Here's why you should never throw out those annoying silica sachets again

Here's why you should never throw out those annoying silica sachets again

Whoa, we had no idea.

Anyone who's ever bought a new electronic device or pair of shoes will be all too familiar with those little "DO NOT EAT" sachets that come in the box. Most of us have a vague idea that they're somehow keeping our products fresh, but toss them as soon as the box is open without a second thought.

But it turns out that just might be one of the worst ideas ever because, as Eames Yates reports for Business Insider, these free sachets can be used for a whole range of life hacks that can save you time, energy, and money. And we're never throwing one out again.

As the video below explains, the sachets are called silica gel bags, and they're filled with little balls of silicon dioxide, which will quickly dry out anything around them.

Despite the warnings on the packet, they're actually not toxic or poisonous, and are only really dangerous because they pose a choking hazard (so, yep, keep them away from kids).

But they're actually also incredibly useful, not only when it comes to keeping your new purchases dry and fresh in the box, but also for soaking up moisture in other unexpected ways. Here are some of their life-changing uses:

1. Save your wet phone

Dropped your iPhone in the toilet again? Forget rice, according to Business Insider, these sachets are far more efficient at sucking up moisture. Just leave your phone switched off in a jar full of them overnight, and they should dry the device out thoroughly.

2. Defog your windshield

Never wait for your windshield to clear up in the mornings again - instead, simply place a few of these bags under your windshield on the inside and they'll keep it dry and clear regardless of the weather.

3. Extend the life of your razor blades

Any shaving aficionado will know that moisture is your razor's worst enemy, with damp blunting your blades before their time. Business Insider recommendskeeping your razor in a tupperware container with a few of these silica gel bags to keep them sharp for longer.

4. Keep your gym bag fresh

You can avoid mould and bacteria colonising your sweaty gym gear by adding a couple of these sachets to your gym bag. They should also help with the odour.

5. Protect your old photos

Many of us store our old photos in attics, cellars, or other equally damp places, which can lead to the pictures sticking together and deteriorating over time. Keep them in a box with a few silica sachets and it should keep them dry and in tact for longer.

Seriously, we had no idea, and we'll never take these free goldmines for granted again. Check out the Business Insider video below to find out more. The regret is real. 

This time-lapse shows the Sun only rises due east two days a year

This time-lapse shows the Sun only rises due east two days a year

You've been lied to.

This incredible time-lapse shows an entire year's worth of sunrises condensed into 23 glorious seconds. And while the colours and scenery are all breathtaking, what's really interesting here is that the footage demonstrates something not many people are aware of - the fact that the point at which the Sun rises (and sets) moves slightly north and south with the seasons. In fact, it only rises due east two days a year.

This time-lapse was created by Tobias Hoerburger, who took a photo looking due east over the German city of Regensburg 10 minutes after sunrise each day between 21 March 2015 and 20 March 2016.

Coincidentally, just last week, astronomer and science writer Phil Plait wrote about the vernal equinox (better known as the spring or fall equinox), which occurred on March 20 this year, over on his Slate blog, Bad Astronomy.

He was explaining how those two days are the only ones of the entire year when the Sun actually sets due west, and rises due east, despite what you've been told throughout your childhood. But he was lacking any long-term time-lapse footage to demonstrate this effect in action - which is where Hoerburger stepped in withthis incredible record of the Sun's motion throughout the year.

So what you can see in the time-lapse is that, for the first sunrise, the Sun is coming up due east, and then continues to move further north every morning fairly quickly. Then it slows down, hits the June solstice, and begins to move south again. 

Eventually, it gets to the December solstice, and reaches its most southern point, before moving back up to due east for the 2016 vernal equinox (which occurs September 22 this year).

This all happens because of the tilt of Earth's axis as it orbits the Sun, Plait explains over at Bad Astronomy. And when you think about it, this is probaby something you already instinctually knew, but never really thought about too seriously. I mean, we all know the Sun moves, but sunrise is just always due east! 

So why does the Sun speed up and slow down as it moves across its path for the year? Plait explains, referring to the sunset this time:

"The thing is, as the 'sunset point' moves north and south over the year, it doesn’t always move at the same speed. At the equinoctes it’s moving the fastest, and before the solstices it appears to slow down and stop (solstice means 'the Sun stands still') before reversing direction. For the mathophiles, the motion itself is a sine wave, and the speed it travels is the derivative, a cosine."

