Life is full of secrets. None, so more than science. Science is full of secrets that we’re just beginning to explore. Science holds secrets from long past, secrets of diseases, under the ocean, and outer space; just to name a few.
A few obscure facts or secrets. Pound for pound a human being produces more heat than the sun. The sun emits so much heat because of its size. Glad we aren’t that big. Can you imagine our AC bill!!? Speaking of the sun. The sun could hold about 1,300,000 Earths. Don’t take your scale to the sun!! You’d weigh about 2 tons there.
Adult electric eels are blind. To find food they give off a small electrical discharge. Then they produce an electric field of up to 650 volts to stun or kill. Yikes! The cod produces an amazing number of eggs. If all the eggs laid by a single cod develop into adults the ocean would become a bit crowded. A 21 pound cod can lay up to 9,000,000 eggs in one spawning period.
We all like to invent little ways of doing things. Most never obtain a patent on our marvelous ideas. Thomas Alva Edison kept himself busy. He obtained 1,300 patents on his inventions. In one 4 year time slot he averaged one patent about every 5 days. Did he ever sleep?
For the gardener. Did you know most roses are not red? Until the 19th century roses were either white or pink. In 1832 a sweetly scented China rose was crossed with a deep-red hybrid flower to bestow upon us the first red rose. If you are a gardener you know some seeds last for years, while others have a much shorter lifespan. However! The seeds of an oriental lotus more than a thousand years old were found in a Manchurian bog. The seed were planted and produced a beautiful pure flower symbolizing attaining enlightenment.
Snow is called the “poor man’s fertilizer” because it traps ammonia from the air and soaks it into the earth, helps prevent nitrogen from escaping the soil and contains a little nitric acid. What with the sun, ammonia, nitrogen and nitric acid it all provides nutrition for the soil. Nice to know you’ll be ahead of the game for spring work.
Is there such a thing as a human lightning rod? Most of us would be killed if we were hit by lightning. But a Virginia park ranger survived seven bolts of lightning over a period of 35 years. It wasn’t all good news. He did suffer burns and some loss of hearing.
By weight bread could be considered to be worth more than gold. A pound or 16 oz of bread is measured by avoirdupois weight which measures 16 ounces to a pound. Gold however, is measured by troy weight, which measures 12 oz to a pound. Therefore, a pound of bread is heavier by 4 ounces.
“All the gold in California Is in the bank in the middle of Beverly Hills In somebody else’s name.” So if you’re dreamin’ about California.” We’ve all dreamt of havin our share of the gold. And with all the gold rushes we have witnessed throughout history across the country or the world, we must figure that all the gold has been discovered. Not a chance. Since the beginning of history, the entire world’s production would probably fill an American football field of 300 feet x 160 feet to only a depth of 2.6 feet. There’s gold in them there hills!
Remember Mount St. Helens May 18, 1980? At 8:32 a.m. PDT Mount St. Helens in Washington suffered a massive eruption, killing 57 people and devastating some 210 square miles of wilderness. If you thought that was big. The island of Krakatoa in the East Indies exploded in 1883. The explosion was heard 3,000 miles away. Thought that was big? About 3,700 years ago the island of Thera blew up in the Mediterranean. The eruption darkened the entire and sea and caused heavy floods, earthquakes and rains of ash. The Thera explosion is estimated to have been 4 times the size of Krakatoa’s explosion. And we thought the ash from Mount St. Helens was bad.
We love color. The colors of the rainbow, the blue of the sky, the green grass, but did you know stars are different colors? The temperature determines the color of stars. The hottest stars are either white or blue-white and the cooler stars are reddish.
Some of us believe we are as old as dirt. Wonder how old dirt is though? “Most of the dirt you see today is from the past two million years,” according to Milan Pavich. The oldest sedimentary rocks are about 3.9 billion years old—they’re in Greenland—and at one time, they were dirt. That’s pretty close to the time the Earth formed.” About two million years ago, the planet underwent two major changes that drove the formation of new dirt. Global cooling and drying enlarged the deserts, and dust storms redistributed that dirt around the globe. Boy now we know how really old we are!
Other than the really old of us who are as old as dirt, the oldest living thing is a bristlecone pine growing in Nevada. It was found to be 4,900 years old at the time of testing. It was just a few centuries old before the 1st Egyptian pyramid was built.
Have you ever wondered why a flame has different colors? The colors of a flame are caused by bits of wax molecules that didn’t get completely reacted. These glow a certain color when they get to be a certain temperature. Since different parts of the flame have different temperatures, these bits of wax molecules make those areas of the flame glow with different colors.
So how do candles with different colored flames work? There are special types of candles that have flames of different colors. These candles are made by adding certain chemicals to the wax. When they get hot enough, these chemicals glow a particular color like red, green, purple, or blue.
Have you found yourself in a sticky situation? How strong can glue be? A super strong glue from 3M was tested to see how much weight it could hold. The ends of two metal rods were glued together using 3M glue called Scotch-Weld Instant Adhesive. The rods were used to lift and hold up a forklift weighing 17,857pounds (over 8 tons) for one hour! The rods did not come apart. Better not glue your fingers or lips together with this!
So what about the glue on tape? Tape is made from a plastic strip with a special kind of glue sprayed onto it. This glue is not as liquidy as regular glue but works with positive and negative charges.
Then they found out bad glue can be good. The famous removable sticky note is a perfect example. On a sticky note, the glue is sticky enough to make the note stay where you put it but not so sticky that it is hard to pick up. The special glue used for sticky notes forms tiny little balls called microspheres. They are the right size, number, and stickiness to make the note stick well enough but not too well.
Now let’s get to the good stuff. Why does ice cream float in an ice cream soda? Ice cream has a lot of fat which floats, and ice crystals which float, and a lot of air which definitely floats. Those ingredients help make ice cream a great floater! So offs to the root beer float.
And why does some ice cream seem creamier than others? It’s the fat. The milk fat in ice cream is mostly what gives ice cream that creamy rich taste and feeling in your mouth. The creamiest ice creams have about 16% fat and the least creamy have about 10% fat. It has been rumored that ice cream can be the cure all for what ails you. At least that is what ice cream lovers accept as true. Now is the time to try your own experiment!!