Obvious-incredible: the most interesting facts. Obvious facts

Incredible facts

Some facts don't seem so obvious, although you always knew about them.

For example, you know that you can see your nose, but you didn't think about it until someone pointed out this strange fact to you.

Here are some more obvious but surprising facts that may amaze you.

1. You have never seen your real face - only photographs and reflections.

2. You always see your nose, but your brain ignores it.

3. You can't imagine a new color.

Any color of the spectrum visible to humans already exists.

4. You can't breathe and swallow at the same time.

Admit that you just tried this.

5. Your tongue never rests in your mouth.

How is your tongue resting at the moment? It's likely pressed against the roof of your mouth most of the time, which means the tongue muscles are working all the time. Now this thought will haunt you.

6. At this very moment, you are older than you've ever been and younger than you'll ever be.

7. You can't hum while holding your nose.

8. Your right palm has never touched your right elbow.

9. Something touches you all the time.

Even if you jump in the air naked, because air has mass.

10. Except that nothing touches you, since atoms act Each other with force, and, in fact, do not touch.

Atoms repel other atoms all the time, so when you put your hand on the table, it actually floats slightly above the table.

11. If a child was born at 23:00 in Moscow, and another child was born in Novosibirsk at 3:00, they will have different birthdays, although they were born at the same time.

12. "() ()" is not a palindrome, but "()) (" is a palindrome.

A palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same in both directions. And although "()()" looks more symmetrical, it is not a palindrome.

13. If you buy a bottle of 12 year old whiskey, it was only produced in 2005.

14. You may only be disgusted by other people's hair and nails when they are separated from the person's body.

Especially if you find them in food.

15. Money has value only because we ourselves decide so.

16. When you think about your brain, your brain thinks about itself.

If you throw raisins into champagne, they will jump up and down the glass without stopping.

Regular sex three times a week helps people look 7-12 years younger.

Eating a pack of chips every day is the same as drinking 5 liters of sunflower oil a year.

In Tibet, residents drink tea with salt, and not with sugar, as is customary here.

In East Africa you can buy beer made from bananas.

The oldest letter is O, it has not changed its appearance since 1300 BC.

Tuatara (beakheads) are lizard-like animals found in New Zealand that have existed on Earth for at least 200 million years. But what is surprising is not their age, but the fact that tuatara have a third eye - with a lens, cornea, retina and optic nerve connected to the brain. This is a real full-fledged third eye, which by the age of six months is completely covered with scales, and the animal becomes like everyone else, with two eyes.

Left-handed people live about 9 years longer than right-handed people.

Men are on average a third stronger than women, especially in the muscle group above the waist, and their brain weight is greater than that of women.

Many lipsticks contain fish scales.

The density of ice is approximately equal to the density of concrete. This is why it is so difficult to excavate in permafrost areas. It is, for example, impossible to dig the foundation of a house into the ground there. Therefore, in northern cities, houses are often built on stilts.

When you inhale, there is more air in the right lung than in the left.

People who regularly drink coffee suffer from asthma much less often than others.

A soap bubble bursts in 0.001 seconds. The nuclear reaction lasts 0.000000000000000 001 seconds (ten to the minus eighteenth power of a second). By the way, the film of a soap bubble is one of the thinnest things that can be seen with the naked eye. “Hair-thin” or “tissue-paper-thin” means a huge thickness next to the thickness of the wall of a soap bubble, which is 5000 times thinner than a hair and tissue paper.

In the seventeenth century, when anti-Catholic and anti-papal sentiments began to spread among the Puritans, they protested by stuffing wicker effigies of the Pope with live cats and burning them. Good people...

Chewing gum helps you stop crying while cutting onions.

If you pour alcohol on a scorpion's back, it will stab itself to death.

To cleanse the stomach, some species of frogs practically turn their stomach out, “squeeze” it with their right paw and stick it back.