So there you have it, the sunrise isn't as constant as you might or might not have thought. But either way, you have to admit that it's even more beautiful when you know the science behind it. And enjoy it, because thanks to Earth's tilt, not everyone gets to:

Physicists have finally solved a key mystery in how hydrogen bonding works

Physicists have finally solved a key mystery in how hydrogen bonding works

A quantum universe in a drop of water.

It’s easy to feel like the quantum world is incredibly distant from your everyday experience, so here’s something you can do to bring it closer to home. Go grab a coin and put it under slowly dripping water. If you have a pipette, that’s the way to go. Otherwise, a dripping faucet will work.

Try enough times, and eventually you’ll be able to get the water to pile up on your coin in a big, bulbous blob. According to a new study, part of the reason the drop holds together like this is because water molecules act like little, quantum-tunnelling gears. Okay great, you can sit down now.

Water molecules are made of a big oxygen atom and two smaller hydrogen atoms, with electrons buzzing around the whole group. On average, the electrons spend more time buzzing around the oxygen and less time buzzing around the hydrogen, so the oxygen tends to be negatively charged, while the hydrogens tend to be positively charged.

If you put two water molecules next to each other, the oxygen of molecule 1 tends to attract the hydrogens in molecule 2, and the molecules will end up with the oxygen and one hydrogen really close together. If you put a whole bunch of water molecules together, they’ll arrange themselves so one molecule’s oxygen is always next to another’s hydrogen.

And then, because molecules are always jiggling around, they’ll occasionally switch from lining up with one set of neighbours to lining up with another set - the common metaphor being that water molecules are dancers who like to switch partners. The whole process of attraction and partner-switching is known as hydrogen bonding, and it’s the underlying reason for surface tension - the tendency of water molecules to clump together instead of spread apart. That’s why water drops can get so big.

But there are a couple of holes in this explanation. If all of the water molecules are in groups, how does one find another partner without disrupting the whole dance? And what happens if they’re not jiggling enough to keep switching? Does the drop just collapse?

These were the questions asked and answered by physicists at the University of Cambridge in the UK, by looking at supercooled arrangements of just six molecules.

First, they checked what happens when one of the molecules switches partners, and found that you don’t just get one molecule at a time doing the switch. The molecules always work in pairs, like interlocking gears. When one turns, it frees up a hydrogen bond that can be taken by the other and there’s never an awkward partnerless period.

But that’s not all. The molecules in these experiments weren’t jiggling enough to do the switching on their own, so the team turned to simulations to see how the gears were working.

Quantum particles (okay, all things in the Universe, but let’s not go there) don’t have a well-defined position. Instead, their positions are kind of spread out across space: it’s most likely that they’ll be where you expect them to be, but they could also end up somewhere else, even if they don’t have enough energy to get over there. It’s like if you threw a ball at a wall and the ball, instead of hitting it and bouncing back at you, just went through without breaking the wall. Your ball would seem to have accessed some sort of tunnel between your and the other side of the wall when no such tunnel exists.

This is how water is able to switch partners, according to the new simulations,published in Science this week. The molecules aren’t jiggling enough to do it on their own, so they have to rely on quantum tunneling in order to set this molecular clockwork in motion. Instead of actually searching for a new partner, they just appear next to the new partner and switch immediately. The two molecules that work together in the gears coordinate their tunneling so that none is ever without a partner.

Not bad for a little bulb of water.

Why won't this damn balloon pop after being skewered by an arrow?

Why won't this damn balloon pop after being skewered by an arrow?

Thank you, physics.

Earlier this week, this maddeningly frustrating image of an un-popped balloon being pierced by an arrow at an archery club went viral on Reddit - because, come on, what the hell is going on here?
Before you get started about how this is an old trick used to rig carnival games, the guy who actually took the photo, evilbytez, also established some context: the balloon was a plain, unaltered balloon, blown up by humans, and the arrow was shot by an 11-year-old from a distance of about 10 metres in an indoor space. It was part of a club activity at Brockley Archery Club in Ontario, Canada, and plenty of other balloons were popped fine that day.

By all accounts, this one really should have burst too - after all, the kid nailed it fair and square with his arrow - but on this occasion, it didn't. And (as far as we can tell from an image uploaded to the Internet) that's because a whole series of conditions lined up to rob the young archer of a victory. Thank you, physics. 

evilbytez/reddit

So how exactly did the balloon survive?
While it's impossible to say for sure without examining the situation further than this one photograph, this looks like a pretty classic classroom science experiment called the balloon shish kebab, where you pierce a balloon with a kebab stick - just like this arrow did - without popping it.

