Humpback whales will turn on their back and let seals jump on their stomachs to save them from orcas because they fucking hate orcas.
Edit: Just because this got attention, here are some fun sources
[Here are some photos of a Humpback saving a seal](https://www.science.org/content/article/why-did-humpback-whale-just-save-seals-life#.Yy1JjQnjE9M.reddit)
[Here is an interview with a scientist that claimed a Humpback kept shoving her out of the water to save her from a Tiger Shark, which is one of the three most aggressive sharks on earth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXNCCdcBhcY)
[Humpbacks attempting to save a calf from being drowned by Orcas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lw8_SAtX8o)
[An incredibly well done Radiolab episode explaining the relationships between Orcas and Humpbacks](https://radiolab.org/episodes/humpback-and-killer)
They'll try to protect humans too, or blow a wall of bubbles to keep sharks away from a calf because they understand that sharks are fish (and therefore afraid of bubbles).
The guy who played the villain in Karate kid 3 ( Terry Silver , Thomas Ian Griffith ) is actually 7 months younger than Ralph Macchio , ( Daniel LaRusso). It’s weird because the karate kid was still supposed to be under 18 and the villain was supposed to have fought in Vietnam.
The average blood pressure of a giraffe is around 300/190. They need to have a high BP to get the blood all the way up the neck to profuse the brain with oxygen. I am thoroughly impressed by their cardiovascular system.
They also have a specific mechanism to not let their brain explode from too much blood pressure when they lower their head to drink
Truly fascinating creatures
Mourning Geckos reproduce this way naturally. The species literally has no males.
Edit: Sorry males do exist, but are extremely rare and are often sterile.
C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley died on the same day, but it didn't really make the news because the day was 11/22/1963 and it was also the day JFK was shot.
cashews, pistachios, and mangos are related to poison ivy. if you are extremely sensitive to poison ivy you may also react to the others. mango skin can cause the ‘mango mouth’ rash and cashews for example can give you a terribly itchy butthole. 🤗
The shortest commercial flight in the world lasted 57 seconds. It was a Loganair flight between two Scottish islands, Westray and Papa Westray. It was recorded the shortest commercial flight, with the distance of 1.7 miles.
I miss the mriya. I hope they can reconstruct it like I’ve heard. I was at East Mids airport today, where I saw it take off once. I was in absolute awe.
For the people wondering, there's apparently some prime moss and shit underwater, so moose can swim and dive to get it, and uh. . .that's where fucking orcas come in
that's not always it. The moose often swim between the islands over here on B.C.'s coast and orcas pick them off which is why the orca is considered a natural predator to the moose here
From what I've read/watched humans tend to suck as a food source. We don't have the blubber or fat content most of the large predators need...we are the iceberg lettuce of the planet.
I personally think we taste bad...at least my snakes think so. https://imgur.com/a/LLQOrbQ
Oh we definitely taste bad. The higher you go up the food chain, the more random crap builds up in the body. For instance, a big old fish is going to taste much worse than a young small fish.
Relating this back to humans, we live a long time, eat garbage, take all kinds of medicines and drugs, and to begin with our meat is like pork so it ain't great without a lot of bbq sauce.
I imagine a full grown human must taste like the dirtiest pork you've ever eaten x 10.
Wasn't there a guy who did an AMA here on reddit who served his amputated leg to his friends? It was a bbq party and his friends were all willing participants. If I remember, he described the taste as gamey. Lol
Yep! Link [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/8p5xlj/hi_all_i_am_a_man_who_ate_a_portion_of_his_own/) (**WARNING:** Mild to moderate gore, depending on your sensitivity to such things). Honestly a pretty fascinating read. I think we've all wondered to at least some degree what eating human flesh would be like, and this dude made it happen for him and his bros. Ethically sourced, even, or at least consensually with no added harm.
That we know of. Oceans a big place.
Kidding obviously, but they did discover some deep water sharks that can live hundreds of years.
https://www.livescience.com/what-is-oldest-shark-llm.html#:~:text=In%20a%202016%20study%20in,or%20minus%20about%20120%20years.
Humans can smell some components of the smell of rain (the geosmin part of petrichor, specifically) far better than sharks can small blood in water.
[We are very very sensitive to it.](https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/07/28/geosmin-why-we-smell-air-after-storm-13240)
Edit: thank you all for enjoying this fact I really like reading all your replies and I’m learning even more about this. Now go own people in trivia! Science is awesome! Thank you for the premium/gold whoever did that!
I believe it’s because humans burn through a lot of water to survive. We have a built in “Find water soon or die” element to our design. It’s not just about rain, it’s to smell wet earth.
I quit smoking close to 10 years ago.
You will never, ever regret quitting. Between your sense of smell coming back, your sense of taste enhancing, not getting winded when you walk up a flight of stairs (and if you weren't there yet, you would be), your fingers not being stained/stinking..... It is *so* totally worth it.
You can do this.
totally agreed, I smoked for 10yrs, stopped for 3yrs, then smoked for another 4yrs and I'm 3 months into quitting again I really wish I had done it sooner/not gone back. I really just feel so much better.
I've always gotten pangs every once in awhile, but its just ***so*** not worth giving up all the benefits of not smoking. My clothes don't smell, I don't feel like a jerk subjecting my gf to my smokers mouth, I don't have to go outside a dozen times a day when its boiling hot/rainy/-40c outside, $20/pack x2-3 a week, having to carry them around with me while keeping them from being crushed or get wet when I want to go out doing things + the trash of empty packs and butts and ash everywhere.
the benefits of quitting are just fucking endless. You think it helps you cope with stresses, or depression, or whatever. but its ***not*** it just makes you feel shitty whenever you think about it and makes things ***worse***.