The Guinness World Records book has one of its own records - this book was most often stolen from the library.

The only product that does not spoil is honey.

If the statue of a “rider on a horse” has both legs raised, it means the person died in battle. If a horse has one leg raised, it died from wounds acquired in battle. If both feet are on the ground, he died a natural death.

Starfish have no brains.

In manatees, the mammary glands are located slightly below the forelimbs, and perhaps it was these animals that served as the prototype for stories about mermaids as told by sailors.

The average person spends a week waiting for traffic lights to change.

With a simple pencil you can draw a line approximately 56 km long.

Fluff, contrary to popular belief, is not only not lighter than air, but hundreds of times heavier than it. It floats in the air only because it has a very large surface, so that the air resistance to its movement is great compared to its weight.

Grapes explode in the microwave.

Hydrogen gas is the least dense substance on Earth, while liquid hydrogen is the densest.

When bats are upside down, they “snap” their claws, so there is no need to exert any force to hold them. Sometimes they even die in this position and are left hanging.

Granite conducts sound ten times better than air. That is, what we usually hear well at a distance of one hundred meters would be heard a kilometer away if there was a solid granite wall between us and the sound source. (which is impossible, because it’s not granite in our ears, but air).

Champagne cools faster in boiled water than in raw water. The problem at parties is usually that there is no cold, boiled water on hand. By the way, hot water weighs more than cold water.

Over the past 500 years, the mass of the Earth has increased by a billion tons due to cosmic matter.

Fingernails grow four times faster than toenails.

If you cut an onion and rub the cut on the top of your foot, then after half an hour you will feel the taste of the onion - the volatile substances will spread with the bloodstream throughout the body.

The finest powder on Earth is solid helium.

You can't kill yourself by holding your breath. With such suffocation, the person will simply lose consciousness and begin breathing again.

We are a walking zoo for bacteria, with about three million tiny microorganisms living on every square centimeter of the surface of our bodies.

In one minute, the Sun produces more energy than the entire Earth uses in a year. Moreover, we do not consume all the energy coming from the Sun. The energy that reaches the Earth is distributed as follows: 19% of solar energy is absorbed by the atmosphere, 47% falls on the Earth, and 34% returns to space.

Leprosy is a purely human disease; besides humans, only armadillos suffer from it. There are known cases of human infection by armadillo and vice versa.

718 degrees Celsius: the temperature of hell, calculated by scientists based on a comparison of quotations from the Bible on this topic.

Contrary to popular belief, camels are not the hardiest animals in terms of water consumption. Giraffes can survive without water longer than camels.

To pull a foot out of quicksand at a speed of one centimeter per second requires a force similar to that required to lift an average passenger car off the ground. By the way, quicksand in itself is not dangerous, since the depth of such dangerous zones is usually shallow. A person dies mainly not due to suffocation, but due to the high pressure of the surrounding layers of sand.

If you thought that iron is something strong and reliable, you are wrong. Iron heated to 5000 degrees Celsius becomes gaseous.

To check the naturalness of pearls, throw them into vinegar. Natural pearls will begin to emit gas bubbles.

Unlike ordinary bees, the queen bee can sting repeatedly, but her sting does not remain in the body of the victim.

There are a lot of interesting things happening around us all the time. We bring to your attention several interesting facts from different areas.

Scientists blindfolded people for 4 days and the hallucinations were incredible

Sometimes our brain can do funny things. Take, for example, a study in which scientists took 13 people, blindfolded them for 96 hours (that is, 4 days), and recorded everything that these people “saw”. Ten participants in the experiment began to experience visual hallucinations, some of them very intense and vivid. Many hallucinations consisted of simple lights, some were more complex. But in each case, the participants knew that it was all just a figment of their imagination.

