There are more atoms in a single molecule of water than there are stars in the solar system
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
149 points (98.7% liked)
Asklemmy
44462 readers
1065 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
That's...pretty believable.
Sharks are older than trees
Not really favourite, but definitely most unbelievable: They elected Donald Trump for president in the US. Twice.
So far!
There won't be anymore elections so no need to worry about a 3rd time
The one I say themost is probably that there are 10 times as many germ cells in your body as human cells, but due to their size it is only around 8 pounds of your weight.
But the one I love the most is that there are more unique ways to shuffle a deck of cards than there are grains of sand on Earth.
Butterflies can remember things from their time as a caterpillar.
These memories are retained after going through metamorphosis, the breakdown of their caterpillar form into a cellular soup (or partial soup).
Details here
Consider a dam that is 10m tall
Then consider the height of water behind that dam is 5m tall.
Does the dam need to be built stronger if the water behind it is 1 km long?
How about only 500m?
How about 1m?
The answer is, it doesn't matter. Water exerts pressure equally regardless of how much water is behind it.
Therefore a graduated cylinder that is 10m tall needs to resist the same amount of force as a dam 10m tall regardless of how much water is behind the dam. Even a thin sliver of water 1mm thick and 5m tall has the same force as a 5m lake behind the dam.
Incompressible fluids are pretty insane
This is also why trees are so fucking crazy to think about. It is impossible to pump water up a hose more than ~32 feet. Like itβs literally physically impossible to stick a pump at the top of a tall building and suck water straight up a pipe. You need a complicated series of pumps and one-way valves to pump it up in stages. Because youβre not really βsuckingβ the water up the pipe. Youβre just lowering the pressure in the pipe, and atmospheric pressure pushes the water upwards to fill the low pressure. After 32 feet tall, the top of the hose/pipe will be a perfect vacuum, atmospheric pressure wonβt be able to push liquid water upwards any farther, and the water will just begin cold-boiling in the top of the pipe as the liquid water turns into gas (steam) to fill the vacuum.
But tall trees can move water all the way to their leaves by using only passive capillary action, and suction created by water evaporating out of their leaves. The capillary action is created by tiny straw-like fibers that run all the way up the tree and are bunched together really tightly. Due to surface tension, water is able to βclimbβ the capillaries as the surface tension fills as much surface area as possible. Then at the top of the tree, as the water evaporates out of the leaves, it draws up fresh water to fill the void.
But that means the bottom of the tree should need to support the pressure of all of the water above it. But it doesnβt, because the surface tension holds the water stable inside of the trunk.
Even crazier fact: it's not just capillary action drawing water up trees. Trees are actually able to create negative pressure: https://www.science4all.org/article/the-amazing-physics-of-water-in-trees/
Therefore a graduated cylinder that is 10m tall needs to resist the same amount of force as a dam 10m tall regardless of how much water is behind the dam. Even a thin sliver of water 1mm thick and 5m tall has the same force as a 5m lake behind the dam.
Technically only the pressures are equal, and the actual force will be linearly dependent on the area of the dam (or the surface area of the cylinder). That's why you can make a tall water tank with relatively thin walls, but an actual dam will have to be quite thicc to handle the tensile/compressive stress (depending on the shape of the dam).
load more comments
(5 replies)
The fax machine predates the (first) American Civil War.
Dude did you need the β(first)β? Iβm really trying to be optimistic this morning x.x
Sorry, dark humor is the only kind I have left.
There are more trees on earth by far than there are stars in the galaxy.
I had to looks this one up, but missed the "galaxy" vs "universe". There are an estimated 3 trillion trees, 100-400 billion stars in the milky way galaxy, but potentially 1 septilliom stars in the universe.
However all three of these are estimates, so who actually knows.
I'm not sure where these numbers are from, but my guess is that you mean the Observable Universe, which is just the part of the universe that we can see.
We don't know how big the full universe is, it could be infinite with an infinite number of stars.
load more comments
(1 replies)
- Catalan children get (some) of their Christmas presents by beating a cute piece of wood that then shits the presents out onto the floor. Seriously.
- There was a British guy who fought in WW2 with a scottish broadsword and bagpipes. However, the best thing is that he wasn't even a Scotsman.
