We all have a concept of reality. We know what is “fact” and what isn’t. However, the truth of the matter is that the definition of “real” is a mere construct of the brain.
If that didn’t blow your mind, this list has a lot more where that came from. These are responses from a recent Reddit thread, bearing a question originally directed at scientists: “What’s something we know is true but people don’t realize how crazy it is?”
A lot of these answers did not disappoint. You may want to have Google open next to you as you read through, since you'll likely want to do a little more digging.
After being a Behavioral Specialist for so long it is astounding how much of human behavior is built on wanting attention from others. Even me just writting this, the primary motivation would be to gain attention and demonstrate my knowledge. Sure I just want to share but even that is rooted attention seeking behavior. At first it’s a little disturbing realizing that non of us can escape it. But it’s part of being human. We are wired to be this social and it has helped us to survive.
Cooperation is literally the single greatest survival tactic ever seen in nature. We were never meant to be as intentionally and artificially isolated and alienated from each other as we are today, and the modern obsession with individualist hostile competition, up to and including creating artificial scarcity through which to enforce this hostility, is antithetical to our very being as a species.
Charles Keeling had a team at Mauna Loa Observatory taking twice-daily samples of the air since 1958, specifically to test for CO2. As you can imagine, this was was done by a dude bringing a jar out, holding their breath, opening the jar, waving it around, putting back on the lid, then resuming their breathing. Every day, twice a day.
The technology for testing these samples for the different isotopes and exact measurements that are actually useful was invented and brought to the island in 1978.
Let that sink on. They collected jars of air for 20 years before they actually had a way to test them properly, and did it every day, twice a day.
All good scientists are mad scientists, the crazier, the better.
The mental image is sort of adorable 🤣
Fly around the surface of Earth once non-stop in a 747? It would take around 2 days.
Fly around the Sun once non-stop in a 747? Around 6 months.
Fly once around the largest star discovered in a 747?1,200 years.
Fly across the Milky Way once in a 747?
Fly around Brazil in a 747?A Brazilian years.
Your stomach lining regenerates every few days. Otherwise stomach acid would literally digest your own organs. You're constantly saving yourself from yourself.
This is why chemo is so hard on your digestion and leads to nausea. Chemo targets fast-growing cells and isn't very precise, so it's constantly messing up the cell turnover in your stomach.
About 99.86% of all the mass in the solar system is inside the sun.
Everything else combined--all the planets, moons, asteroids, comets, kuiper belt objects, oort cloud objects--is a rounding error compared to the sun.
The Earth has about 0.0003% of the solar system's mass. We are decimal dust.
Except your Mom, she alone accounts for at least .00005%.
Oncology scientist. Pharmaceutical companies are not hiding the cure to cancer. Whoever finds the cure to cancer will be bring too much value to the shareholders for it to be squashed.
As a former cancer patient, when people would say this stupid stuff to me I would tell them if my oncologist had a cure, there was nothing that could stop him from getting it out. Then I would cut that person out of my orbit.You are doing the real work and I thank you for it.
Mushrooms are closer to animals than to plants. In fact, in our current phylogenetic classification, fungi are even closer to animals than to slime moulds.
Mushrooms digest their food outside of their bodies.
It's why treating fungal infections in humans is SO DIFFICULT because both fungal cells and human cells are eukaryotic (meaning they have membrane bound nuclei) and anti-fungal meds truly can't tell the difference, so they end up destroying both.
"The fact that atoms are 99.9999999% empty space. If you removed all the 'empty space' from the atoms that make up every single human being on Earth, the entire human race—all 8 billion of us—would fit inside the volume of a single sugar cube. We feel solid because of electromagnetic fields pushing against each other, but in reality, we are essentially just 'organized nothingness.' You aren't actually 'touching' the chair you're sitting on right now; your electrons are just repelling its electrons so strongly that it creates the illusion of a solid surface.".
I might be wrong, I could swear I read a paper one time that explained that because there is so much empty space, it's theoretically possible that in the perfect conditions, you could accidentally "phase through" a solid object instead of bumping into it if everything was aligned just right on an atomic level. (But the odds of it are so astronomically insane, it's basically guaranteed it'll never actually happen in human history.)
Farmer here. Seems obvious, but just how many resources nature has to throw at EVERY problem (in this context, "problem" means your healthy crop).
Our solutions for pest / disease issues on crops are incredibly specific. Develop a specific insecticide that targets the digestion of a gnat, or the reproductive cycle of a worm. Nature has 24/7 to develop infinite new evolutions of that pest / disease that will circumvent your incredibly specific mode of action.
Follow up - no...nature WONT "just provide for us". Nature will provide for itself. All the crops we eat have been developed by humans to feed us. If you ever doubt that, look up the native species we derived corn or apples or strawberries from. They look nothing like the crops we enjoy today.
Every breath you take today likely includes at least one molecule once exhaled by Julius Caesar when he passed away.
Because the atmosphere thoroughly mixes over time, and each breath contains an enormous number of molecules — ~1 × 10²² molecules.
But it can get even more interesting. Due to the number of molecules in our atmosphere and those in each breath, and given enough time, every breath you take likely includes a molecule of air once breathed by…
Taylor Swift at that concert a few years ago
Want to blow your mind even more?
Every time you drink a glass of water, at least one molecule of that H₂O likely passed right through a dinosaur.
The amount that your body's microbiome affects you. Studies have shown that reduced cravings for alcohol were achieved after fecal transplants. Also we are about 1:1 Human cell and microbe.
I remember when fecal transplants were new and I was being considered for one, they also said early studies has shown several obese people who had the transplant then lost weight as the food noise stopped. So makes sense about alcohol.
The atoms in your body are older than the Earth.Most of them were formed inside exploding stars billions of years ago.You’re literally recycled stardust walking around arguing about WiFi speed.
