10 surprising facts that are scientifically proven

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

How much space do people occupy on the planet, what do the sun, your body and the compost heap have in common, and how dinosaurs spoiled our water.

1. Polaris periodically changes

In Shakespeare's tragedy Julius Caesar, the hero says the following:

But I am unchanging, as the Pole Star is unchanging: it is motionless - / And in the whole sky there is no one like it. There are many stars in the sky; there are countless of them, / And they all shine and all shimmer, / But only one does not change the place.

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

Well, William was a poet and lived in the days when the word "precession" is a phenomenon in which the axis of rotation of a body changes its direction over time. Launch the top, and when it starts to slow down and roll on its side, it will be a precession of its axis. it was impossible to google, he was forgivable. But in general, Caesar was mistaken in his tragedy. The North Star is not at all unchanging.

Since the earth's axis is moving 1.

2. in a circle with a radius of 23 °, shifting by about 1, 397 ° every 100 years, the position of the stars in the night sky of the Earth changes over time.

For example, in the 13th millennium BC. NS. in the place of the present Pole Star was Vega. 3500 to 1500 BC NS. there was Tuban. From 1500 BC NS. 1 year A. D. NS. - Cohab. From 1 to 1100, the place above the Earth's pole was generally empty.

From 1100 to 3200, the Alpha Ursa Minor, familiar to us, will point the way to the north. It will come closest to the pole on April 23, 2102. In 3200, she will be replaced by Alrai. And by the 13th millennium Vega will again take the leading position in the northern sky.

2. Mount Everest is growing

Not only the North Star shows us that everything in the world is changeable. On Earth, too, no stability can be found.

Take Mount Everest, for example. Everyone knows that it is the highest on our planet. It seems that 8,848 meters is quite sufficient height for this.

But Everest itself does not think so.

Therefore, from the time of the previous measurement, he took and grew by 86 centimeters.

On average, Everest is growing at a rate of 1 millimeter per year. This is because the Indian continental plate is gradually moving towards Asia. A side effect is the formation of the Himalayas, which has been going on for 55 million years.

3. The sun warms us with stale light

Surely you know that due to the limitation of the speed of light, the rays of the Sun reach the Earth with a delay of about 8 minutes. Therefore, some people joke that our star does not give us the freshest light. But they have no idea how old he really is.

8, 31 minutes is the time it takes 1.

2. so that the light reaches us from the atmosphere of the Sun. But the star's energy comes from a thermonuclear reaction in the core.

And in order for the photons to get from the sun's interior to the conditional surface, it takes on average from 10 thousand to 170 thousand years. Just keep in mind.

4. A pile of compost is not inferior in the amount of produced energy to solar matter

Another interesting fact: the average reaction power in the Sun's core is 276.5 W per 1 m³. That is, a cubic meter of solar matter produces 1,371 kcal of energy per day. This is about the same as the compost heap produces. The human body, for comparison, produces a good 1,995 kcal in the same time.

Why, then, don't compost heaps (or people) produce the same amount of heat and light? Well, they're a little smaller.

Take a pile of compost with a radius of 140 million kilometers so that it is comparable in size to the Sun, and it also becomes a star. By the way, people can also be used: in such quantities, the characteristics of a substance are no longer particularly important.

5. Bananas contain antimatter

Antimatter is the rarest and most expensive substance in the observable Universe. However, it can be found not only in the depths of space or in some Large Hadron Collider, but also in … bananas 1.

2..

Due to the fact that the average banana contains about 0.42 g of the isotope potassium-40, it emits one positron every 75 minutes.

True, the resulting antiparticle will immediately be destroyed when it comes into contact with an ordinary substance. Most of the banana is made up of normal electrons.

In general, due to the small radioactivity of bananas, physicists even have the expression "banana equivalent". They indicate the amount of fruit that must be eaten in order to receive a particular dose of radiation.

For example, you get roughly 100 banana equivalent doses from the sun and the environment per day. Chest imaging is roughly like eating 70,000 fruits. The lethal dose of radiation is about 35 million bananas - if, of course, you can cram that much into yourself.