To understand how that works, you first need to understand why a balloon pops in the first place. As you blow one up, you're increasing the air pressure on the inside with your breath, and that pressure is stretching the rubber until it becomes thinner and thinner.  

As you know, if you prick that rubber with a pin, the whole thing will pop, because all the tension that should have been supported by the pricked rubber is now transferred to the edges of the hole. That force is too large for it to handle in its stretched state, so the rubber rips violently until enough air escapes to remove the internal force.
This illustration by The Naked Scientists shows what that looks like:

The Naked Scientists

But the rubber isn't equally stretched all over a balloon. In fact, you'll notice that at the top and at the bottom, right near the mouth, balloons are usually darker in colour, where their rubber is more slack. "This means that the rubber at the edges of the hole can stretch significantly so the force is shared out over a large area," The Naked Scientists explain.

The Naked Scientists

So if you put a skewer (or an arrow) in at one of these dark points, and then poke it out the least-stretched area on the other side, you'll easily be able to leave the balloon un-popped. Of course, it may deflate slightly as air escapes, but if you leave the arrow in there, it should seal up most of that leak.
And this appears to be what's happened to this poor archer - who, to be honest, should be pretty happy about the whole thing, because managing to hit a balloon at precisely the right angle to not pop it is far more rare than just shooting one of the weak, over-stretched rubbery sides. Well done, kid.
And just in case you were wondering, this is what it looks like when a man sits inside a giant water balloon and then pops it - in glorious slow motion.  

You know how when you learn a new word, you see it everywhere? Science knows why Mystery = solved.

You know how when you learn a new word, you see it everywhere? Science knows why

Mystery = solved.

Have you ever learned a new word, one that you swear you've never heard before, only to find it popping up throughout your daily life for a few days after? It’s like the word is haunting you, or that the word didn’t exist at all before you learned it. Well, turns out that’s called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, and it all comes down to your brain playing tricks on you.
The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is actually a term for 'frequency illusion', a type of cognitive bias your mind creates. To understand this, you need to know a little about cognitive bias as a whole. Though there's a whole lot of nuisances caused by cognitive bias, in short, it’s when your mind deviates from normal, rational thought and starts to make up patterns based off of nonsense. 

 

John Donovan from Mother Nature Network summarises this elegantly:

"Example: Hindsight bias (also known as the "I knew it all along" bias) is the tendency to think that, looking back on an event, we should have seen it coming - even though there may be no rational reason that we actually should have known what was going to happen."

So what about frequency illusion? Well, the term was coined in 2006 by Arnold Zwicky, a linguist from Stanford University, who claims that frequency illusion is, in fact, two different processes happening at the same time: selective attention and confirmation bias.
The first process, selective attention, comes about when you learn anything new. Basically, when you learn something new, it stays fresh in your mind - you’re paying more attention to it than other things. Because of this, you see it more often when going about your daily life.
However, this very simple, logical process is amped up by confirmation bias, which is a cognitive bias that makes you "search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions, leading to statistical errors", reports ScienceDaily.
This means that your mind is on the look-out for newly learned information because it’s still super fresh and interesting to you. At the same time, your mind sees these new words everywhere, thinks that it's weird, and tries to make it fit into some rational system.

 

In other words, because the information is new, you suddenly force yourself to believe that it's new to everyone and has suddenly popped up, when in reality, you’ve just stopped ignoring it.
The name Baader-Meinhof phenomenon actually started as a meme in 1994. Since frequency illusion was coined in 2006, people sort of just came up with a term to describe the weird feeling without having the science behind it. According to Pacific Standard:

"Baader-Meinhof phenomenon was invented in 1994 by a commenter on the St. Paul Pioneer Press' online discussion board, who came up with it after hearing the name of the ultra-left-wing German terrorist group twice in 24 hours. The phrase became a meme on the newspaper’s boards, where it still pops up regularly, and has since spread to the wider Internet."

So there you have it. You actually see new words more often and believe there’s some weird pattern at work because your mind is trying to make sense of new information. It just so happens that most of it is made up.

A mysterious disease is killing people in Wisconsin

A mysterious disease is killing people in Wisconsin

 

A total of 54 people in Wisconsin have so far been infected by a mysterious kind of bacteria called Elizabethkingia since November, and 15 of them have died. The bacterium is not known for making people sick on this scale - which experts say is unprecedented - and right now, no one knows how so many are getting infected. 
"The fact that we’re seeing more than four dozen cases, that is a very large outbreak," Michael Bell, deputy director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) healthcare quality division, told Wired. 

