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#1
One I never see people post is Oxygen.
The oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere only exists because of life. Without life continually replenishing it, it would eventually disappear.
The thing is, oxygen is *reactive*. It isn't inert like the nitrogen in our air. It's gradually pulled from the atmosphere when it bonds with rocks, volcanic gases, organic material—producing such hits as CO2, rust, and fun things like *fire.* If photosynthetic life stopped, free oxygen in the atmosphere would steadily decline as it was “used up” in chemical reactions.
Earth had almost no free oxygen before microbes evolved photosynthesis and began releasing it as a waste product. Over millions of years, that waste gas built up until it reached today’s level of ~21% of the atmosphere.
The kicker is that oxygen was actually toxic to most life at the time. It led to the "Great Oxygenation Event", which triggered one of Earth’s earliest mass extinctions. It’s a bit like if human-produced pollution and waste gas accumulated until it was so thick it was impossible to breathe and k****d off most life, but new life evolved that needed our pollution to live.
When free oxygen is hit by ultraviolet radiation, it breaks apart and forms ozone. The ozone layer exists because of atmospheric oxygen, and it protects the surface from that ultraviolet radiation. No oxygen, no ozone, and a lot more skin cancer. Or worse.
Because oxygen wouldn't really be in the atmosphere without life, it's also a potential biosignature. If we ever detect a planet with a stable, oxygen-rich atmosphere (especially alongside gases it shouldn’t chemically coexist with) it’s strong evidence that something is actively producing it... possibly even life.
Whiskey Tango Delicious 1 day ago
Cogent, well written, precise yet very detailed. This breakdown is smart
RELATED:
#2
I’m a nurse, worked in an AIDS clinic for a while, before anti-retrovirals. All our patients passed away. Now it’s a manageable chronic illness, at least in the US.
#3
Every single thing they learn about the platypus.
theytookthemall:
We all know how weird they look, and that they lay eggs, and they're mammals but don't have nipples, and the males have venom.
Many people don't know that the platypus is one of three known mammals to have a sense of electroreception (the others are the echidna, and a type of dolphin). As far as we know the platypus and echidna (which is much less reliant on electroreception) evolved the sense entirely separately from any other animal; the nerve that goes to the electroreceptors in their bill is the trigeminal nerve, which is homologous to the trigeminal nerve in humans and other mammals.
Even fewer people know -- though few are surprised -- that the platypus genome is WEIRD. Like, real weird. The overwhelming majority of mammals have two sex chromosomes: XX, or XY. The platypus has TEN sex chromosomes, so male platypus are XY XY XY XY XY.
They also lack the SRY gene, which in most other mammals is the key to sex determination - it's pretty much what tells a developing fetus to start developing testes, which in turn leads to testosterone production and so on. Until very recently we didn't know how sex determination worked in platypus, but we've recently discovered that they do have a gene called AMH, which is another gene that contributes (but does not initiate) sex determination in mammals. That's weird, and also interesting that AMH is found on the 'oldest' chromosome, X1, which also is more homologous to the Z chromosome, from the ZW sex-chromosome set that is found primarily in birds. This suggests that there was separate, convergent evolution in monotremes and other mammals. There's also some random reptilian homologies thrown in there, too, just for good measure. It's really true that everything we learn about them makes them seem even stranger.
Bonus facts if you made it this far: they also have cheek pockets like hamsters, and can use their tail to carry nesting materials!
#4
Apparently there’s a cloud somewhere in space scientists believe is made out of the same chemicals as alcohol
There’s a booze cloud in space.
#5
Apparently we don't just get baby teeth and adult teeth, there's a third set that doesn't usually develop, and there's a human trial in Japan of a therapy that aims to change that - regrowing teeth in adulthood is straight science fiction to me, and I'm happily baffled.
Michelle Gosney 1 day ago
My two front teeth are my third set. My baby teeth feoll out naturally, but the adult set grew wonky. Had an Xray pre brace fitting, only to find out the third set were pushing the previous set out. My Dad grew 3 molars in his sixties too. I do not play the banjo.
#6
Grizzly bears run as fast as the average horse.
#7
Somewhere deep in the ocean, there are sharks that were alive in the year 1550....
Nathaniel He/Him Cis-Het 1 day ago (edited)
Old aged shark, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo / Old aged shark, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo / Old aged shark, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo / Old aged shark
#8
Split brain experiments.
People had their left and right brain hemispheres disconnected from each other, usually as a treatment for epilepsy. The scientists would give the patients tasks to complete or questions to answer to study how the split brain operated.