In addition, the resulting potassium-40 is successfully excreted along with metabolic products. So if you want to get irradiated with bananas, then while eating that 35 million, refrain from going to the toilet.

6. You could get to space in an hour

Space begins at an altitude of 100 kilometers above sea level - this conditional boundary is called the Karman line Theodor von Karman, an engineer and mechanic, was the first to determine that at about this altitude the atmosphere becomes so rarefied that it is no longer possible to fly there with the help of wings. … This means that if your car could go vertically upwards, then you would get to space in about an hour.

And the Moon is 400,000 km away, which is about 10 times the circumference of the Earth. That is, getting to it is like making 10 rounds of the world by car. This will take a little less than six months, unless, of course, you stop along the way.

7. Rumors about overpopulation of the planet are slightly exaggerated

If you think that there are many people on Earth and we are in danger of overpopulation, you are wrong. It's just that 7, 88 billion people who live on our planet now are very unevenly settled over it. But if you distribute them more compactly …

Standing shoulder to shoulder, the entire population of the world can fit 1.

2. within 1,050 square kilometers. This is less than the area of Los Angeles.

For comparison, the area of Moscow is about 2,500 square kilometers, so don't worry - we'll fit.

And yes, contrary to myths, if all such a crowd jumps, we will not move the Earth from orbit. No, in general we will move it a little, but at a distance less than the size of a hydrogen atom. The solar wind is pushing our planet harder, and nothing - we do not fly out of orbit.

8. During the burning of a candle, microscopic diamonds are formed

Diamond is carbon, that is, the same graphite from a pencil, which, however, has a different shape of the crystal lattice. And this is not as rare a gem as it might seem.

In total, the earth's crust contains approximately a quadrillion (million billion) tons of diamonds. True, most of them are hidden by Mother Nature at a depth of about 150 km, so it's not so easy to get to them.

But you can find diamonds very close. If you have a candle, of course.

And she's not needed to go down the mine. Light a candle, and about 1.5 million nanodiamonds per second will begin to form from the flame. This happens when the hydrocarbons from the wick are converted into pure carbon during combustion. True, the diamond particles will immediately burn in the fire from which they appeared, turning into carbon dioxide.

9. Some snails are able to avoid being digested by birds

Perhaps you think being swallowed is a terrible fate. What could be more nightmarish than being digested alive in someone's stomach? However, Japanese snails of the Tornatellides boeningi species do not think so.

These molluscs thought, "The problem is not that we are being eaten, but that we are dying from it." And we decided to fix it.

When a bird, for example a Japanese white-eyed, swallows a snail, it begins to calmly move along the digestive tract and in about 2 hours crawls out from the opposite end of the feathered one.

Due to the fact that the shells of snails resist the effects of gastric juice quite well, and the digestion of birds is slow, the mollusk has a chance. In the experiments, approximately 16% of the snails survived. But this is because not everyone turned out to be smart enough to understand in which direction to crawl.

Snails even manage to use the birds that eat them to their advantage, since the surviving specimens, along with excrement, spread throughout the world, traveling far beyond their usual habitat.

They are not the only creatures that prefer not to resist eating, but to overcome digestion. For example, some water beetles that are swallowed by frogs simply crawl out of them from the other side.

An excellent example of how resourcefulness and determination help out in the most unexpected situations.

10. All the water you've ever drank in your life was dinosaur urine

Dinosaurs have lived on Earth for much, much longer than humans. In fact, our distant ape-like ancestors set out to turn into something vaguely human-like just 2 million years ago. Dinosaurs dominated the planet all 186 million. And then the meteorite will go bang … Okay, now is not about that.

So, during this time the dinosaurs drank a lot, a lot of liquid. In fact, 1.

2.

3. they have passed through their kidneys all the drinking water that we have now. But the new one practically does not appear on Earth and the old one does not disappear. Unless it will bring several tons of ice from space with an asteroid flying by, or some liquid from the upper atmosphere will evaporate.

So you drink the same water that was once the urine of some dinosaur. Live with it now. Probability theory, all the cases.

However, since the dinosaurs became extinct, the water they drank has evaporated millions of times and precipitated again, so that it is completely purified. So you shouldn't worry too much about this.