Asklemmy

A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus. One day takes 243 Earth days, while a year takes 225.

Maybe it's not "well known", but still interesting in my opinion.

Not exactly bizarre, but it’s fun to learn that the delicious fragrance of shrimps and crabs when cooked comes from chitin, and chitin is also why sautéed mushrooms smell/taste like shrimps.

And since fungi are mostly chitin, plants have evolved defenses against fungi by producing enzymes that destroy chitin, which is how some plants eventually evolved the ability to digest insects.

EDIT: a previous version of this post mistakenly confused chitin with keratin (which our fingernails are made of). Thanks to sndrtj for the correction!

Time relativity always boggles my brain, I accept the fact but I find crazy that if I strap my twin and his atomic clock to a rocket and send them out to the stratosphere at the speed of light, when they return he'll be younger than me and his clock will be running behind mine. Crazy

That "I" am pretty much just the construct of electrons flying around my brain.

That you need to lay down K.O. for many hours every day, otherwise you get insane.

That we are always only 2min or so away from death, if we stopped breathing.

That everything I eat actually gets digested into mousse and bacteria are in my body, digest it and I get the elements into my blood.

That our world is so big, but you could also walk to China ~~Japan~~ from the EU, if you had enough time. But also its crazy how huge our common trade routes are.

That a weird minicomputer in my pocket can store 128GB of information, access a wireless network from across the whole planet, and can remember so much more than my brain

Calcium is a metal. We have metal bones.

Let's stick with the iron in your hemoglobin for some more weirdness. The body knows iron is hard to uptake, so when you bleed a lot under your skin and get a bruise, the body re-uptakes everything it can. Those color changes as the bruise goes away is part of the synthesis of compounds to get the good stuff back into the body, and send the rest away as waste.

In the other direction, coronaviruses can denature the iron from your hemoglobin. So some covid patients end up with terrible oxygen levels because the virus is dumping iron product in the blood, no longer able to take in oxygen. I am a paramedic and didn't believe this second one either, but on researching it explained to me why these patients were having so much trouble breathing on low concentration oxygen... the oxygen was there, but the transport system had lost the ability to carry it.

There is about 8.1 billion people in the world. Assuming romantic cliches to be true and that we all have exactly one soulmate out there, we would have a very hard time sifting them out. If you were to use exactly one second at meeting a person it would take you 257 years to meet everyone alive on earth at this moment, which due to human life span being significantly shorter and the influx of new people makes the task essentially impossible without a spoonful of luck. Moral of the story: If you believe you have found your soul mate, be extra kind to them today.

there's people that don't like music.

The sun could've gone nova 8 minutes ago and we wouldn't know for another 20 seconds or so.

There’s no such thing as tides. Gravity holds the water as the earth rotates

Alaska is simultaneously the northernmost, westernmost, and easternmost US state.

The hell that giving birth can be.

A lot of women endure having a baby...and holy. shit. No.

The USA has 157 million workers, shuffling 140,000 years of work a day. One in 4 has an idea. One in five of those is a good idea. Two thousand stakeholders can make it an innovative idea. So, they can pump 3.5 years of brute force innovation into the world every single day. That's well over a thousand years of advancement per year.

Critical mass populations that can keep up with their own development are a serious creative force to be reckoned with. And human evolution has been exceeded by innovation, dramatically.

Your asswhole can stretch up to 8 inches without permanent deformation.

Also an adult raccoon can fit into a 4.5 inch hole.

Do with that info as you wish

Women have orgasms

Your bones are made of calcium, which is also a metal. You've got a metal frame inside your body.

That the first civilian hot air balloon was perceived as a flying monster by rural French onlookers who tried to bring it down before beating it with sticks.

Makes the whole Hartlepool monkey story seem sane.

Here's one: Iron doesn't have a smell. It acts as a catalyst in the reaction of bodily fluids or skin oils, which is why you can't smell coins after washing them

Yo OP. We're carbon based, which you accept. Diamond is stronger than almost all metal, and it's pure carbon. Why wouldn't we have metal in our veins? We atomically won that round before inflation was even over.

I'm just playin, carbon under high enough pressure is metal too.

Twice over, my favorite fact is that humanity has only existed during the time frames that the moon and the sun have been the same size in our sky, this allowing total eclipse - which is so obviously ridiculously rare I don't see the point in quantifying with maths.

I think it's bizarre to think we have free will. Everywhere around us, in all our tech, tools, toys we see the realities of determinism. Cause and effect. To think that our minds are somehow not governed by this in a universe that unequivocally is is beyond Babel levels of arrogance.

Beyond that, the idea that's gaining ground about shared consciousness I find really intriguing. Rather fascinating stuff.

Consciousness is the biggest mystery of the all, after all.

The fact that things are able to float, despite of gravity pulling all objects towards the big mass of Earth. You would think that the push of gravity should be more than enough to overcome the slight fluid displacement that allows balloons and boats to push away from the Earth's surface.

The combustion engine. I know technically it's not but ultimately we as humans found a way to harness the power of explosions and make them do our bidding. honestly, one of humanity's finer achievements. yes, it's not without its barbs like emissions, but that's a small price to pay for the workload any vehicle can provide.

That stuff about metal is really counterintuitive, because normally when we talk about iron, gold, copper, nickel, zinc, magnesium, aluminium etc it’s usually about the element in its metallic form. However, when you study chemistry a bit more, you’ll come to realize metals can be dissolved in water and they can be a part of a completely different compound too.

Calcium, sodium and potassium are basically the exact opposite in this regard. Normally when people talk about these metals, they are referring to various compounds that obviously aren’t metallic at all. This leads to people thinking of these elements as non-metallic, but it is possible to purify them to such an extent that you are left with nothing but the metal.

In the case of Ca, Na and K, the resulting metal is highly reactive in our aggressive atmosphere, so that’s why we rarely see these elements in a metallic form. Our atmosphere contains water and oxygen, which makes it an incredibly hostile environment for metals like this. Imagine, we’re breathing this stuff that attacks so many elements mercilessly.

To be fair, the single iron atoms are surrounded by a lot of carbony goodness. There's a few metals that have minor biological uses in humans like that, and even sodium and potassium are metals in pure form.

It's hella weird to me how we suddenly developed democracy and industrialisation after thousands of years of kind of the same thing. I have yet to hear a convincing explanation; right now I'm playing with Lanchester's laws as a theory.