Here's what one of them says: "The hallucinations began about 12 hours after the blindfold, and turned into a series of different pictures, as if in a dream." Another participant reported seeing a butterfly turn into a sunset, an otter, and a flower. She also saw cities, the sky, lions. All these visions were so vivid that she “could hardly look at them.” “If it was sunset or sunrise, it was impossible to look at the sun because it was so incredibly bright.”

“All 13 subjects who voluntarily agreed to long-term visual deprivation were completely healthy people who had no cases of cognitive dysfunction or psychosis. They also did not have any eye pathologies. They wore specially designed bandages, and during the experiment, specialists recorded their sensations on a voice recorder. Ten subjects (77%) reported visual hallucinations that ranged from simple (bright spots of light) to complex (decorative objects, landscapes). In most cases, hallucinations began after the first day of visual deprivation. The subjects were aware that their visions were not real. This experiment clearly demonstrates that rapid and complete visual deprivation is quite sufficient to induce visual hallucinations in completely healthy subjects.”

One subject, a 29-year-old woman, experienced a hallucination after 12 hours of deprivation. This happened while she was standing in front of the mirror. It was at that moment that she saw a green face with huge eyes, which frightened her very much. Another, a 24-year-old woman, reported that she hallucinated the same event. It seemed to her that she was dozing, waiting for her sister to come to her. When the sister finally entered the room, the woman noticed that instead of eyes she had spots of light.

Eight-Year-Old Millionaire YouTube Star

Meet Evan, a sweet 8 year old who has the best job in the world. He earns hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he does what all children do - play with toys. He is the face of EvanTubeHD and runs a family YouTube channel where he reviews new toys and video games. Evan's videos regularly receive over a million views, and the channel generates $1.3 million in revenue per year.

This is one of those success stories that leaves people asking themselves, “Why didn’t I think of that?” It all started as a small game project created by Evan and his father Jared. They wanted to make a funny video using clay models from the game Angry Birds. The video turned out so cute that they decided to make it really popular, and when the number of views of the video exceeded a million, Jared realized how great the popularity had become. This happened shortly before their channel turned into a serious business project. "By reviewing toys that have come out more recently, we try to provide people with up-to-date information about the product," he said.

If you go to this channel and watch a few videos, you will see that they are adorable. Evan fits perfectly into the frame and his reviews are so compelling that you'll want to go out and buy the toy yourself, no matter how old you are. His 6-year-old sister Jillian also participates in the filming and gives little explanations, which increases the appeal of the videos a million times. Take this video of two kids playing in the park with Softee Dough toys. They tie their mother to a tree and throw these toys at her. A warning immediately appears on the screen: “For your safety, we strongly do not recommend tying your own mother to a tree and throwing toys at her. This will result in severe punishment." Believe it or not, this video has already received over 50 million views.

So how does wealth and fame affect little Evan? It turns out that he is completely ordinary, like any other child. “He goes to school, does homework, chats with friends, attends a karate class, and of course, he still has time for the computer. I don't think he understands how popular the channel is." Jared, who works for a video production company, says he and his wife would like to keep Evan's life as normal as possible. That is why the channel does not have any information about the boy's last name, and there is no other information that allows him to be identified.

Sperm are attracted to the smell of flowers

A few years ago, scientists made a strange discovery: sperm seem to gravitate towards the scent of lily of the valley. Could this discovery mark the beginning of a new era of scent-based conception and the discrediting of flower shops?
Lily of the valley is a white flower that gives off a very sweet aroma. Because it was very popular in a certain era, it now seems old-fashioned and is associated with the bath soap of very old ladies. This soap contains bourgenal, the main component of the aroma of real lily of the valley.

In the laboratory it turned out that bourgenal is a kind of attractant for human sperm. The human egg releases chemical attractants to attract sperm. Scientists were confused because they could not find anything like bourgenal in the female reproductive system - sperm simply went crazy with the aroma of lily of the valley.