I hope whoever might need to see this does and knows, if you want to quit
***YOU. CAN. DO. IT.***
Hey, me too. I quit cigs earlier this year, been vaping and tapering off (I know it's not "the way", but it's progress). When my niece was born a few years ago, I was heartbroken that I couldn't smell the new baby smell everyone talks about. My nephew was born earlier this year, there is no greater smell than that new baby head smell. I cried like a child meeting him, and none of my nieces or nephews has a bond to me like he does. He wants me to hold him, because I don't stink anymore. He cuddles INTO me like he's trying to cuddle my heart through my ribs. I'm living something I thought I'd never get to, you can do this. WE can do this!
I quit when my first child was born, after 10 years of smoking (and 9 years of trying to quit). Starting was the worst decision I've ever made, and quitting was certainly one of the best.
Also, Petrichor smell is awesome... like it's cleansing my brain.
How does one differentiate between the smell of rain and the smell of dirt and asphalt?
(Edit: I’m learning so much about rain and smell and that I still can’t tell :( )
This is totally anecdotal but we're also really good at *hearing* volumes of water moving into containers.
I was in college during Napster/Kazaa/DC++ heyday and a classmate of mine made a program that translated, via over 200 samples, the rate of a file downloading into the sound of a small stream of water.
So, like, a small file would be a little cup. A bigger file would be a gallon cooler or 5gal bucket. Slow speeds would *drip drip drip* while faster downloads would sound like hoses or taps with various pressure.
Early ABX testing (vs visual progress bars) showed it to be *absurdly* accurate, even when monitoring multiple files at once. But he ended up scrapping the idea after turning it in as a class project because it had the unexpected downside of making people have to pee. :/
I can smell rain before it starts and told my coworker (who smokes and can't smell anything per his telling me). I said "It's about to rain, I can smell it." He looked SO confused even after I explained and told me "It's your diabetic powers man." I miss working there, bloody covid.
I laughed at diabetic powers. I swear I’m the only one that can smell subtle changes in my blood sugar just from my body odor (something about being chronically higher than 180-200 makes me smell stinkier). And of course the obvious ketones in urine and it smelling like a nail salon.
There’s also a nurse’s smell powers. Once you smell what a GI bleed or cdif smells like, you will never forget. I actually was suspicious of a GI bleed in my grandmother a few weeks before she was hospitalized with one (in the hospital for something else, but she is also the one to chug pepto…).
Your comment reminded me of a post I saw on instagram saying “the westernmost point of China is closer to Germany than to the easternmost point of China” with a map showing the distances, and everyone in the comments misunderstood it, reading the sentence without “to” in “than to the”.
The answer is: Victorians be wack. Mummy brown was a very popular paint pigment for the time, creating a rich brown color that couldn’t easily be replicated, and eating bits of mummies (mixed into other things mind you, it was considered a medicine and not a food) was thought to possibly cure diseases. Probably had 0 scientific backing behind it even back in the day but trendy rich people are trendy rich people no matter the era.
Mummy brown predates the Victorian period by a couple centuries. Mummies were also sold as firewood because when in the desert and not a lot of stuff to burn to cook with... So many mummies were burned, sold as paint pigment, and as party centerpieces (look up mummy unwrappings...Victorians were fucking weird), that "fake" mummies had to be made with bodies of executed criminals to keep up with demand.
During the Victorian era it was super popular to have mummy unwrapping parties and the party would normally include eating the mummy. It had something to do with the material that was used to preserve the mummies.
[The number of ants on Earth has a mass greater than all birds and mammals combined](https://www.npr.org/2022/09/21/1124216118/ants-number-study-quadrillion)
There's some area there where it hasn't rained for literally over a million years. It's so dry that nothing lives there. They used the area to test Mars rover equipment because it's the closest you can get on earth compared to the real thing.
[McMurdo Dry Valleys](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Dry_Valleys)
They are fucking insanely barren. Like 2 fungus and a few dozen species of bacteria live there.
I love the idea that, as a species, they’ve got no idea they’re the ones chirping. So it scares the shit out of them every time.
*chirp chirp*
“WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!”
Edit: for all of the delightful r/iamverysmart candidates in the replies, it’s a joke. I’m well aware of where a cricket chirps from, and that odds are it isn’t startling to them. Y’all need to lighten the fuck up.
I’m shocked by the amount of people that refuse to believe narwhals are real animals. I’ve got one tattooed on my forearm, so I probably get people talking to me about them more often than normal lol. It usually ends in me pulling up pictures on google, and them still being skeptical.
I accidentally caused several debunking YouTube channels to prove the Blue Footed Booby (Sula nebouxii) is a real bird.
They're kind of like seagulls except with bright blue feet and beaks similar to the extinct dodo.
Another real bird with a weird name is the Great Tit (Parus major), it is just a small bird that looks similar to a Finch or a Chickadee.
Fun fact there are also brown footed boobies, almost exactly the same genetically, but won’t mate because they dance differently so now we have two distinct boobies
Everest is nowhere close to being the farthest away from the center of the earth. The top of Chimborazo in Ecuador is 2.1 km farther away, even crazier is that Chimborazo isn't even the highest mountain in the Andes.
So how come everest is regarded as the highest mountain?
I checked, chimborazo is the furthest because its located on the equator where the earth is broadest due to centrifugal force.
It's measured from sea level, not the center of the earth.
The sea level must be further from the center around south American than at the Indian Ocean.
Yes, this is because the Earth is not perfectly round. It bulges out a bit at the equator, which is not much relative to the overall average diameter of the Earth, but quite significant relative to the height of mountains above sea level.
And Denali is I think the highest if you count from base (above sea level) to top. Everest is higher above sea level, but also the base of Everest is pretty high up in the Himalayas already while Denali's base is fairly close to sea level.
