Everyone Thought It Was a Myth but It’s Real

It’s partly true nothing happens if you dip your pinkie for a second into the red-hot lead. There is one condition — you need to dip it into the water first. The water between the skin and the metal will evaporate, creating a vapor layer, so it will repel metal for a second. Still, you don’t want to perform this stunt.

A sandwich before bedtime provokes the appearance of nightmares. Any late-night meal increases metabolism and body temperature. It activates the brain, which leads to not very sweet dreams.

Mosquitoes bite some people more than others. The most delicious humans are those with type O blood. Also, these insects have excellent eyesight. They’re attracted to green, black, and red, so before you go camping, check the color of your clothes!

Birds are the only surviving dinosaurs. They evolved from theropods, the dinosaurs that ran on two legs. Yep, T. rex is a distant relative of chickens, ostriches, and even hummingbirds.

A phone is 10 times dirtier than a toilet handle. Also, beware of office desks since they have hundreds of times more bacteria per square inch than office toilet seats. Ew.

Ants can take over the world. Argentinean ants have built colonies in every part of the planet except Antarctica. Insects from different territories are on good terms and never have conflicts!

Each human is 99.9% empty space. Kinda like my brain. Your body, like any other object in the universe, consists of atoms. At the center of the atoms, there’s a super small nucleus. If you zoom the atom up to the size of a basketball, you still won’t see the core. If it were possible to get all the empty space out of your body, you’d probably be as tiny as a grain of sand.

A head of human hair can support from 5 to 8 tons. This weight won’t damage individual strands, but the scalp can’t withstand such pressure.

Hypothetically, you can see the past, for example, when you look into the starry sky. When the Sun disappears, we see it only after 8 minutes — this is how long it takes for sunlight to reach the Earth.

Glass is an amorphous substance, and it violates many laws of physics. It’s solid, but if you look at it under a microscope, it looks liquid. In reality, it’s neither liquid nor solid. It happens because the heat needed to produce glass changes the way molecules behave. It’s like when you iron the clothes and fibers change because of high temperatures.

Scientists from Japan played audio recordings for cats to prove they’re truly dismissive. In those recordings, the owners of the cats called them by their names. Cats’ pupils dilated, the animals moved their tails, legs, or ears. Sure, cats could hear human voices, but they rarely respond. It’s all about evolution — cats came to humans because they were attracted by mice that ate grains. They lived close to people but were never tamed.

Trees have their own underground Internet. Mycelium filaments interconnect the roots of 90% of trees. Trees exchange information and nutrients through them. They warn each other about danger and fight parasites together.

Trillions of microorganisms live inside you. They make up 3% of your body weight and weigh up to 6 lb. Microorganisms play a significant role. They help with digestion, absorb nutrients, and do many other things we never notice.

In comparison with microorganisms, there are really few people on our planet. A teaspoon of soil contains more living organisms than there are humans on planet Earth. Go ahead, count ’em.

Human brain capacity has a limit. Scientists estimate that your brain can store 2.5 million gigabytes of data. To use up all your limits, you need to upload a 300 years long, high-quality video right into your memory. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Since 1950, humanity has mined nearly 200,000 tons of gold. If we made a cube out of all this metal, it would be 70 feet high and wide. Recent data from scientists confirmed that in the Earth’s core, there are vast reserves of gold. The metal is enough to cover all the planet, and people might have gold up to their knees. The problem is, we can’t mine it from there.

Scientists used to believe 400 billion trees were growing on Earth, but there are over 3 trillion of them or 420 trees per person. There are more trees on Earth than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

Wrangel Island was the last place where mammoths lived. These giant animals disappeared about 4,000 years ago. By this time, the Great Pyramid in Giza had been around for only 500 years.

Archaeologists have found honey pots that are 3,000 years old in Egypt. It didn’t spoil and turned out to be edible. It’s possibly because of the chemical composition of this product. Bacteria and insects that can spoil honey can’t live in it.

You’re drinking the same water that the dinosaurs drank. The water on our planet is the same as it was billions of years ago. Only a tiny portion of the liquid has evaporated. By the way, scientists still don’t know exactly where the water came from.

We have a detailed map of the Moon and Mars. Still, over 80% of the Earth’s ocean is unmapped and unexplored. We can’t study the oceans properly because of pressure, cold, and lack of light underneath billions of tons of water.

The myth that you can’t put hot food in the fridge is true. If you freeze some hot soup or roasted meat, the food might lose its nutritional value. You also risk breaking the refrigerator. Before freezing, it’s best to wait for the temperature of the food to drop to room temperature.

There’s a biologically immortal creature on Earth — a transparent jellyfish called Turritopsis dohrnii. When it reaches maturity, it sinks to the bottom and turns into a polyp. From a polyp, the creature again turns into a jellyfish. The number of rebirths is unlimited.

You can break a glass with your voice, but it’s pretty hard. The volume of your scream must be at least 105 decibels, and it must last about 2–3 seconds. The jackhammer works at a volume of 90 decibels. I had a gym teacher once, who was named Jack Hammer.

Sailors from all over the world talked about the giant squid they met on their voyages. For many years, scientists considered monsters with long tentacles to be a myth. But in 2004, the first photo of a squid was taken. They exist! Scientists have registered an animal that has grown to 43 ft. Holy calamari!

Flamingos are white. The bird turns pink due to beta-carotene. This pigment is found in the algae and the shrimp that it feeds on. You can change your skin color too. If you eat a lot of carrots, your skin will turn slightly orange. This will happen because of the high beta-carotene content in the vegetable.

Your nose and ears get bigger every year. This isn’t due to an increase in size but due to gravity. With age, the cartilage of the nose and ears weakens. Because of this, they sag and appear more prominent.

The Kepler Space Telescope Expedition confirmed that Earth isn’t unique. Most likely, our world isn’t the only place in the universe where there’s life. The device, the size of a minibus, flew through space for 9 years. During this time, it confirmed the existence of 300 million potentially habitable planets. They have a solid surface, liquid water, and nearby stars that look like our Sun.

All plants, fungi, animals, and humans evolved from a single microbe. Scientists called it LUCA — the last universal common ancestor. The microbe was discovered by comparing the genes of living beings and their descendants. LUCA lived 4.5 billion years ago. It lived in the craters of deep-sea volcanoes, among hot lava and water. I think we should have a family reunion, don’t you?

Recent research has shown that Neanderthals could hibernate like bears. This is confirmed by the bones of ancient people from the Spanish cave Sima de los Huesos. Scientists have found signs of slow bone metabolism. It proves Neanderthals slept for months and did not leave the cave.

The myth that closed eyes improve memory is true. When your eyes are closed, you don’t need to memorize information visually, and the environment does not distract you. This frees up your brain energy and makes the memory more efficient.

The acidity levels of the human gastric juice and the acid from the car battery are almost identical. Plastic and even metal will dissolve in your stomach. If we drop a metal plate the size of a penny into gastric juice, there will be only about 63% of it remaining within 24 hours.

You can put a shark in a trance for 15 minutes. To do this, you need to stroke its nose with your hand. Yeah, you first, I’ll watch from here, thanks. This sort of hypnosis is called tonic immobility, thanks to the receptors in the shark’s nose. When stroked, the receptors send many signals, and the shark’s brain cannot process them all. I know the feeling.