 

Last week, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services reported four new cases of the bacterial strain Elizabethkingia anophelis, announcing that infections have been confirmed in 12 Wisconsin counties so far. 
If the bacterium makes its way to a person’s bloodstream, it can cause fever, shortness of breath, chills, and cellulitis (bacterial infection of the skin), and in the worst cases, causes sepsis, which can be deadly, particularly in patients with existing diseases or compromised immune systems. Most of the patients who have died from Elizabethkingia infection during this outbreak have been over 65 and all had pre-existing conditions.
So how do you get infected with Elizabethkingia? Unfortunately, when it comes to this particular outbreak, no one’s entirely sure. The bacterium is prevalent in the environment, but doesn't usually cause illness in people. 
"At this time, the source of these infections is unknown and the department is working diligently to contain this outbreak," Wisconsin Department of Health Services announced to the press this week.
In the past, outbreaks have been linked to isolated sources, such as contaminated taps in hospital sinks at a London critical care unit. But what’s so confounding about this outbreak is that patients are spread across 12 different counties, with a range of living conditions - some were infected in nursing homes, others in their own homes, and some were infected in hospitals, while others had not been in a hospital prior to getting sick.
What’s even more strange is that genetic analysis of the bacteria involved suggest that all of the infections are coming from a single source, and somehow infecting people all over the southeastern and southern parts of the state.

 

The most obvious answer is that the Wisconsin tap water had been contaminated, but tests of the water supply have so far shown no signs of contamination. "That leaves us looking at a huge number of potential risk factors," including medications, foods and environmental sources, Bell told The Washington Post. "It’s frustrating. The fact that all these cases share a fingerprint has us wanting to really track down the source."
The CDC now has 70 to 80 researchers working to identify the source of the outbreak, with eight experts currently on the ground in Wisconsin. 
According to Wired, they basically have to knock on every patient’s door and through careful questioning, try to find clues as to what they all might have in common, whether it’s using the same lotions or wipes, or eating the same foods sourced from the same place. In 2011, the bacteria was discovered in the guts of mosquitoes, but there's been no solid evidence of transmission to humans in this way.
The CDC is continuing to analyse the local water, looking at the possibility that contaminated water was used on produce sold at a particular grocery store, but you can imagine how much work that’s going to be. "The amount of potential exposure sources is very large," Bell told Wired.
The investigation is ongoing, so for now, we’ll just have to wait and see what the results will bring, and hope that no one else contracts a fatal case of the disease.

Scientists have removed HIV from human immune cells using a new gene-editing technique

Scientists have removed HIV from human immune cells using a new gene-editing technique

They've managed to shut down HIV replication permanently.

Using the much-touted CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing method, scientists have demonstrated how they can edit HIV out of human immune cell DNA, and in doing so, can prevent the reinfection of unedited cells too.

If you haven’t heard of the CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technique before, get ready to hear a whole lot more about it in 2016, because it’s set to revolutionise how we investigate and treat the root causes of genetic disease. It allows scientists to narrow in on a specific gene, and cut-and-paste parts of the DNA to change its function.

CRISPR/Cas9 is what researchers in the UK have recently gotten approval to use on human embryos so they can figure out how to improve IVF success rates and reduce miscarriages, and it’s what Chinese scientists were caught using in 2015to tweak human embryos on the down-low.

Earlier this year, scientists started using CRISPR/Cas9 to successfully treat a genetic disease - Duchenne muscular dystrophy - in living mammals for the first time, and now it’s showing real potential as a possible treatment for HIV in the future.

The technique works by guiding 'scissor-like' proteins to targeted sections of DNA within a cell, and then prompting them to alter or 'edit' them in some way.CRISPR refers to a specific repeating sequence of DNA extracted from a prokaryote - a single-celled organism such as bacteria - which pairs up with an RNA-guided enzyme called Cas9.

So basically, if you want to edit the DNA of a virus within a human cell, you need a bacterium to go in, encounter the virus, and produce a strand of RNA that’s identical to the sequence of the virtual DNA. 

This 'guide RNA' will then latch onto the Cas9 enzyme, and together they’ll search for the matching virus. Once they locate it, the Cas9 gets to cutting and destroying it. 

Using this technique, researchers from Temple University managed to eliminate HIV-1 DNA from T cell genomes in human lab cultures, and when these cells were later exposed to the virus, they were protected from reinfection.