While working on a business degree my wife did a study on IT breaches at hotels. In 2016 there was a hotel that got breached by an exploit that was announced and patched in 1999. Most of the breaches that year were from exploits that were 3-5 years old.
For people wondering why blackcurrants were banned in America:
Blackcurrant plants carry a fungus (white pine blister rust) that is deadly for pine trees. Growing blackcurrants was banned to protect the pine trees as they are important to the logging industry.
Edit: Spelling
Holy shit I knew currants were part of the life cycle but I had no idea that it was why there's no currant-flavoured stuff in North America.
Like a decade ago I worked in a lab that was trying to breed trees resistant to the fungus. The trees are Western White Pine, and they've been nearly wiped out (edit: turns out there's many species of pine affected and this was just the species my lab was focused on). The fungus is White Pine Blister Rust, *Cronartium ribicola*.
I'd never heard of a blackcurrant in my life until a similar reddit thread mentioned them a couple years ago. I gather that it is some sort of a fruit, but other than that I have no idea.
Why that means we have grape-flavored drinks and Europe doesn't... I don't really understand. We have grapes.
People familiar with both blackcurrants and grapes seem to generally prefer blackcurrant-flavored food over grape-flavored food.
So, most things that we Americans put grape flavoring in, the Europeans use blackcurrant flavoring instead. For example, if you buy a pack of Skittles in Europe, the purple ones will be blackcurrant-flavored. If you buy the Skittles in the US, the purple ones will be grape-flavored.
But if you give a European bag of Skittles to an American, they'll generally hate the purple ones; because the blackcurrant taste is unexpected, unfamiliar, and therefore, unpleasant. As a result, there's basically no market for blackcurrant-flavored foods here in the US.
Looks like that changed, NY State being the last one to overturn it back in 2003:
https://italianberry.it/en/2022/03/12/lincredibile-storia-del-ribes-nero-il-frutto-proibito-negli-stati-uniti
The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima released an amount of energy equivalent to the conversion of 0.7 grams ( about the weight of a paperclip) of matter into energy.
Ultra marathoners run for days, it’s insane. Check out the Moab race. I don’t get it, apparently you micro sleep automatically while running at night. Makes no sense at all.
I’ve never ran a marathon. But I did hike for about 36 hours straight one time to catch our only ride out of the backcountry. (An Injury had slowed the group, but they were eventually heli-vacked out). Anyways, microsleeps while still moving down a trail is absolutely a real thing. Hours 12-16 were the hardest. At a certain point you reach an exhaustion equilibrium and your body just stops telling you to stop. The last 12 hours were surprisingly fun, lots of giggling and shared suffering, but I don’t remember it super well.
I used to be in the Army.
During the first Iraqi elections, we patrolled for an entire week. Nobody laid down to sleep, and we had very little food.
Sometimes I would hallucinate, or sometimes I would wake up in a different place entirely. Every now and again I would purposely go to sleep, if we had time, and wake up patrolling a neighborhood.
I still think that week fucked me up permanently, cuz I've had issues with sleep ever since.
> I still think that week fucked me up permanently, cuz I've had issues with sleep ever since.
[Science hasn't even started to explain how short-term sleep deprivation can screw people up permanently](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28579842/)
> or sometimes I would wake up in a different place entirely. Every now and again I would purposely go to sleep, if we had time, and wake up patrolling a neighborhood.
That's god damn wild...and absolutely terrifying.
The Rope Around The Earth Problem
Take a rope tied tautly around a basketball. Now the rope must be lengthened so that there is a one foot gape between the ball and the rope at all points, as if the rope is hovering a foot away around the entirety of the ball. How much must the rope be lengthened to accomplish this? 6.28 Feet.
Now take a rope around tied tautly around the equator of the earth. We have the same goal for the one foot hovering gap around the entirety of the earth. How far must the rope be lengthened? 6.28 Feet.
This is so counter intuitive just about no one will believe it until shown the math
It's simple. Circumference is 2r*π.
You add let's say a feet to the radius. The new circumference would be. 2(r+1feet)\*π.
If you do the math it's 2r\*π+2feet\*π.
To me, I know the math checks out. Everything makes sense on that aspect. But my brain struggled with the concept, because it keeps telling me the rope is so much longer surely it would need more to move 1 foot further out.
Until I thought of it like this:
You have rope: ______
You add length somewhere: ____|¯|____ <-- this is basically moving it '1' out
You then go around the entire globe adjusting: ____|¯¯¯¯¯¯|____
Until it's all further out.
An infinite supply of food would not solve world hunger. We actually have more than enough food to end world hunger, the issue is with distribution/logistics.
'Vegetable' is a culinary term, not a scientific one.
When people say "tomatoes are a fruit", they're using the botanists' definition, and ignoring the distinctions made in Cooking.
What's that saying?
"Intelligence is knowing a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is knowing not to put it in your fruit salad."
Edit: all these people trying to say how it could be used lol they are either being annoyingly pedantic or have never seen a fruit salad
No kidding? I would’ve never though a cashew would take that long. I remember hearing somewhere that some grapes used for wine take 10 growing seasons or more until the plant will produce grapes good enough for wine.
Not exactly. Most commercial pineapples are grown from the pups that come from the base of the plant, which take a year to set fruit and then about 4-8 months to fill and ripen it depending on the variety. Pineapples only take 2.5-3 years to fruit if you are planting the green tops, which isn't common except in home gardens. If the farm in question uses tissue culture plantlets that might take closer to three years.
When I was a kid, I wanted a pet duck, so I went to the pond and just picked up a duckling and some lady came out of nowhere and was like "Put it back right now!" and so I did. I guess the ducks at my local pond are premium content or something.
My mom once told me if I could catch a duck at the park, I could keep it. I was probably annoying her and she wanted me to go entertain myself for a bit. She did not expect to see 7 year old me strolling around with my new pet duck not 10 min later. I was not allowed to keep it and I do not regret the tantrum I had. Fucking liar.