Your brain has different functions on the left side of the brain than right. For example, speech and language is exclusive to only one side. The brain halves are not symmetrical in terms of functionality.
______
“The split-brain experiments studied people whose Corpus Callosum had been surgically cut to treat severe epilepsy. This disconnected the left and right hemispheres so they could no longer communicate normally. Researchers like Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga then tested what each half of the brain could perceive independently.
The most famous finding came from vision experiments. If an image was flashed only to the left visual field, it went to the right hemisphere. Since language is usually centered in the left hemisphere, the patient often could not verbally say what they saw. But their left hand, controlled by the right hemisphere, could still point to or grab the correct object. This showed the information existed in the brain even though the speaking part could not access it.
In one famous split-brain experiment, a command was shown only to the patient’s right hemisphere, such as:
“Walk over there.”
The patient stood up and began walking. When researchers asked why, the speaking left hemisphere had never seen the instruction because the hemispheres were disconnected. But instead of saying “I don’t know,” the patient confidently answered something like:
“I’m going to get a Coke.”
The significant part is that the patient was not lying or joking. They genuinely believed the explanation they gave. Their brain automatically generated a reason that felt real and coherent to them, even though the true cause of the action was hidden from the part of the brain responsible for speech. The brain is designed to make sense of our experience. The ‘thinking’ part of the brain couldn’t access the reason the decision was made, so it invented one. Apparently convincing enough for the patient to feel as though it actually happened that way. That’s what made the experiment so unsettling and influential; It suggested that humans can sincerely experience invented explanations as genuine motives.”
_____
I love listening to philosophers, scientists, neurologists, and ordinary people deconstruct this phenomenon. I’ve spent a good chunk of time becoming familiar with these specific experiments, yet the implications never fail to fascinate me.
Caffeinated Ape 1 day ago
It's worth mentioning that in rare cases it can occur as a congenital defect.
#9
We almost didn't make it. At some point, the main human population dwindled to less than a thousand individuals.
#10
Quantum Entanglement, I guess quantum physics in general. There are very fundamental things we just don’t understand.
#11
Blind people (born that way) can't get schizophrenia. At least no case has been documented. That just really disturbs me.
Edit: You have to be born blind to not get schizophrenia, and no, blinding people will not magically cure them of the condition.
Con O Cuinn 1 day ago
That's lucky, it would be twice as hard to realise the voices weren't real if you were blind. Am I mental or is somebody really asking me something?
#12
Just the vastness of space. And that it’s expanding. Into what? Into nothing? That doesn’t work in my brain.
Littlekw81 1 day ago
This one has bothered me my entire life. What's at the edge of universe? More space? Forever?
#13
Peritoneal dialysis. So dialysis is normally a machine that replaces a kidney. But peritoneal dialysis is when you get a bunch of clean fluid injected into your abdominal cavity and let it slosh around all day. Then at the end of the day you place a drain to let this fluid that's now kinda like urine slosh out.
Somehow this works almost as well as a real kidney.
Tiffany Saldana 1 day ago
I did this to my cat and it gave him an extra healthy and happy year. After I'd give him his daily IV and it absorbed, he'd go outside and climb trees, hunt, and chase squirrels with his buddy, an old cat that lived next door. It was really amazing that it worked so well.
#14
Haplodiploidity.
At it's simplest, it's a weird way of determining gender. In Hymenoptera (ants, wasps, bees etc.), if an egg is fertilized, it becomes female but if it's not fertilized, it becomes male. So males only have half a set of DNA, all from their mother.
That's pretty simple but the effects on evolution are earth shattering. Those ridiculously huge colonies of ants and bees? Wouldn't work without it. The quirks of it basically mean that a worker bee shares ~2/3rds of it's DNA with it's sisters but it only shares 50% of it's DNA with it's own sons. That means it's more beneficial from an evolutionary perspective, to raise your sisters, than your own sons and so workers actually benefit from NOT reproducing themselves, leading to these giga-colonies where self interest has been twisted into selfless co-operation.
And that's before it can be twisted even further through the unique form of parasitism known as Dulosis.
Honestly, I could fill this whole thread with just stuff about ants. Hymenoptera saw the rules of evolution and decided they didn't want to play that game, they'd make their own version.
#15
The fact that your brain basically rewrites your memories every time you remember them:) Like… there’s a chance some of your strongest memories aren’t even fully accurate anymore. That genuinely freaks me out a bit.
Bruce Mardle 1 day ago
A woman kept a very detailed journal and was tested on it. The conclusion was that we (well, her) don't really remember things for >4 years.
