Their intestines have varying elasticity along the length that shapes waste into cubes. The evolutionary theory is that cube-shaped poop doesn't roll off the rocks and logs they use to mark territory. Nature is a comedian.
It's called a 'whale fall.' The carcass sinks to the deep ocean and supports successive communities of scavengers, bone-eating worms, and chemosynthetic bacteria for decades. Some species exist nowhere else.
I was today years old when I learned humans have more than five senses (proprioception, equilibrium, thermoception, etc. are real senses). What have you found out recently?
They contain potassium-40, a naturally radioactive isotope. The dose is so small it's used as an informal unit of measurement — the 'banana equivalent dose.' You'd need to eat about 10 million bananas for acute radiation sickness.
Only about 6,000 years ago, much of the Sahara was a humid grassland with rivers, hippos, and human settlements. Earth's orbital wobble (the 'Green Sahara cycle') flipped it to desert. It'll flip back eventually.
I got into restoring old fountain pens during the pandemic and now I have 40 of them. What weird rabbit hole did you accidentally fall into?
Sharks have been around for ~450 million years. Trees appeared ~350 million years ago. Sharks watched trees evolve and thought 'sure, whatever.'
About 3 trillion trees vs. an estimated 100-400 billion stars. Puts into perspective both how vast our galaxy is and how absurdly forested our planet actually is.
Honey's low moisture and acidic pH make it basically immortal. Bacteria can't grow in it. You could theoretically crack open a sealed jar from the Roman Empire and put it on toast.
Learning to juggle actually made me a better typist somehow. What niche skills do you have that quietly pay off?
The Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896. The Sultan refused to step down, the British bombed the palace for 38 minutes, he fled, war over. Some meetings I've been in have lasted longer.
The average cumulus cloud weighs around 1.1 million pounds. It floats because that weight is spread across trillions of tiny water droplets suspended in rising warm air. Physics is unreal.
Launched in 1977, it's now over 15 billion miles away. Its signal takes more than 22 hours to reach Earth, and it's running on less power than a refrigerator lightbulb. We're still listening.
Two hearts pump blood to the gills and the third pumps it to the rest of the body. The main heart actually stops beating when they swim, which is why they prefer crawling. Evolution is wild.
Pando, a grove of about 47,000 quaking aspen trees, shares one root system and is genetically identical. It covers 106 acres and weighs ~6,000 tons. It's considered one of the oldest and heaviest living organisms on Earth.
Every video makes you think about something completely differently. This one about traffic is a classic.
Small communities > massive platforms. We're going back to forums and group chats and honestly it feels healthier than the algorithmic feed era.
I used to think naps were for lazy people. Now I understand they're a strategic advantage. What opinion of yours did a total 180?
I was 28 before I learned you're supposed to peel a banana from the bottom. What basic life skill took you way too long to figure out?