• March 29, 2024
Science And Technology Screen

10 amazing science facts you probably didn’t know

Did you know that the average person has around 60,000 thoughts per day? Or that we only use 10% of our brainpower? Or that it’s physically impossible for a human to lick their own elbow?

Science is always advancing and with it comes new discoveries that often surprise us. Here are 10 amazing science facts you probably didn’t know.

1. The average person has around 60,000 thoughts per day.

No, that’s not a typo. It turns out the human mind can really only focus on about 60,000 thoughts per day, which is also equal to about 4-5 dreams per night. The remaining 40,000 thoughts are filled with subliminal messages and other random stuff our brain makes up to occupy itself so it doesn’t melt down from boredom.

2. We only use 10% of our brainpower.

This seems to be an ancient myth originally propagated by Swiss psychologist William Stern in the early 1900s because he felt people wouldn’t aim for higher goals if they knew how limited their mental capacity was. If you find yourself feeling guilty or inadequate after reading this, don’t worry. You’re not a 90% loser. We now know that people use everything from 0 to 100% of their brainpower depending on the activity at hand.

3. It’s physically impossible for a human being to lick their own elbow.

You can try as hard as you want but your tongue just won’t reach that far. No one has been able to prove whether it’s due to simple anatomical reasons or if there is a more complicated phenomenon going on here, like quantum entanglement affecting sensory organs or something else we haven’t discovered yet.

4. Women have twice as many pain receptors on their bodies as men do and are more sensitive to pain than men are.

There are plenty of scientific explanations for this, including the fact that women have a lower tolerance to pain because they need to be able to experience more pain during childbirth in order to push the baby through their pelvis. But there’s also evidence that women having twice as many pain receptors might be an evolutionary adaptation for when early humans were attacked by saber tooth tigers or other dangerous predators.

5. The Earth weighs 6,588,000,000,000, 000,000 tons!

The weight of our planet is often rounded up to 6 billion tons with “6” being the number everyone uses when talking about it casually. However scientists found out that if you round it down by 1000000000000000000 then you get the exact weight.

6. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on earth .

There are somewhere between 1022 and 1024 stars in the universe. That means that for every grain of sand on this planet there’s more than one star up in the sky, many of which have planetary systems just like ours!

7. Every time you sneeze a little bit of your soul escapes from your body.

8. Humans shed between 100-1,000 skin cells every hour .

The good news is that new skin cells are constantly replacing the old ones. The bad news is we’re all walking around with bits of our former selves stuck to us all day long.

9. The total weight of all ants on Earth is greater than the total weight of all humans in the world .

There are about 10-15 thousand different species of ants and most weigh between 1-5 milligrams (0.001 g). Taking an average ant weight at 1.5 mg means the total weight of all ants on Earth is about 500,000 tons, which is greater than the total weight of humans at 350,000 tons.

10. The blue whale has a heart that weighs more than 1 ton and a blood vessel system that would wrap around the earth 2 times .

Now I know you probably think this article must be biased because it’s obviously going to end with the most amazing fact ever but keep reading anyway! In addition to being the largest animal on planet Earth, blue whales have hearts that weigh up to 1-1.6 tons and blood vessel systems that could wrap around our planet 300 times if laid end to end! Now you can combine two facts into one by realizing that we only know about 300 modern species of mammals (so far) but there were probably tens of thousands of extinct mammal species we haven’t found yet. So it’s possible the largest mammal to ever live was a whale and its heart weighed 2 or 3 tons.