Obviously, "aroma" is more of a metaphor. Sperm do not have a nose and cannot appreciate a pleasant smell. Bourgenal has a physical effect on sperm, and after some research, scientists have figured out why. There are cation channels for sperm. Cations are positively charged ions, in this case calcium ions with two additional positive charges. When sperm enters a certain chemical environment, ion channels open and the tails of the sperm begin to wriggle, giving them additional acceleration to fertilize the egg.

Bourgenal opens these channels for some reason. Unfortunately, this only occurs at very high concentrations of bourgenal. So high that it cannot be used for conception or positive effects outside the laboratory. So don't worry, you can't get pregnant from perfume.

Antarctic notothenioid fish bleed from ice

To survive in the coldest climate on Earth, Antarctic notothenoid fish have a special anti-freezing protein in their blood that binds ice crystals and interferes with their growth to prevent the fish from freezing. Paradoxically, a new study has found that this same protein prevents ice crystals from melting, causing ice to accumulate in fish veins throughout the year, harming their health.

It has long been known that many Antarctic fish have ice in their veins, but scientists did not know how ice is removed from the body of fish. During the winter, ice accumulates in the spleen, and the researchers hypothesized that it melts in the warm summer waters.

To test their theory, the researchers sampled several species of fish in the winter waters of McMurdo Sound in South Antarctica and tested them in the laboratory. They heated the fish's bodies to temperatures above the expected melting point of ice, but some of the crystals never melted. That is, even when the ice overheated, it remained in a solid state.

The scientists then caught fish in McMurdo Sound during the summer, and 90% of the fish caught had ice crystals in their blood, regardless of the water temperature. After studying ten years of water temperature data in the strait, scientists found that it rarely reached the level of melting ice crystals in the blood of Antarctic fish. However, the researchers concluded that ice in the blood of fish remains almost throughout their entire life.

Ice crystals lodged in fish's tissues and organs can cause harmful inflammatory reactions and block narrow capillaries, much like asbestos destroys the lungs of humans. At this stage, researchers are not sure whether adverse health effects in fish occur due to ice in the blood. However, they do think that these fish must have evolved mechanisms to protect themselves from ice accumulation.

The 'Anthropocebo Effect' Explains How Our Minds Can Destroy the World

The placebo effect and the nocebo effect clearly demonstrate that our minds have a special kind of control over our bodies. They can also gain control of the world. And that's what you should worry about. The placebo effect is so widespread that it is included in every new drug trial. People who take completely useless sugar pills report that their condition begins to improve. They do this in a very dramatic and consistent manner, so companies have to constantly make sure that their newest drug is more effective than sugar pills.

The other side of the coin is the nocebo effect. If people are convinced that they will experience negative consequences after taking a drug, there is a high probability that this will happen. If a group of women believes that they can all die from heart disease (even though there is no real reason for this), their chances of dying from cardiovascular disease are much higher than for a group that does not share their unfortunate belief.

Jennifer Jacquet, an assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University, believes the above effects may extend beyond the body. She coined the term “anthropocebo effect.” People who believe that humanity can only destroy the planet and nothing else, at some point may cause the destruction of the planet. We can't put effort into saving something because we believe it won't work. We are not looking for a solution, we believe that there are no solutions. And if environmental destruction is inevitable anyway, then we could make money on it. In other words, people who believe that humanity can only destroy everything around them, and that nothing can be done about it, can themselves become the cause of their own death.

Archimedes' claws

The device works on the principle of a crane: it grabs an enemy ram, lifts it into the air and throws it down. Let us give the floor to the Greek historian Plutarch, who wrote a biography of Marcellus: “When the Romans attacked twice (that is, from land and sea), the Syracusans were speechless, struck with horror. What could they oppose to such forces, such a powerful army? Archimedes launched his machines. The land army was struck by a hail of projectiles and huge stones thrown with great speed. Nothing could withstand their blow, they overthrew everything in front of them and brought confusion into the ranks. As for the fleet, then suddenly from the height of the walls, logs, due to their weight and the given speed, fell onto the ships and sank them. Either the iron claws and beaks grabbed the ships, lifted them into the air with their nose up, their stern down and then plunged them into the water. Or the ships were set into rotation and, spinning, fell on underwater rocks and cliffs at the foot of the walls. Most of those on the ships died under the attack. Every minute we saw some ship raised in the air above the sea. A terrible sight!..."