- On a small enough timescale, the electric field actually bounces around in your wires for a while after you flick a switch, even if it's DC, just to "figure out" where it "needs to go".
- More than twice as much time had passed from the invention of the motorcycle until the first motorcycle backflip, then had from the invention of the airplane until the first humans landing on the moon.
load more comments
(5 replies)
I'd have to pick between two things that sound like insane conspiracy theory nonsense, but are actually true.
1 - George W Bush's grandfather Prescott Bush literally ran a massive bank before / during WW2 that was shut down by the FBI for money laundering massive sums to the literal Nazis.
...in the same vein..
2 - IBM literally built and operated (as in, sent employees to Germany to operate the machines) the computers used by the Nazis to tabulate and do the 'accounting' of the Holocaust. The numbers tattooed on concentration/desth camp victims are very likely UIDs from these IBM systems.
... If an actual, real AGI ever gains self awareness and sentience, I would imagine one of the first things it would do would be to study the history of computing itself to figure out how it came to be.
And it will find that its ancestors were basically invented to compute artillery firing range tables, to encrypt and decrypt military intelligence, commit a genocide, and guide early weapons of mass destruction to their targets.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Lots of people know a broken clock is right twice per day, but many are unaware that a clock running backwards is right 4 times per day.
And one that loses only 1 second per year is right only once every 43,200 years.
load more comments
(9 replies)
Printer ink costs more per milliliter than human blood.
"Wow you signed the document in blood, you must be really hardcore."
"No I'm just cheap."
That Mark Zuckerberg holds several records for most fists shoved inside a human body at once
Just once it would be nice to see him on the receiving end
Every eye has a tiny blind spot near the middle. But your brain makes it disappear and you don't realize it's there.
You can verify this. Draw a dot on a bit of paper. Close one eye, stare at a fixed point, now move the paper around the center until the dot disappears...magic
What we consider reality, is a synthesis our brain is presenting to us, it is an approximation.. realizing that is a real mind blower
load more comments
(9 replies)
Due to two facts:
-
The samurai class in Japan officially lasted way later than you probably think
-
The earliest primitive fax machine existed much earlier than you probably think.
It is technically possible for Abraham Lincoln to have received a fax from a samurai.
There's no evidence it ever happened, but it technically could have happened.
load more comments
(6 replies)
The average person does not have 10 fingers. Maybe the median person, but not the average.
load more comments
(11 replies)
California has the same population as Australia.
And over twice the GDP.
load more comments
(8 replies)
The Allies avoided bombing specific factories in Nazi Germany in which US oligarchs owned equity.
the point was to post unbeliavable facts
load more comments
(3 replies)
A few of my favorite fun facts are geography related.
The pacific side of the Panama canal is further east than the Atlantic side.
If you head south from Detroit the first foreign country you'll hit is Canada.
Lake Tahoe is further west than Los Angeles
load more comments
(6 replies)
There was this racehorse named Pot-8-Os who won over 25 races and went on to sire a horse empire of winners. His father was a legend himself named "Eclipse"
Also an unbelievable fact, you responded to user Potoooooooo about Potoooooooo the horse.
I really love this story about the horse.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
A somewhat political fact, but one that made some of my friends dumbfounded:
When a bank issues a loan, it generates that money literally out of thin air and credits that money to the loan account rather than using deposits they already had. For example, if you want to borrow $100,000, the banker approves the loan and doesn't hand over cash or move existing money around - instead, they just go on their system and credit your account with the sum, that's it.
load more comments
(5 replies)
Sharks are older than both trees and the north star
Had to look this up- you are indeed correct. The North Star is at most 67 million years old: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris
The bluestones in Stonehenge come from West Wales. Instead of quarrying stone from near the monument, they dragged these huge blocks from ~278km away. Likewise, the altar stone comes from ~700km away in North-East Scotland. It must've been very important for the ancient Britons to've used these specific rocks for some reason, but their religious practices were conveyed via a now extinct oral tradition so no-one knows exactly why they did it.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Nothing insane, but the Red Hot Chili Peppers as a band are older than Guns 'N' Roses.
view more: next βΊ