"The findings are important on multiple levels," says lead researcher Kamel Khalili. "They demonstrate the effectiveness of our gene editing system in eliminating HIV from the DNA of CD4 T-cells and, by introducing mutations into the viral genome, permanently inactivating its replication."

"Further," he adds, "they show that the system can protect cells from reinfection and that the technology is safe for the cells, with no toxic effects."

While gene-editing techniques have been trialled before when it comes to HIV, this is the first time that scientists have figure out how to prevent further infections, which is crucial to the success of a treatment that offers better protection than our current antiretroviral drugs. Once you stop taking these drugs, the HIV starts overloading the T-cells again.

"Antiretroviral drugs are very good at controlling HIV infection," says Khalili. "But patients on antiretroviral therapy who stop taking the drugs suffer a rapid rebound in HIV replication."

There’s still a lot more work to be done in getting this technique ready for something more advanced than human cells in a petri dish - particularly when it comes to perfect accuracy for the 'cutting' process - but it’s an exciting first step.

4 things you can actually learn while you sleep

4 things you can actually learn while you sleep

Make the most of your sleeping hours.

It turns out there actually are a few things you can learn - or at least improve your grasp of - while you snooze. Most of them depend on one thing: sound. Here are some of the skills you may be able to sharpen in your sleep.

1. Foreign words

In a recent experiment, scientists had native German speakers start learning Dutch, beginning with some basic vocab. Then they asked them to go to sleep.

Unbeknownst to the dozing Germans, while they slept, the researchers played the sound of some of those basic words to one group of them. The other group was exposed to no such sounds. Later on when they were tested on the words, the group that had listened to them overnight was better able to identify and translate them.

To make sure the findings were tied to sleep - and not just the result of people hearing the words - they had another group listen to the words while they did something else while awake, like walking. The walkers didn't recall the words nearly as well as the sleepers.

2. Musical skills.

In another study, researchers taught a group of people to play guitar melodiesusing a technique borrowed from the video game Guitar Hero. Afterward, all the volunteers got to nap. When they woke up, they all were asked to play the tune again.

Unbeknownst to the sleeping participants, one group was played the same melody they'd just learned as they slept. The other group was not. The volunteers who'd been played the sound while they napped - even though they had no memory of it - played the melody far better than those who didn't hear it as they snoozed.

3. Where you put something.

In a 2013 study, researchers had 60 healthy adults use a computer to place a virtual object in a particular location on the screen. When they picked a location and placed the object there, they heard a specific tune. Then, they did two experiments in which they had the participants nap for 1.5 hours.

During the first nap, participants dozed as usual, with no sounds playing. During the second nap, the tune that was played when they were placing the object was played again - though none of them reported hearing it.

Not surprisingly, after either nap, people's memories faded. But their memories faded less when they'd been exposed - even sub- or unconsciously - to the sound that had been played when they'd placed the item. Interestingly, their memories were sharper still when they'd been told the virtual object was of 'high value'.

4. How to protect special memories

Scientists think our brains use a special tagging system to separate critical memories from less-important ones. Those the brain flags as 'important' get sent straight to our long-term memory, while less-important memories are washed away by new ones. But researchers think there may be a way to hack this system to our advantage.

In a recent study, they found that people who listened to a sound they'd linked with a memory - even an unimportant one - were better able to hold on to it.

First, they had a group of volunteers place icons on a computer screen in a specific location. The computer was programmed to play a specific sound when each object was placed. Placing a cat icon played a meowing noise; placing a bell icon prompted a ringing sound. Then, they let participants nap. While one group of them dozed, the scientists played the sounds of some of the icons. The other group heard nothing.

People who listened to any of the sounds were better able to recall all of the objects: One sound appeared to help trigger multiple memories.

What's happening while we sleep that's so good for our brains?

Our brain activity slows down in specific shifts overnight, with some of us spending more time in a special phase called slow-wave sleep (SWS) than others. But slow-wave sleep is also the phase of sleep when scientists believe some of our short-term memories are moved into long-term storage in our prefrontal cortex.

In some of these experiments, when researchers were able to study brain wave activity on the dozing volunteers, they noticed that those who were exposed to sound overnight - be it the German words played during the first study or the guitar tunes played as part of the second - also tended to spend more of their sleeping time in slow-wave sleep.

In other words, perhaps the more slow-wave sleep we get, the better - both for learning new skills and preserving important memories.