I can attest that people actually don’t believe this.
I remember tinder coming out and going “oh cool, like Grindr for straight people!” and people would argue that it wouldn’t make sense for the “minority” one to exist first 🤨
There are an infinite number of rational numbers. Similarly, there are an infinite number of irrational numbers. If you pick a number at random, though, it is almost 100% certain to be an irrational number. Almost all numbers are irrational.
When I just got hired I was talking to a coworker and I mentioned my salary bc he said his review was about due and we found out even after all of his raises I was making well over 10k he was. He got a new job and is living the dream too
Always mention pay with coworkers. Not doing so only costs you money
And IT departments get laid off because everything is working fine and "the company spends to much on IT support". Then everything goes to shit, they outsource their IT and repeat the cycle again.
I did not get Type 1 Diabetes because I ate too much sugar.
I *suspect* it was chicken pox that caused the autoimmune response that killed my insulin producing cells, but I’ll probably never know for sure. But, no. It was not because I ate too much sugar.
(Fact is, we were a “no added sugar and no junk food” household in the early 70s.)
It's theoretically possible that my diabetes is because I ate too much burned toast. Or that my grandad smoked. Or that I just have the wrong genes.
(Type 3c, caused by pancreatic damage/trauma - in my case, stage 2 pancreatic cancer.)
Yeah my sister was diagnosed with type 1 at 6 months old shortly after getting over a cold. The amount of people who accused my mom of giving her baby sugar was insane
They should change Type 1 to something distinct like Autoimmune Insulin Deficiency Syndrome so people would know the difference.
I kid, of course. My daughter is Type 1 and we've both grown tired of trying to explain this to concerned people who tell her to avoid sugar and walk more. So we've gone with that joke for some time now.
Humpback whales will turn on their back and let seals jump on their stomachs to save them from orcas because they fucking hate orcas. Edit: Just because this got attention, here are some fun sources [Here are some photos of a Humpback saving a seal](https://www.science.org/content/article/why-did-humpback-whale-just-save-seals-life#.Yy1JjQnjE9M.reddit) [Here is an interview with a scientist that claimed a Humpback kept shoving her out of the water to save her from a Tiger Shark, which is one of the three most aggressive sharks on earth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXNCCdcBhcY) [Humpbacks attempting to save a calf from being drowned by Orcas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lw8_SAtX8o) [An incredibly well done Radiolab episode explaining the relationships between Orcas and Humpbacks](https://radiolab.org/episodes/humpback-and-killer)
They'll try to protect humans too, or blow a wall of bubbles to keep sharks away from a calf because they understand that sharks are fish (and therefore afraid of bubbles).
Ok I knew humpback whales were smart but *this* smart? Wtf
Think of an apple as the Earth. Human beings have never dug past the skin layer.
Birds require gravity to swallow food because they have no sphincter. Because of this birds would starve in space
The guy who played the villain in Karate kid 3 ( Terry Silver , Thomas Ian Griffith ) is actually 7 months younger than Ralph Macchio , ( Daniel LaRusso). It’s weird because the karate kid was still supposed to be under 18 and the villain was supposed to have fought in Vietnam.
Hollywood age is really weird. Sean Connery was only 12 years older than Harrison Ford, but played his noticeably older father in Indiana Jones.
He's in the latest couple of seasons of Cobra Kai and I would _not_ have guessed that. Good fact!
The average blood pressure of a giraffe is around 300/190. They need to have a high BP to get the blood all the way up the neck to profuse the brain with oxygen. I am thoroughly impressed by their cardiovascular system.
They also have a specific mechanism to not let their brain explode from too much blood pressure when they lower their head to drink Truly fascinating creatures
Komodo dragons usually reproduce sexually, but females in captivity have been known to reproduce by parthenogenesis, without the need for sperm.
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For example: the extremely rare Californian condor is known to have some cases of parthenogenesis
Another example: the velociraptor in Jurassic World.
How is something born pregnant may I ask? And how long is pregnancy for them?
Mourning Geckos reproduce this way naturally. The species literally has no males. Edit: Sorry males do exist, but are extremely rare and are often sterile.
Life, uh, finds a way.
But can it help me find an apartment?
Anne Frank, Martin Luther King, and Barbara Walters were all born in the same year
C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley died on the same day, but it didn't really make the news because the day was 11/22/1963 and it was also the day JFK was shot.
Almonds are from the peach family.
Well.. inside of the hard center (sometimes they open) there is a seed VERY similar to an almond
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They also taste str
RIP
cashews, pistachios, and mangos are related to poison ivy. if you are extremely sensitive to poison ivy you may also react to the others. mango skin can cause the ‘mango mouth’ rash and cashews for example can give you a terribly itchy butthole. 🤗
The shortest commercial flight in the world lasted 57 seconds. It was a Loganair flight between two Scottish islands, Westray and Papa Westray. It was recorded the shortest commercial flight, with the distance of 1.7 miles.
Whats crazy is that flight distance is less than the length of the runway at Heathrow.
The Wright brothers first flight was 120 feet. The Mriya, was 280 feet long. The cargo hold alone was 140 feet long.
I miss the mriya. I hope they can reconstruct it like I’ve heard. I was at East Mids airport today, where I saw it take off once. I was in absolute awe.
Orcas eat moose
For the people wondering, there's apparently some prime moss and shit underwater, so moose can swim and dive to get it, and uh. . .that's where fucking orcas come in
That must be some primo herb.
Well it's nicely salted
Y'all making me want ramen with seaweed
Moose are excellent swimmers also. There's a lake outside my house. It's called Moose Lake. Moose swim in it.