Water on Earth is older than the Sun

A new chemical model of the early solar system has found that nearly half of all the water on Earth came from interstellar ice when the sun formed. This means that moisture in our solar system did not arise from local conditions in the protoplanetary disk, but rather is a regular feature of planet formation. This gives rise to hope that there may be life in the Universe besides us.

To determine the age of water in the solar system, researchers focused on studying the hydrogen in deuterium, known as "heavy hydrogen" because it has an extra neutron. Interstellar ice has a very high proportion of deuterium to hydrogen because it formed at very low temperatures. Scientists already know this from studying the composition of comets and asteroids.

Levels of deuterium in the water of the solar system have been increasing since the formation of the sun. So to determine whether the Sun could independently produce today's level of the isotope, the researchers created a computer model that takes us back to the beginning of the solar system and does not account for legacy deuterium.
However, this model was unable to produce the same amount of deuterium that is now detected. Therefore, researchers estimate that 30 to 50% of the water in our solar system was part of the ancient molecular cloud that gave birth to the Sun and planets. The scientists published their discovery in the journal Science.
If the formation of our solar system was typical by cosmic standards, then the discovery proves that interstellar ice takes part in the formation of all nearby planetary systems. And since all life as we know it depends on water, this news increases the chance that other planetary systems have everything to support life.

To paraphrase Samuel Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: "Water, water everywhere, every planet has something to drink."

Spies-saboteurs of Leningrad

During the Second World War, the German command sent crowds of spies and saboteurs to the besieged city of Leningrad. The spies were equipped first class! They were given clothes like locals, documents, passwords, appearances and addresses of safe houses.

But, here's the problem. Very soon it became clear that all this was in vain - super trained spies were caught by any patrol that stopped them for a banal document check... The ingenious forgeries of the best criminologists in Germany, with enviable regularity, became a kind of pass to the wall.

Throughout the war, the Germans tried to forge Soviet documents. The best minds were sent to this task! Whole groups of specialists selected the texture of the paper, the smallest shades of paint and in every possible way revealed secret symbols - the result was zero! Ordinary Soviet patrols, consisting of semi-literate Asian peasants, identified the linden tree at first sight!

And only after the war the secret of making “unfalsified” Soviet documents was discovered.
It turned out that everything was simple to the point of disgrace. The Germans are a very cultured nation and they made document clips from stainless steel. While real Soviet paper clips were rusty.

The Incredibly Strange "Lady Macbeth Effect"

One of William Shakespeare's most famous plays, Macbeth tells the story of a power-hungry general who rises to power by assassinating the King of Scotland. Of course, he would never have done this if his wife, Lady Macbeth, had not pushed him to do so. However, the femme fatale soon discovers that killing in cold blood is not so easy at all, and begins to suffer from remorse. Wracked with guilt, Lady Macbeth thinks she has blood on her hands and furiously washes her fingers in an attempt to get rid of the supposed dried blood.
Of course, this is not the only case. In the Gospel, for example, Pontius Pilate famously “washed his hands” of handing Jesus over to the crowd for execution. In fact, so many guilty guys and gals try to wet their hands, and researchers even have a catchy name for the phenomenon: the "Lady Macbeth Effect." And this effect is incredibly powerful.

In 2006, University of Toronto researcher Chen-Bo Zhong and his colleagues conducted a series of tests on a group of guilty subjects. First, the researchers asked subjects to remember their past. Some were asked to remember their good deeds, while others were asked to remember their less than ethical actions. Subjects were then given sheets of paper and asked to complete unfinished words such as “W _ _ H” and “SH _ _ ER.” As it turned out, people who talked about their sinful deeds wrote “WASH” and “SHOWER” (English “Shower”), and people who recalled their good deeds were more likely to write words such as “WISH” (English: “Wish”) and “SHAKER” (English: “Pepper shaker”).

