improves fracture resistance.[7] The matrix is hardened by the binding of inorganic mineral salt, calcium phosphate, in a chemical arrangement known as bone mineral, a form of calcium apatite.[9]

So the statement is a bit faulty, not only because of the relative low amount of calcium in our bones, but also because it appears as a mineral. We distinguish between salts and metals because of their chemical properties being quite different (solubility, reflectiveness, electrical conductivity, maleability and so on).

Edit: I do realize the point of the comment was not to be entirely factual, so if I am allowed as well I would say science is pretty metal.

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[–] ryathal@sh.itjust.works 58 points 1 year ago (12 children)

Queuing theory can have some fun surprises.

Suppose a small bank has only one teller. Customers take an average of 10 minutes to serve and they arrive at the rate of 5.8 per hour. With only one teller, customers will have to wait nearly five hours on average before they are served. If you add a second teller the average wait becomes 3 minutes.

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[–] Immersive_Matthew@sh.itjust.works 57 points 1 year ago (9 children)

The mitochondria in all but your blood cells are a different species than us with their own separate DNA.

[–] calhoon2005@aussie.zone 29 points 1 year ago

You mean the power house of the cell?

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[–] JoYo@lemmy.ml 57 points 1 year ago (23 children)

there's people that don't like music.

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[–] Iraglassceiling@hexbear.net 53 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (23 children)

The birthday paradox

If you get 23 people in a room the odds of two of them sharing a birthday are 50%

The birthday paradox is a veridical paradox: it seems wrong at first glance but is, in fact, true. While it may seem surprising that only 23 individuals are required to reach a 50% probability of a shared birthday, this result is made more intuitive by considering that the birthday comparisons will be made between every possible pair of individuals. With 23 individuals, there are (23 Γ— 22)/2 = 253 pairs to consider, far more than half the number of days in a year.

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[–] Selmafudd@lemmy.world 52 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Don't know if it's bizarre but I was shocked when I found out I'd been lied to my whole life... a leap year isn't every 4 years.

So leap years happen when the year is divisible by 4, but not when the year is divisible by 100 but then they do again when the year is divisible by 400.

So the year 2000 is a perfect example of the exception to the exception. Divisible by 100 so no leap year, but divisible by 400 so leap year back on..

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No one (!) alive today experienced a year divisible by 4 that was not a leap year. The oldest living person was born in 1907.

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[–] PeepinGoodArgs@reddthat.com 50 points 1 year ago (8 children)

The hell that giving birth can be.

A lot of women endure having a baby...and holy. shit. No.

[–] NoIWontPickaName@kbin.social 32 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Their bodies produce chemicals that cause them to forget how bad childbirth was.

[–] Jay@sh.itjust.works 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Exactly. I was there and saw my wife having the worst pain of her life. Really without exaggeration. It was incredibly hard and painful.

Then, 10 minutes after it's all over, she looks at me and says "Well, that wasn't so bad".

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[–] Davel23@kbin.social 49 points 1 year ago (14 children)

Alaska is simultaneously the northernmost, westernmost, and easternmost US state.

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[–] shinigamiookamiryuu@lemm.ee 40 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] ProfessorOwl_PhD@hexbear.net 36 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Quantum superpositioning. SchrΓΆdinger was right, it's absolutely ridiculous and the cat can't be alive and dead at the same time, box or not.

The problem is it provably does work that way, or at least in a way that is indistinguishable from it, ridiculous or not, and we don't really know why. We've learnt many of the rules, managed to trap particles in superimposed states, even discovered that plants take advantage of it to transport energy more efficiently, and it's just a thing that happens, an apparently fundamental rule of existence. And it doesn't make any fucking sense.

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[–] PaulSmackage@hexbear.net 36 points 1 year ago (2 children)

There's about 25 blimps in the world, and only 40-50 pilots.

[–] Sasuke@hexbear.net 35 points 1 year ago (4 children)

doesn't really fit the thread, but i was surprised when i learned that the empire state building has a blimp docking station

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[–] beteljuice@lemmy.ml 34 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Your bones are made of calcium, which is also a metal. You've got a metal frame inside your body.

[–] niels@lemmy.world 36 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Hate to burst your bubble, but the calcium inside your bones is not in a metallic form but as calciumphosphate. So no metal frame but one made of a salt I guess.

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[–] Rocky60@lemm.ee 33 points 1 year ago (15 children)

There’s no such thing as tides. Gravity holds the water as the earth rotates

[–] Turun@feddit.de 31 points 1 year ago

You mean in the same way that there is no centrifugal force?

Technically right, but doesn't matter if you are in the rotating frame of reference.

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[–] Sargteapot@lemmy.nz 29 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Your asswhole can stretch up to 8 inches without permanent deformation.

Also an adult raccoon can fit into a 4.5 inch hole.

Do with that info as you wish

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[–] glibg10b@lemmy.ml 29 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Here's one: Iron doesn't have a smell. It acts as a catalyst in the reaction of bodily fluids or skin oils, which is why you can't smell coins after washing them

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[–] rtxn@lemmy.world 28 points 1 year ago (11 children)

We can't touch objects, ever. Most of the space "occupied" by an atom is emptiness (which is another rabbit hole I'm not willing to go down), and when we "touch" an object, it's just a force field pushing the atoms apart. It's the same reason why we don't fall apart into atoms - some invisible force just really wants our atoms to stay together.

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[–] Elon_Musk@hexbear.net 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

The speed of advancement from the industrial revolution to present.

The relatively short time humanity has been around

The universe is finite but expanding

The Monty Hall problem

The absolute scale of devastation created by humanity

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[–] Colorcodedresistor@lemm.ee 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The combustion engine. I know technically it's not but ultimately we as humans found a way to harness the power of explosions and make them do our bidding. honestly, one of humanity's finer achievements. yes, it's not without its barbs like emissions, but that's a small price to pay for the workload any vehicle can provide.

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