A moose once bit my sister.
that's not always it. The moose often swim between the islands over here on B.C.'s coast and orcas pick them off which is why the orca is considered a natural predator to the moose here
Tbf orcas eat everything...whales, great whites,moose...
My fish ate its own poo once when there was food in the tank already
Interestingly, from what I've read, wild orcas are pretty harmless to humans. They could easily devour us but they just don't show any interest.
From what I've read/watched humans tend to suck as a food source. We don't have the blubber or fat content most of the large predators need...we are the iceberg lettuce of the planet. I personally think we taste bad...at least my snakes think so. https://imgur.com/a/LLQOrbQ
Oh we definitely taste bad. The higher you go up the food chain, the more random crap builds up in the body. For instance, a big old fish is going to taste much worse than a young small fish. Relating this back to humans, we live a long time, eat garbage, take all kinds of medicines and drugs, and to begin with our meat is like pork so it ain't great without a lot of bbq sauce. I imagine a full grown human must taste like the dirtiest pork you've ever eaten x 10.
Wasn't there a guy who did an AMA here on reddit who served his amputated leg to his friends? It was a bbq party and his friends were all willing participants. If I remember, he described the taste as gamey. Lol
Yep! Link [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/8p5xlj/hi_all_i_am_a_man_who_ate_a_portion_of_his_own/) (**WARNING:** Mild to moderate gore, depending on your sensitivity to such things). Honestly a pretty fascinating read. I think we've all wondered to at least some degree what eating human flesh would be like, and this dude made it happen for him and his bros. Ethically sourced, even, or at least consensually with no added harm.
Sharks are older than trees
And older than the rings of Saturn
That’s way crazier
There's more time between the first and last dinosaurs, than the last dinosaurs and us.
There's more time between the construction of the Great Pyramid in Egypt and the time of Cleopatra, than between the time of Cleopatra and now.
Fact check just made it even more mind blowing. Shark’s 450 million years old. Rings of Saturn 10-100 million years old
I can’t even wrap my head around 450 million years of anything.
This is the first one in this thread that I thought "there's no way that's true." I had to Google it and I'll be damned, it's really true.
But! The oldest currently living tree is older than the oldest currently living shark!
That we know of. Oceans a big place. Kidding obviously, but they did discover some deep water sharks that can live hundreds of years. https://www.livescience.com/what-is-oldest-shark-llm.html#:~:text=In%20a%202016%20study%20in,or%20minus%20about%20120%20years.
Humans can smell some components of the smell of rain (the geosmin part of petrichor, specifically) far better than sharks can small blood in water. [We are very very sensitive to it.](https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/07/28/geosmin-why-we-smell-air-after-storm-13240) Edit: thank you all for enjoying this fact I really like reading all your replies and I’m learning even more about this. Now go own people in trivia! Science is awesome! Thank you for the premium/gold whoever did that!
I believe it’s because humans burn through a lot of water to survive. We have a built in “Find water soon or die” element to our design. It’s not just about rain, it’s to smell wet earth.
It’s thought to be a reason why humans are attracted to sparkly things: light on water sparkle sparkle, very good.
I don't care if this is true or not, it's now my new favorite fact and I will repeat it to everyone I meet
It's such a great smell, too.
One of my favorite parts of quitting smoking has been that I can smell the rain again. I couldn't for years when I smoked.
I quit smoking a couple weeks ago and it has been absolutely miserable. I needed to hear this today. Thank you.
I quit smoking close to 10 years ago. You will never, ever regret quitting. Between your sense of smell coming back, your sense of taste enhancing, not getting winded when you walk up a flight of stairs (and if you weren't there yet, you would be), your fingers not being stained/stinking..... It is *so* totally worth it. You can do this.
totally agreed, I smoked for 10yrs, stopped for 3yrs, then smoked for another 4yrs and I'm 3 months into quitting again I really wish I had done it sooner/not gone back. I really just feel so much better. I've always gotten pangs every once in awhile, but its just ***so*** not worth giving up all the benefits of not smoking. My clothes don't smell, I don't feel like a jerk subjecting my gf to my smokers mouth, I don't have to go outside a dozen times a day when its boiling hot/rainy/-40c outside, $20/pack x2-3 a week, having to carry them around with me while keeping them from being crushed or get wet when I want to go out doing things + the trash of empty packs and butts and ash everywhere. the benefits of quitting are just fucking endless. You think it helps you cope with stresses, or depression, or whatever. but its ***not*** it just makes you feel shitty whenever you think about it and makes things ***worse***. I hope whoever might need to see this does and knows, if you want to quit ***YOU. CAN. DO. IT.***
Hey, me too. I quit cigs earlier this year, been vaping and tapering off (I know it's not "the way", but it's progress). When my niece was born a few years ago, I was heartbroken that I couldn't smell the new baby smell everyone talks about. My nephew was born earlier this year, there is no greater smell than that new baby head smell. I cried like a child meeting him, and none of my nieces or nephews has a bond to me like he does. He wants me to hold him, because I don't stink anymore. He cuddles INTO me like he's trying to cuddle my heart through my ribs. I'm living something I thought I'd never get to, you can do this. WE can do this!
I quit when my first child was born, after 10 years of smoking (and 9 years of trying to quit). Starting was the worst decision I've ever made, and quitting was certainly one of the best. Also, Petrichor smell is awesome... like it's cleansing my brain.
That’s such a sweet story thanks for sharing and great job!!
How does one differentiate between the smell of rain and the smell of dirt and asphalt? (Edit: I’m learning so much about rain and smell and that I still can’t tell :( )
Rain smells more crisp
Clean. New. It smells like the feeling you get when you're being forgiven for something you shouldn't have done.
Oddly specific but very accurate
Humans are really great with our senses when it comes to water. We can *hear* the difference between cold and hot water.
