Science facts You Never Knew You Needed

You think you know it all sometimes, but here are a few facts about science that you can bring up at your next dinner party.

Venus

All our planets in our solar system rotate in the same direction except for one, Venus. This planet often known as Earths evil twin planet, actually rotates backwards in the opposite direction. So that means that the sun rises in the west and sets in the east on Venus.

Plants

Even though you think plants just stand there doing nothing, they actually have the ability to secretly talk to each other. They have often been shown to signal other plants and trees about potential threats coming their way.

Breast Milk

Did you know there is over 700 species of bacteria in breast milk?

Sun

People often thing of the sun as a giant ball of fire. Actually, its not fire at all. The sun consists of plasma with the process of nuclear fusion turning hydrogen into helium inside of its core.

DNA

Humans actually share between 50 to 60 % of its DNA with bananas.

White Light

White light technically doesn’t exist. It is a product of all the colours put together. This can be seen if you shine a white light into a prism and the end result showing a beautiful rainbow colour spectrum.

Earths Magnetic Poles

Scientists believe that the Earth’s magnetic poles get reversed from time to time, and it might happen again in the next one to two thousand years.

Black Holes

A black hole happens when matter gets packed into such a small space, the gravity becomes so strong that even light can’t get out. We’ve all heard of supermassive black holes, but scientists believe that some black holes might be as small as one atom in size.

Circulatory System

Your body has not one but two circulatory systems that work together to transport blood throughout your body on a constant basis. Your systemic circulation and your pulmonary circulation meet up and connect in your heart to ensure that your body is getting everything it needs to function.

Stomach Acid

Our stomach digests food thanks to highly corrosive hydrochloric acid with a pH of 2 to 3. This acid also attacks your stomach lining, which protects itself by secreting an alkali bicarbonate solution. The lining still needs to be replaced continually, and it entirely renews itself every four days.

Saliva

Humans need saliva to be able to taste properly. So stay hydrated. Also humans produce over two swimming pools worth of saliva in their lifetime. sjo.

Quantum Particles

When the study of physics gets down to the subatomic level, crazy things happen. Subatomic particles appear to move in random and unpredictable ways, causing some people to actually speculate that they might indicate the existence of parallel universes. The crossroads between science fiction and reality may be closer than we think.

Chalk

Tiny single-celled algae called coccolithophores have lived in Earth’s oceans for 200 million years. Unlike any other marine plant, they surround themselves with minuscule plates of calcite (coccoliths). Just under 100 million years ago, conditions were just right for coccolithophores to accumulate in a thick layer coating ocean floors in a white ooze. As further sediment built up on top, the pressure compressed the coccoliths to form rock, creating chalk deposits such as the white cliffs of Dover. Coccolithophores are just one of many prehistoric species that have been immortalised in fossil form, but how do we know how old they are? Over time, rock forms in horizontal layers, leaving older rocks at the bottom and younger rocks near the top. By studying the type of rock in which a fossil is found palaeontologists can roughly guess its age. Carbon dating estimates a fossil’s age more precisely, based on the rate of decay of radioactive elements such as carbon-14.

Photosynthesis

I am sure most of you remember this one from school. Plants literally absorb sunlight and turn it into food for themselves to consume.

Eyes

The human eye has roughly 576 megapixels – who really needs the latest camera phone then?

Dreaming

Early psychological thinkers such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung theorized about the meaning of dreams, while most scientists in the twentieth century assumed that dreams were random spurs of memories that had no actual coherent meaning. Recently, some neurologists have found evidence suggesting that dreams exist as a defense mechanism to help humans understand and protect themselves from potential problems.

Dark Matter

Scientists determined that the vast majority of what exists in the universe is totally invisible to us, and we know nothing at all about it. This stuff is referred to as Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

Babies

They have about 300 bones at birth, with cartilage between many of them. This extra flexibility helps them pass through the birth canal and also allows for rapid growth. 

The Amazon Rainforest

Our atmosphere is made up of roughly 78 per cent nitrogen and 21 per cent oxygen, with various other gases present in small amounts. The vast majority of living organisms on Earth need oxygen to survive, converting it into carbon dioxide as they breathe. Thankfully, plants continually replenish our planet’s oxygen levels through photosynthesis. During this process, carbon dioxide and water are converted into energy, releasing oxygen as a by-product. Covering 5.5 million square kilometres, the Amazon rainforest cycles a significant proportion of the Earth’s oxygen, absorbing large quantities of carbon dioxide at the same time.

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