#16
In Gabon, central Africa, there's a layer of rock known as the Francevillian Formation. It was laid down on a seabed about 2 billion years ago, something like 1.4 billion years before the beginning of multicellular life as we know it. In this rock there are grooved, spiral-shaped impressions of various sizes, the largest about 17 centimeters in diameter, and they kinda look like late Precambrian animal fossils other than the fact that they're too old by a factor of three.
Some skeptical scientists have suggested that they are probably just mineral concretions (similar to manganese nodules that we find on the ocean floor today), as some crystals also leave impression patterns like this as they form and interact with surrounding minerals. But there is also evidence that at that place and time, an inland sea combined with nearby volcanism caused nutrients to be trapped and concentrated, encouraging unusually prolific cyanobacteria growth and raising the local oxygen levels well above the Earth's average at the time- perhaps the ideal chemical environment for weird evolutionary experiments. So we *might* be looking at the fossils of some bizarre strain of life that got an early start on multicellularism 1.4 billion years ahead of time, before going extinct when its anomalously hospitable environment naturally disappeared.
That’s all I yam 1 day ago
My favorite story about Gabon: “A natural nuclear fission reactor is a uranium deposit where self-sustaining nuclear chain reactions occur”. “The first discovery of such a reactor happened in 1972 in Oklo, Gabon”. “Oklo is the only location where this phenomenon is known to have occurred…” ( Natural nuclear fission reactor, Wikipedia )
#17
Gamma ray burst.
One could be coming to microwave our entire planet into sterility and we won’t know until it happens.
Elladine DesIsles 1 day ago
Assuming there would be absolutely nothing we could do to prevent it, I think I'd rather not know anyway.
#19
Lobster are biologically immortal and the only reason why they pass is because they exhaust themselves, either because of molting being too taxing, not getting enough food, get eaten, or get sick.
highwaycrossingfrog 1 day ago (edited)
I believe the reason behind this is because lobsters are able to regenerate telomeres. (I am by no means an expert in this subject so may get some details wrong.) Telomeres are a sort of DNA buffer that cap the end of each DNA strand in our cells. Every time a cell is replicated, we lose a bit off the end, where the telomeres are located. Once the telomere is gone, the cell can no longer regenerate, and so our bodies deteriorate through aging. Aging effectively doesn't happen with lobster cells because they can regenerate indefinitely. It's more accurate to say that lobsters don't age in the same way that most other animals do, rather than that they're immortal.
#20
Ants measure distance by counting their steps. Scientists proved this by taking some ants out of a line and putting tiny stilts on them. Those ants then over shot the food source they were going too.
#21
MRI, magnetic resonance imaging. Let’s take a big magnet, throw in some intermittent radio waves, measure which atoms are flipping upside-down, and then make a 3D image.
TotallyNOTAFox 1 day ago
It works because we have magnetite in our bones and especially in our skulls. It's the same stuff that birds and other animals use to sense the Earth's magnet field
#22
There's a species of salamander that stabs its ribs through the sides of its body to ward off predators.
John Dilligaf 1 day ago
works, I mean who's gonna fuq with a creature that will stab you with their own rib cage?
#23
Mantis shrimp's punch. That impossible punch similar to a .22 bullet, 1500+ newtons of force and the cavitation bubble that reaches tempreature hotter than the surface of sun. All of this in under 3 milli second. WHAT.
Brian Droste 1 day ago
Don't they do this to protect themselves from being eaten? It knocks out or even k**l the predator that is after them?
#24
The discovery of The Great Attractor. A massive gravitational anomaly that is pulling everything in its neighborhood, including the Milky Way Galaxy towards it at rates of +/- 700km per second. We have no idea what it is, because we can't observe it through our own galactic zone of avoidance, but it's estimated to be roughly 10^16 solar masses.
Luke || Kira (he/she) 1 day ago
THEORY: the whole evolution and all that jazz happens to create the best possible organism that can possibly exist. The Great Attractor is actually a gate into a different dimension where the perfect, evolution-proven organisms ascend into some higher form of existence; the evolution made sure they'll be able to handle their newly-found "godhood". Yes, I'm weird. Yes, I'm a sci-fi writer.
#25
Prions.
midgetyaz:
A protein just bends the wrong way and all the proteins around it start doing it, too. And that's not how the body is suppose to work.
#26
A good portion of us have no inner monologue
Edit: I think some folks are confusing aphantasia with inner monologue - which is also interesting but not quite as confusing.
Boop the Snoot. Pound the Paw. 1 day ago
I never knew some people didn't have an inner monolog until I started reading BP.