Immortal Jellyfish

The good news is that you can be immortal. The bad news is that you have to become a floating blob of jelly to do so. Scientists have discovered a jellyfish which can live forever.

Turritopsis dohrnii is now officially known as the only immortal creature. The secret to eternal life, as it turns out, is not just living a really, really long time. It’s all about maturity, or rather, the lack of it. The immortal jellyfish (as it is better known popularly) propagate and then, faced with the normal career path of dying, they opt instead to revert to a sexually immature stage.

Turritopsis rubra – Commonly confused with immortal jellyfish
(c) Photo Credit: Peter Schuchert/The Hydrozoa Directory

It turns out that once the adult form of the 4.5 mm-wide species Turritopsis dohrnii have reproduced, they don’t die but transform themselves back into their juvenile polyp state. Their tentacles retract, their bodies shrink, and they sink to the ocean floor and start the cycle all over again. Among laboratory samples, all the adult Turritopsis observed regularly undergo this change. And not just once: they can do it over and over again.

Thus, the only known way they can die is if they get consumed by another fish or if a disease strikes the jelly. However, there are still many mysteries surrounding the turritopsis dohrnii. While the process of reverting from its adult-phase to a polyp was observed several times, it hasn’t been observed yet in nature, only in laboratory environments.

Turritopsis nutricula vs Turritopsis rubra vs Turritopsis dohrnii

There was a lot of confusion even inside the scientific community between the three types of turritopsis jellyfish: the dohrnii, the nutricula and the rubra. Simply put, the turritopsis genus can be found in many parts of the world and it it is not an easy task to differentiate between these tiny jellyfishes.

The nutricula was for a long time mistakenly the one referred to as the immortal jellyfish, while the jellyfish used in the lab observations was the turritopsis dohrnii, as they were collected from the Mediterranean, where the dohrnii is found.

The nutricula is found in the Caribbean and North America and the cycle reversal was not in fact observed on the nutricula. That doesn’t mean that the nutricula isn’t biologically immortal but that it has not yet been observed and proven that. When the study (Bavestrello et al. 1992;

Piraino et al. 1996, 2004) was published, the difference between the dohrnii and nutricula wasn’t clear yet and afterwards the media distributed the information that the nutricula would be the immortal one.

And finally the rubra is a turritopsis that can be found next to New Zealand waters. Its photos can be found all over the web describing the nutricula, but the rubra wasn’t even observed to be immortal. Its shape is similar to that of the nutricula, but it is bigger (it can reach 7 mm versus the 4.5 mm of the nutricula).

So chances are that if you ever hear about the nutricula being immortal, it is in fact the dohrnii but a picture of a rubra will be attached.

Quick Science Facts!

• The average healthy human blinks about 15 times a minute.
• In North America, when gas prices go up by 10%, car accidents go down by ~2%
• The average rain cloud weighs about 216,000 pounds.
• Hipsters rejoice! You will forever live in the past. The time it takes for your brain to process the concept of “now” is longer then the time it takes for time to come into existence!
• If you see a flash of light when sitting in a completely dark room, you’re seeing a photonic boom – the collision of light particles (photons) as they are slowed down from air speed to the speed they travel in the fluid of your eyes. Or your phone just received a text message.. go check on that..
• After the first hour you spend in a confined space such as a class room or office, you’re breathing in about 2% of other peoples farts.
• Speaking of farts – no ones fart can smell the same as another persons fart.. ever – it’s like a fingerprint.. for your butt!
• Every time you fart, you lose about 0.001 grams of weight.
• More humans have virtually died in the video game series Halo than actual humans have died in the entire history of humanity.
• The loudest human burp is louder than a car horn at 109db.
• The entire electron weight of the data known as “The Internet” is about 0.2 millionths of a single ounce. That’s every photo on Facebook, every video on YouTube, every e-mail ever sent/received.
• The human that will live to be 150 years of age or older, has statistically been born already, in 2010.
• Your eyeballs grow when your a kid, but at the average age of 13, they stop – and will remain that size for the rest of your life.
• When you shuffle a deck of cards randomly, the order in which they end up has never existed on Earth before – and will never happen again before the Sun explodes.
• Sitting down right now? No you’re not. Technically your butt is not touching the chair.. at least, on an atomic level – You’re actually hovering at an atomic distance away from the chair.
• Even though nothing ever touches another thing, you can hold on to something due to the imperfections in your skin and the object you’re holding on to.
• The only way for an object to touch another object, is to chemically bond it, such as chemically bonding one hydrogen atom to two oxygen atoms to form, water!