Fascinating fact of the day :)

[ColdemortReturns]

Read earlier that at 20 years old you are statistically more likely to have both grandmothers alive today, than to have your mother alive in the early C19th .
Bizarrely comforting thought that I've been pondering all day....

[ColdemortReturns]

Only me then

[bluebellforest]

The moon is very slowly, slowing the Earth's rotation.
Every one hundred years, themoon adds approximately 1.4 millisecondsto a day. While this may be a very tiny amount, it does add up. When dinosaurs roamed the planet,days were 23 hours long, according to NASA.

[Will0wtree]

Trees "talk" to each other through a network of fungi around their roots and will share nutrients, particularly with their offspring.

I'm reading this guys book at the moment, and it's very interesting (though he can anthropomorphise the trees a bit too much, but the facts are still fascinating. www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering-trees-180968084/

“Some are calling it the ‘wood-wide web,’” says Wohlleben in German-accented English. “All the trees here, and in every forest that is not too damaged, are connected to each other through underground fungal networks. Trees share water and nutrients through the networks, and also use them to communicate. They send distress signals about drought and disease, for example, or insect attacks, and other trees alter their behavior when they receive these messages.”

"Once, he came across a gigantic beech stump in this forest, four or five feet across. The tree was felled 400 or 500 years ago, but scraping away the surface with his penknife, Wohlleben found something astonishing: the stump was still green with chlorophyll. There was only one explanation. The surrounding beeches were keeping it alive, by pumping sugar to it through the network. “When beeches do this, they remind me of elephants,” he says. “They are reluctant to abandon their dead, especially when it’s a big, old, revered matriarch.”

[Awwlookatmybabyspider]

How real this one is I don't know but I've heard that the weight of a persons ashes on cremation is the same as their birth weight.

I love facts about time.
1 billion seconds=32 years.
Cleopatra lived closer to the first iPhone than she did to the Pyramids.

[ColdemortReturns]

@bluebellforest

The moon is very slowly, slowing the Earth's rotation.
Every one hundred years, themoon adds approximately 1.4 millisecondsto a day. While this may be a very tiny amount, it does add up. When dinosaurs roamed the planet,days were 23 hours long, according to NASA.

Ok, that's mad
You win

[Riapia]

The first person who will live to be 200 years old has already been born.

[hilariousnamehere]

@Awwlookatmybabyspider

How real this one is I don't know but I've heard that the weight of a persons ashes on cremation is the same as their birth weight.

I love facts about time.
1 billion seconds=32 years.
Cleopatra lived closer to the first iPhone than she did to the Pyramids.

I've heard the ashes one too - from the crematorium manager so am inclined to think it's true?

Time is a concept I sometimes struggle with - I am late for everything - so your second facts have completely blown my mind

[InTheSnow]

The mind-boggling ones for me are all around astro-physics. Brian Cox stuff. The fact that their are more stars in the observable universe than there are grains of sand on all the world's beaches. If you can get that round your head then think about the scale of a star and all its planets and all that planets mountains, rivers and atmosphere. All of this, including you, me and the kitchen sink where all compressed together smaller than an atom some 13.8 billion years ago.

Then trying to get your head around the fact that once there was nothing, but how could there have been nothing because something must have made something out of nothing.

[OrigamiOwl]

Pineapples are acidic and are slightly dissolving away the tissue in your mouth while you're chewing (which is why you're mouth tingles when you eat fresh pineapple).
So while you're eating a pineapple the pineapple is also eating you...

[LadyJaye]

The existence of sharks pre-dates that of trees.

[BargainCunt]

Pineapples do not grow on trees. Sharks do not eat pineapples but if they did the sharks mouth would instantly turn the flesh and juices into an alkali, thus preventing sharks from becoming extinct too quickly. And other shit.

[Awwlookatmybabyspider]

The novel Gadsby written by Ernest Vincent Wright has no letters E in it aside from the authors name.

[Prokupatuscrakedatus]

Frogs use their eyeballs to help swallow their food.

[73kittycat73]

@InTheSnow

The mind-boggling ones for me are all around astro-physics. Brian Cox stuff. The fact that their are more stars in the observable universe than there are grains of sand on all the world's beaches. If you can get that round your head then think about the scale of a star and all its planets and all that planets mountains, rivers and atmosphere. All of this, including you, me and the kitchen sink where all compressed together smaller than an atom some 13.8 billion years ago.

Then trying to get your head around the fact that once there was nothing, but how could there have been nothing because something must have made something out of nothing.

Thanks for this. Physics fascinates me. I'd love to get my head round it all! It took me years to get the one where, if you are on a plane going at the speed of light, as you walk down the plane, you are going bvack in time. Amazing!
Thanks for all the other facts too, great to read.

[73kittycat73]

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