#27
The smell of grass being cut is it’s distress signal.
#28
Humans are the best developed species for distance running. We out perform any other species in the long run.
#29
That one fungus that literally takes over an insect's brain and walks its body to the highest available point from which it can more effectively propagate itself.
#30
In the grand scheme of things our impact on this world and the universe will not matter in anyway at all. In relation to our world we are a blink of an eye, and to the universe beyond even detectable. We are self important to a fault and yet as insignificant as what ever exists that’s smaller than a quark.
Michael Largey 1 day ago
There is no grand scheme of things. And that is the only truly reliable fact we have.
#31
There are more cells in what you consider your body that are not you (bacteria) than cells that are you.
michael Chock 1 day ago
And who is to say our cells are not self aware or that the earth is not self aware.
#32
There are an unfathomable number of unfathomably small particles called neutrinos passing through all of us, and Earth, all the time.
The only way we(humanity) have found to detect them without interference is to build giant underground water tanks that essentially watch for the tiny bit of light that is produced when one of them collides with a water molecule.
Working in IT, I'm confident that very rarely, one of them strikes a PC component, be it in a server or consumer devices, and flips a bit.
#33
Different animals experience time at different rates. Smaller animals with faster metabolisms experience time more slowly.
#34
If we were to zoom in as far as possible until we get to the smallest unit of measurement possible, Planck's Length, and then tried to zoom in even further beyond that - the amount of energy required to do so would be so locally-dense that it would create a singularity (black hole).
Nathaniel He/Him Cis-Het 1 day ago
What do you call a theoretical physicist carrying as much wood as he can manage? Max Planck.
#35
Supposedly people who have been deaf from birth but who aren't mute do not make the same sounds when sneezing as people who are not deaf. The implication is that the sound you make when you sneeze is learned. That freaks me out because I feel like it is sort of an unstoppable innate sound that I've always had.
Peter Bear 1 day ago
I mean, considering how much variety there is in human sneezing, this doesn't surprise me so much.
#36
Sharks are older than trees.
Nathaniel He/Him Cis-Het 1 day ago (edited)
I would make a reference to the baby shark song, but I have done it elsewhere on this thread. I will save you the trauma of remembering the baby shark song here. So no need to think of the lyrics. Or how annoyingly catchy they are.
#37
Genghis Khans conquests resulted in so many passings carbon emissions significantly dropped over a century or so.
UKGrandad 1 day ago
That's a half-remembered fact poorly retold. Carbon emissions really weren't that high to begin with back then. What happened was that his conquests wiped out so many people that a great amount of cultivated land was abandoned, leading to a period of reforestation. The growth of so many trees took a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere.
#38
3 trillion fish are ended yearly, and the vast majority are by letting them suffocate, which is extremely painful and takes tens of minutes.
Just to compare, 100 billion humans have ever lived.
#39
We don't know how effective the rabies vaccine is. We know it works pretty well, likely somewhere between 80% and 100%, but for obvious reasons it's impossible to test on humans, and rabies is difficult to determine exposure, because it isn't the most transmissible disease and often times the infected animal isn't even recovered. So a possible exposure may not have been an exposure at all.
TotallyNOTAFox 1 day ago
I'd still take a 80% chance of protection over the mortality rate of rabies.
#40
Until the WNT1 pathway is down-regulated during late childhood, in preparation for puberty, the human body is still capable of regrowing amputated fingertips. This pathway remains active in some species which are capable of regrowing entire appendages, or even their entire bodies.
TotallyNOTAFox 1 day ago (edited)
The Axolotl is very interesting in the latter regard - They are lizards stuck in puberty because they don't fulls get into adult hood due to a lacking enzyme. Because of that they are able to replace ANY body part as long as they survive it's loss
#41
A Cambridge team studying the atmosphere of a planet called K2-18b has detected signs of molecules which on Earth are only produced by simple organisms.
TotallyNOTAFox 1 day ago
As far as we know, who knows what else is out there that could produce them besides organisms
#42
I work with cancer cells from people that died several decades ago. They're still going strong. We can freeze and thaw them indefinitely. Ship them all over the world. Probably the most popular ones have generated 1000s of times the weight of their original body.
None of this is possible with cells from healthy tissues, unless you genetically make them cancerous.
That’s all I yam 1 day ago (edited)
“Henrietta Lacks (née Loretta Pleasant; August 1, 1920 – October 4, 1951) was an African-American woman whose cancer cells are the source of the HeLa cell line, the first immortalized human cell line[B] and one of the most important cell lines in medical research. An immortalized cell line reproduces indefinitely under specific conditions, and the HeLa cell line continues to be a source of invaluable medical data and research to the present day.” ( Henrietta Lacks, Wikipedia )
#43
Mushrooms are not plants or animals. What am I even eating?
