Collection of Mind-blowing Facts
A ‘gömböc’ is a 3-d shape that will always end up settling in the same position regardless of how it was originally placed. The mathematics of these shapes has helped explain why tortoises can roll back over onto their legs when they’re placed with their shell to the ground.
In 1981 a group of scientists met to discuss ways of making future humans aware of nuclear waste disposal sites. One idea was genetically engineering cats to change color in the presence of radiation and introducing a cultural idea to run away when you see a cat change color.
In Russian culture “British Scientists” is a running joke and Internet meme used as an ironic reference to absurd news reports about scientific discoveries, particularly ones that have no practical value. For example, “British scientists debunked the myth that mice love cheese.”
In the 1950s a scientist used a mirror to focus the enery from a nuclear explosion to light his cigarette.
A new telescope built to study the Sun has released its first images. They show the surface of the Sun in the most exquisite detail we’ve ever seen – revealing convection granules the size of Texas, and tiny magnetic features – the roots of fields that extend far into space.
via sciencealert.com
More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another’s scientist’s experiments.
In 1957 Little Richard saw a bright red fireball flying across the sky, which he took as “sign from God” to repent from performing secular music and his wild lifestyle at the time until 1962. The fireball actually was the launching of the first artificial Earth satellite Sputnik 1.
Deadline is 1944 sci-fi story about the use of nuclear bomb. It includes topics such as uranium enrichment, methods of isotopic separation and moral questions about the weapon. Author had no knowledge of Manhattan project and came up with the idea from scientific journals.
In 1825, a British geologist went to Sicily and examined the remains of a female saint. He concluded that they weren’t human and likely belonged to a goat. He told the priests, who kicked him out and then placed the bones into a casket to prevent future study.
Japanese researchers have created a chair that can read a person’s “butt fingerprint” by registering an individual’s unique contour and pressure distribution. It might one day be used in cars as an anti-theft mechanism.
Science recognizes Ouija Boards users are “moving the planchette involuntarily” and a when answering “yes or no questions, ouija use was significantly more accurate than guesswork, suggesting that it might draw on the unconscious mind” and the users enter a “dissociative state”.
To find out how sound waves impacted flavor, researchers played nonstop loops of Led Zeppelin, A Tribe Called Quest and Mozart to cheese wheels. Cheese wheels that were exposed to hip hop music had the strongest flavor.