In the second test, subjects were again asked to recall their ethical and unethical actions, and then given a choice of either pencils or antiseptic wipes. You probably won't be surprised to learn that three-quarters of those who thought about their misdeeds chose napkins.

So what does all this mean? According to Zhong, "the cleanliness of the test subjects' environment may have an impact on their moral behavior." Unfortunately, this influence is not always positive. Zhong worries that people who symbolically wash their hands may begin to feel better about themselves despite all their wrongdoings, and may refuse to take responsibility for their unethical actions. In other words, the act of washing gives them something like a feeling of forgiveness. Perhaps this is why many say that cleanliness is next to godliness.

Your decisions are much more random than you think

For the most part, we make decisions based on our previous experiences. But what to do in completely new and unpredictable situations for us? New research suggests that when we encounter an unexpected scenario, the brain chooses randomness as its best strategy.

When it comes to making decisions, the brain is heavily influenced by past experiences. Some experts believe that the brain has a built-in mechanism for evaluating the effectiveness of a decision based on past precedents. This is also something that we can be aware of. And to improve rational decision-making, it is important that we use new information to change our confidence in belief.

But a recent experiment conducted by Alla Karpova shows that randomness may be the brain's preferred policy when things are particularly complex, or when a situation has no historical precedent. And this is not very good, as it leads to risk.

Karpova's experiments showed that rats, when faced with a competitor who is difficult to defeat, abandon their usual tactic of using past experience to make decisions and make random choices instead. This “strategy switch,” Karpova says, is controlled by a specific area of ​​the brain, and is a sign that the brain may be “switching off” from its past experiences and entering “random decision mode” in a desperate attempt to overcome a competitive advantage. From an evolutionary point of view, this makes sense. When animals are faced with a new and unpredictable situation, such as a predator that moves completely chaotically, it is often useful to change behavior in a random mode. This can lead to very risky decisions that would not otherwise be made, but it can also save lives. The trouble is that some animals find it very difficult to get out of this mode.

Some facts don't seem so obvious, although you always knew about them. For example, you know that you can see your nose, but you didn't think about it until someone pointed out this strange fact to you. Here are some more obvious but surprising facts that may amaze you.

1. You have never seen your real face - only photographs and reflections.

2. You always see your nose, but your brain ignores it.

3. You can't imagine a new color.

Any color of the spectrum visible to humans already exists.

4. You can't breathe and swallow at the same time.

Admit that you just tried this.

5. Your tongue never rests in your mouth.

How is your tongue resting at the moment? It's likely pressed against the roof of your mouth most of the time, which means the tongue muscles are working all the time. Now this thought will haunt you.

6. At this very moment, you are older than you've ever been and younger than you'll ever be.

7. You can't hum while holding your nose.

8. Your right palm has never touched your right elbow.

9. Something touches you all the time.

Even if you jump in the air naked, because air has mass.

10. Except that nothing touches you, since the atoms act on each other with a force, and, in fact, do not touch.

Atoms repel other atoms all the time, so when you put your hand on the table, it actually floats slightly above the table.

11. If a child was born at 23:00 in Moscow, and another child was born in Novosibirsk at 3:00, they will have different birthdays, although they were born at the same time.

12. “() ()” is not a palindrome, but “()) (” is a palindrome.

A palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same in both directions. And although "() ()" looks more symmetrical, it is not a palindrome.

13. If you buy a bottle of 12 year old whiskey, it was only produced in 2005.

14. You may only be disgusted by other people's hair and nails when they are separated from the person's body.

Especially if you find them in food.

15. Money has value only because we ourselves decide so.