#44
If you take all the atoms in every person and shrink them down to just the nucleus. The worlds population would fit in something the size of a sugar cube.
T'Mar of Vulcan 1 day ago
Did nobody watch Star Trek? There's an episode where aliens do this to the crew. ("By Any Other Name".)
#45
The fact that we are mostly empty space at the atomic level. Everything you touch is basically energy fields interacting.
#46
The chameleon plant. Like what. How can it know what other plants look like without vision?
"Boquila trifoliolata, a South American chameleon vine, has been documented to mimic the shape, size, and color of artificial plastic plants, even when no chemical or genetic cues exist for it to copy."
David Paterson 1 day ago
The jury is still out on this one "In the decade following the original study describing the species mimicry capabilities in 2014, no independent research groups have verified the field observations.”
#47
Siphonophores.
Most deep sea creatures sound fake and freak me out tbh.
Lady Eowyn 1 day ago
Siphonophores are marine invertebrates that inhabit the global ocean, from surface waters to deep-sea environments. Like jellyfish, siphonophores belong to the phylum Cnidaria, but they form complex animal colonies rather than being single organisms. There are approximately 175 to 200 known species of siphonophores, showcasing a wide range of shapes and sizes. These delicate, often transparent creatures are a unique biological phenomenon, as multiple individuals work together as a single, integrated unit.
#48
Volcanic snails with metal shells.
David Paterson 1 day ago (edited)
They live near hydrothermal vents in the deep ocean. Close but no cigar. Iron sulfide isn't a metal. "The shell is of a unique construction, with three layers; the outer layer consists of iron sulphides, the middle layer is equivalent to the organic periostracum found in other gastropods, and the innermost layer is made of aragonite. The foot is also unusual, being armored at the sides with iron-mineralised sclerites."
#49
There's an extreme case of convergent evolution where a bird species independently evolved...twice...at separate times.
#50
The speed of light is constant regardless of reference frame.
Michael Largey 1 day ago
"If my car is traveling at the speed of light and I turn on the headlights, does anything happen?" - Steven Wright
#51
You can be so sick that the only cure is having another person’s poo medically inserted into you.
#52
The speed of light and the speed of gravity are about the same. If the sun were to disappear, we would maintain current orbit for about 8 minutes, and then drift off into space when we see the sun blink out as we all start to pass away.
michael Chock 1 day ago (edited)
They are not talking about how fast things move in a gravity field, but how quickly the field itself moves.
#53
Chickens are living dinosaurs.
#55
About half the population is infected with a brain worm that stems from cats. T gondii causes massive changes in the behavior of mice and will cause them to run straight towards cats to be eaten.
It’s not clear whether this changes behavior in humans. There’s some correlation that’s been found but nothing solid.
John Dilligaf 1 day ago
it causes humans to run straight toward any cat they see while calling pspsps and trying to pet it.
#57
Carcinization. Everything eventually evolves into crabs. It’s the optimal form.
UnclePanda 1 day ago
*eye roll* "Carcinization is a form of convergent evolution where non-crab crustaceans evolve a crab-like body plan." Only non-crab crustaceans.
#58
The more we dig into the nature of reality, the more unfathomable it becomes. It's almost as if the universe has left us a hint.
That’s all I yam 1 day ago
Just speculation: Can you imagine what the concept of reality will be 10,000 years from now (assuming our species survives that long)? My guess is that they'll be shaking their heads at what we think, sort of like what we think about the thoughts recorded just centuries ago.
#59
Our eyes have their own immune system and our body could theoretically reject them.
That’s all I yam 1 day ago (edited)
"The eye limits its inflammatory immune response so that vision isn’t harmed by swelling and other tissue changes. Other sites with immune privilege include the brain, testes, placenta and fetus." ( The Eye and Immune Privilege, American Academy of Ophthalmology )
#60
Planet 9. A theorized planet that could be 10x bigger than Earth out beyond the current outer planets. We have not found it but we can see evidence of its impact on the Kuyper belt.
What do you think ?
Tyranamar Seuss 1 day ago
So at some point this just became random comments people heard were true.
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Serena Myers 1 day ago
An 'average' domestic cat can run at speeds of up to 30mph in short bursts. In theory, but not in practice, faster than Usain Bolt. A rat can run at a top speed of between 8 to 10 mph. Facts.
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Load More Replies... Tyranamar Seuss 1 day ago
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