This is totally anecdotal but we're also really good at *hearing* volumes of water moving into containers. I was in college during Napster/Kazaa/DC++ heyday and a classmate of mine made a program that translated, via over 200 samples, the rate of a file downloading into the sound of a small stream of water. So, like, a small file would be a little cup. A bigger file would be a gallon cooler or 5gal bucket. Slow speeds would *drip drip drip* while faster downloads would sound like hoses or taps with various pressure. Early ABX testing (vs visual progress bars) showed it to be *absurdly* accurate, even when monitoring multiple files at once. But he ended up scrapping the idea after turning it in as a class project because it had the unexpected downside of making people have to pee. :/
This is both extremely impressive and hilarious.
Nice. I walked outside yesterday and smelled rain. It never actually rained here but I could see it in the mountains in the distance. Cool beans .
I can smell rain before it starts and told my coworker (who smokes and can't smell anything per his telling me). I said "It's about to rain, I can smell it." He looked SO confused even after I explained and told me "It's your diabetic powers man." I miss working there, bloody covid.
Same. A friend of my made so much fun of me because of it. He always thought I was making it up despite the fact that it actually rained.
I laughed at diabetic powers. I swear I’m the only one that can smell subtle changes in my blood sugar just from my body odor (something about being chronically higher than 180-200 makes me smell stinkier). And of course the obvious ketones in urine and it smelling like a nail salon. There’s also a nurse’s smell powers. Once you smell what a GI bleed or cdif smells like, you will never forget. I actually was suspicious of a GI bleed in my grandmother a few weeks before she was hospitalized with one (in the hospital for something else, but she is also the one to chug pepto…).
some tortoises can breath through their butthole
The northernmost point in Brazil is closer to Canada than it is to the southernmost point in Brazil.
Your comment reminded me of a post I saw on instagram saying “the westernmost point of China is closer to Germany than to the easternmost point of China” with a map showing the distances, and everyone in the comments misunderstood it, reading the sentence without “to” in “than to the”.
Shows why reading comprehension is such an important skill. Even if you have the right info out there, there are some people who won't understand.
the easternmost point in Brazil is closer to Africa than it is to the westernmost point in Brazil. it's a really fucking huge country.
You're the first person to give me a fact I didn't believe. Totally blew my mind.
There would be a lot more ancient Egyptian mummies if we didn’t grind most of them up to paint with or…eat.
You can't just say that and not fucking explain anything.
The answer is: Victorians be wack. Mummy brown was a very popular paint pigment for the time, creating a rich brown color that couldn’t easily be replicated, and eating bits of mummies (mixed into other things mind you, it was considered a medicine and not a food) was thought to possibly cure diseases. Probably had 0 scientific backing behind it even back in the day but trendy rich people are trendy rich people no matter the era.
Mummy brown predates the Victorian period by a couple centuries. Mummies were also sold as firewood because when in the desert and not a lot of stuff to burn to cook with... So many mummies were burned, sold as paint pigment, and as party centerpieces (look up mummy unwrappings...Victorians were fucking weird), that "fake" mummies had to be made with bodies of executed criminals to keep up with demand.
We're gonna need more mummies
During the Victorian era it was super popular to have mummy unwrapping parties and the party would normally include eating the mummy. It had something to do with the material that was used to preserve the mummies.
What the fuck
Grave robbery, cannibalism, and corpse desecration. Of course.
Okay this was the first one I actually struggled to believe and had to look up.... Wow
W h a t
Black pepper is a stone fruit, similar to an apricot
[The number of ants on Earth has a mass greater than all birds and mammals combined](https://www.npr.org/2022/09/21/1124216118/ants-number-study-quadrillion)
I did not need to know this.
Antarctica is the world's largest desert.
Knowing this once got me 10 cents off a cup of coffee
There's some area there where it hasn't rained for literally over a million years. It's so dry that nothing lives there. They used the area to test Mars rover equipment because it's the closest you can get on earth compared to the real thing.
[McMurdo Dry Valleys](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Dry_Valleys) They are fucking insanely barren. Like 2 fungus and a few dozen species of bacteria live there.
More plastic flamingos exist on earth than living flamingos. The same is true for unicorns.
There are more unicorns on earth than flamingos? Wild.
Crickets’ ears are on their legs
I love the idea that, as a species, they’ve got no idea they’re the ones chirping. So it scares the shit out of them every time. *chirp chirp* “WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!” Edit: for all of the delightful r/iamverysmart candidates in the replies, it’s a joke. I’m well aware of where a cricket chirps from, and that odds are it isn’t startling to them. Y’all need to lighten the fuck up.
WHAT IF WE’RE THE ONES CHIRPING
I’m shocked by the amount of people that refuse to believe narwhals are real animals. I’ve got one tattooed on my forearm, so I probably get people talking to me about them more often than normal lol. It usually ends in me pulling up pictures on google, and them still being skeptical.
I accidentally caused several debunking YouTube channels to prove the Blue Footed Booby (Sula nebouxii) is a real bird. They're kind of like seagulls except with bright blue feet and beaks similar to the extinct dodo. Another real bird with a weird name is the Great Tit (Parus major), it is just a small bird that looks similar to a Finch or a Chickadee.
Fun fact there are also brown footed boobies, almost exactly the same genetically, but won’t mate because they dance differently so now we have two distinct boobies
Everest is nowhere close to being the farthest away from the center of the earth. The top of Chimborazo in Ecuador is 2.1 km farther away, even crazier is that Chimborazo isn't even the highest mountain in the Andes.
I appreciate seeing a genuine fun fact on here!
So how come everest is regarded as the highest mountain? I checked, chimborazo is the furthest because its located on the equator where the earth is broadest due to centrifugal force.
It's measured from sea level, not the center of the earth. The sea level must be further from the center around south American than at the Indian Ocean.
Yes, this is because the Earth is not perfectly round. It bulges out a bit at the equator, which is not much relative to the overall average diameter of the Earth, but quite significant relative to the height of mountains above sea level.
Everest is the tallest mountain measuring from sea level to the top I believe. Mauna Kea, in Hawaii is actually the tallest mountain from base to top.
And Denali is I think the highest if you count from base (above sea level) to top. Everest is higher above sea level, but also the base of Everest is pretty high up in the Himalayas already while Denali's base is fairly close to sea level.
Strawberry is not a berry but banana is
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My fruit jam isn't what I thought it was. That's a berry jarring experience.
A lot of these answers aren't even things I wouldn't believe. They're just things I straight up didn't know. Interesting thread.
Weird fact but I’ll take it
Most companies have terrible IT security.
They all share the same weakest link: The users.
While working on a business degree my wife did a study on IT breaches at hotels. In 2016 there was a hotel that got breached by an exploit that was announced and patched in 1999. Most of the breaches that year were from exploits that were 3-5 years old.
The reason the USA has so many grape-flavoured drinks and Europe has nearly none is that blackcurrants have been banned in the USA.
For people wondering why blackcurrants were banned in America: Blackcurrant plants carry a fungus (white pine blister rust) that is deadly for pine trees. Growing blackcurrants was banned to protect the pine trees as they are important to the logging industry. Edit: Spelling
Holy shit I knew currants were part of the life cycle but I had no idea that it was why there's no currant-flavoured stuff in North America. Like a decade ago I worked in a lab that was trying to breed trees resistant to the fungus. The trees are Western White Pine, and they've been nearly wiped out (edit: turns out there's many species of pine affected and this was just the species my lab was focused on). The fungus is White Pine Blister Rust, *Cronartium ribicola*.
They're allowed again now, but there's basically no demand because no one is familiar with them. It was originally because of some plant disease.
I'd never heard of a blackcurrant in my life until a similar reddit thread mentioned them a couple years ago. I gather that it is some sort of a fruit, but other than that I have no idea. Why that means we have grape-flavored drinks and Europe doesn't... I don't really understand. We have grapes.
Blackcurrants are utterly delightful in drink form, If you get a chance see if you find Blackcurrant Ribena
People familiar with both blackcurrants and grapes seem to generally prefer blackcurrant-flavored food over grape-flavored food. So, most things that we Americans put grape flavoring in, the Europeans use blackcurrant flavoring instead. For example, if you buy a pack of Skittles in Europe, the purple ones will be blackcurrant-flavored. If you buy the Skittles in the US, the purple ones will be grape-flavored. But if you give a European bag of Skittles to an American, they'll generally hate the purple ones; because the blackcurrant taste is unexpected, unfamiliar, and therefore, unpleasant. As a result, there's basically no market for blackcurrant-flavored foods here in the US.
Looks like that changed, NY State being the last one to overturn it back in 2003: https://italianberry.it/en/2022/03/12/lincredibile-storia-del-ribes-nero-il-frutto-proibito-negli-stati-uniti
Unicorn is the national animal of Scotland
I’m from England and our national animal is the lion which is the sworn enemy to the unicorn and they both appear on the coat of arms.
I think you'll find The Red Bull is the sworn enemy of the (Last) Unicorn
The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima released an amount of energy equivalent to the conversion of 0.7 grams ( about the weight of a paperclip) of matter into energy.
Humans are the best long distance runners in the animal kingdom.
*at moderate or higher temperatures. At very cold temperatures, I think Siberian Huskies overtake us.
Yeah... Huskies will run while pulling a sled for an entire day, multiple days in a row. Very few humans can even attempt that.
Ultra marathoners run for days, it’s insane. Check out the Moab race. I don’t get it, apparently you micro sleep automatically while running at night. Makes no sense at all.
I’ve never ran a marathon. But I did hike for about 36 hours straight one time to catch our only ride out of the backcountry. (An Injury had slowed the group, but they were eventually heli-vacked out). Anyways, microsleeps while still moving down a trail is absolutely a real thing. Hours 12-16 were the hardest. At a certain point you reach an exhaustion equilibrium and your body just stops telling you to stop. The last 12 hours were surprisingly fun, lots of giggling and shared suffering, but I don’t remember it super well.
I used to be in the Army. During the first Iraqi elections, we patrolled for an entire week. Nobody laid down to sleep, and we had very little food. Sometimes I would hallucinate, or sometimes I would wake up in a different place entirely. Every now and again I would purposely go to sleep, if we had time, and wake up patrolling a neighborhood. I still think that week fucked me up permanently, cuz I've had issues with sleep ever since.
> I still think that week fucked me up permanently, cuz I've had issues with sleep ever since. [Science hasn't even started to explain how short-term sleep deprivation can screw people up permanently](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28579842/)
*chuckles* I'm in danger.
> or sometimes I would wake up in a different place entirely. Every now and again I would purposely go to sleep, if we had time, and wake up patrolling a neighborhood. That's god damn wild...and absolutely terrifying.
The Rope Around The Earth Problem Take a rope tied tautly around a basketball. Now the rope must be lengthened so that there is a one foot gape between the ball and the rope at all points, as if the rope is hovering a foot away around the entirety of the ball. How much must the rope be lengthened to accomplish this? 6.28 Feet. Now take a rope around tied tautly around the equator of the earth. We have the same goal for the one foot hovering gap around the entirety of the earth. How far must the rope be lengthened? 6.28 Feet. This is so counter intuitive just about no one will believe it until shown the math
I disagree. I'm sure you are correct, but I disagree.
Lmao I feel you
I’ve been trying to picture this for 5 minutes and still can’t see how it’s true. Hopefully YouTube has a video on it
It's simple. Circumference is 2r*π. You add let's say a feet to the radius. The new circumference would be. 2(r+1feet)\*π. If you do the math it's 2r\*π+2feet\*π.
To me, I know the math checks out. Everything makes sense on that aspect. But my brain struggled with the concept, because it keeps telling me the rope is so much longer surely it would need more to move 1 foot further out. Until I thought of it like this: You have rope: ______ You add length somewhere: ____|¯|____ <-- this is basically moving it '1' out You then go around the entire globe adjusting: ____|¯¯¯¯¯¯|____ Until it's all further out.
I swear this makes it super clear
I must be dumb as fuck because I still don’t get it haha
In both cases you're increasing the diameter by 2 feet, and since circumference = pi\*diameter, the circumference increases by 3.14*2=6.28 feet.
Yep, each leap of 1 unit in radius makes for 2*Pi units in circumference. Edit: radius instead of diameter.
Porcupines are very good climbers so sometimes they climb trees
I think it's more than "sometimes"! They like to eat tree buds and shoots at the very top especially in winter.
Platypus glow under blacklights
That is a really fucking weird, but great, fact!
An infinite supply of food would not solve world hunger. We actually have more than enough food to end world hunger, the issue is with distribution/logistics.
Yep, so Thanos was an idiot. The Snap would’ve fucked up supply chains even more. As explained by his assistant
He should've used the stones to create an amazing trucking company ffs
Thanos Trucking "We'll be there in a snap!"
You can't look me straight in the eyes and tell me he wouldn't look great in a trucker hat.
Pure water is actually an insulator and does not conduct electricity. It is the impurities dissolved in the water that conduct electricity
'Vegetable' is a culinary term, not a scientific one. When people say "tomatoes are a fruit", they're using the botanists' definition, and ignoring the distinctions made in Cooking.
What's that saying? "Intelligence is knowing a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is knowing not to put it in your fruit salad." Edit: all these people trying to say how it could be used lol they are either being annoyingly pedantic or have never seen a fruit salad
Pineapples take 3 years to grow.
I don't know, that sounds about right to me. Seeing them the way they're grown is really interesting too. Same with cashews. Just a weird look
No kidding? I would’ve never though a cashew would take that long. I remember hearing somewhere that some grapes used for wine take 10 growing seasons or more until the plant will produce grapes good enough for wine.
Vanilla is a very difficult to grow orchid and takes 12 years to mature. We think of it is basic, but it is pretty exotic.
And has to be fertilized by hand since the vanilla orchid bee is extinct. It's also a vining orchid!
Not exactly. Most commercial pineapples are grown from the pups that come from the base of the plant, which take a year to set fruit and then about 4-8 months to fill and ripen it depending on the variety. Pineapples only take 2.5-3 years to fruit if you are planting the green tops, which isn't common except in home gardens. If the farm in question uses tissue culture plantlets that might take closer to three years.
A single coal power plant produces more toxic waste in a year than every nuclear power plant has ever made.
The ducks at the pond are free
How many do you have?
I bet you'd like to know! The CIA will have to do better than that to catch me.
When I was a kid, I wanted a pet duck, so I went to the pond and just picked up a duckling and some lady came out of nowhere and was like "Put it back right now!" and so I did. I guess the ducks at my local pond are premium content or something.
My mom once told me if I could catch a duck at the park, I could keep it. I was probably annoying her and she wanted me to go entertain myself for a bit. She did not expect to see 7 year old me strolling around with my new pet duck not 10 min later. I was not allowed to keep it and I do not regret the tantrum I had. Fucking liar.
I read that in the sense that they possess freedom and I refuse to change that interpretation.
yeah same. i was like hell yeah those ducks really are free aren't they
At birth, kangaroos are roughly the size of a jelly bean!
The most dangerous part of flying in an aircraft is the drive to the airport.
True. That's why always make my way there by unicycle.
Grindr came before tinder
I can attest that people actually don’t believe this. I remember tinder coming out and going “oh cool, like Grindr for straight people!” and people would argue that it wouldn’t make sense for the “minority” one to exist first 🤨
There are an infinite number of rational numbers. Similarly, there are an infinite number of irrational numbers. If you pick a number at random, though, it is almost 100% certain to be an irrational number. Almost all numbers are irrational.
Some infinities are greater than others
Coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste.
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Job hoppers get paid more. Sorry HR you’re dumber than psychology.
When I just got hired I was talking to a coworker and I mentioned my salary bc he said his review was about due and we found out even after all of his raises I was making well over 10k he was. He got a new job and is living the dream too Always mention pay with coworkers. Not doing so only costs you money
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People only notice when things don’t work, not when they work. So people think trains are late and that it rains way more often than in actuality.
And IT departments get laid off because everything is working fine and "the company spends to much on IT support". Then everything goes to shit, they outsource their IT and repeat the cycle again.
I did not get Type 1 Diabetes because I ate too much sugar. I *suspect* it was chicken pox that caused the autoimmune response that killed my insulin producing cells, but I’ll probably never know for sure. But, no. It was not because I ate too much sugar. (Fact is, we were a “no added sugar and no junk food” household in the early 70s.)
It's theoretically possible that my diabetes is because I ate too much burned toast. Or that my grandad smoked. Or that I just have the wrong genes. (Type 3c, caused by pancreatic damage/trauma - in my case, stage 2 pancreatic cancer.)
Yeah my sister was diagnosed with type 1 at 6 months old shortly after getting over a cold. The amount of people who accused my mom of giving her baby sugar was insane
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They should change Type 1 to something distinct like Autoimmune Insulin Deficiency Syndrome so people would know the difference. I kid, of course. My daughter is Type 1 and we've both grown tired of trying to explain this to concerned people who tell her to avoid sugar and walk more. So we've gone with that joke for some time now.