Science — Page 7
Fascinating scientific discoveries
172 facts
Sunlight takes about eight minutes to reach the Earth.
Travelling at the speed of light, photons cover the one hundred and fifty million kilometres separating the Sun from…
The human body contains enough carbon to make nine thousand pencils.
Carbon is one of the most abundant elements in our organism and, if extracted and processed, the amount present in an…
If you fold a piece of paper forty-two times, it reaches the Moon.
The thickness of the paper doubles with each fold. Due to exponential growth, after forty-two theoretical folds, the…
Water can form at least fifteen different phases of ice.
Under different extreme combinations of pressure and temperature, water molecules organise into distinct crystalline…
The Sun does not rotate like a solid body and spins faster at the equator.
Being a ball of plasma, the Sun undergoes differential rotation, taking about twenty-five days to complete a rotation…
Space has a distinct smell of seared steak and hot metal.
Astronauts returning from spacewalks report that their suits retain the smell of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons…
On Jupiter and Saturn, it rains diamonds from the sky.
Lightning turns methane into soot that, as it falls, is hardened by extreme pressure until it turns into graphite and…
If you remove the empty space from atoms, the entire human race would fit inside an apple.
Atoms are composed of ninety-nine point nine nine percent empty space. If you compressed all the solid matter of the…
Water can remain liquid well below freezing in a state called supercooling.
If the water is very pure and lacks crystallisation nuclei where ice can start to form, it can cool to minus forty…
On the exoplanet HD 189733b, it rains molten glass sideways.
The atmosphere of this giant planet is swept by winds of eight thousand kilometres per hour, pushing condensed…
The Milky Way is moving through space at two million kilometres per hour.
Our galaxy is pulled by the gravity of massive structures like the Great Attractor, travelling at a mind-boggling…
A teaspoon of water contains more molecules than drops of water in the ocean.
Due to the tiny size of H2O molecules, a simple teaspoon contains about one and a half sextillion molecules, a number…
An average-sized cloud can weigh over 500,000 kilograms.
Despite looking light and fluffy, clouds are made of millions of tiny water droplets. Their density is very low and…
Under certain conditions, hot water freezes faster than cold water.
This paradox is known as the Mpemba effect. Although the physics behind the phenomenon is still debated, factors like…
Francium is so unstable that there is likely less than 30 grams of it in the Earth's crust at any given moment.
The most stable isotope of francium has a half-life of only 22 minutes. It rapidly decays into other elements…
Window glass is not a very viscous liquid, it is an amorphous solid.
The myth that glass flows over the centuries comes from old windows that are thicker at the bottom. This happened…
The atom is mostly empty space, if we removed that space all of humanity would fit in a sugar cube.
The nucleus of an atom is incredibly dense, but tiny compared to the electron cloud. If we compressed all the empty…
An average cumulus cloud weighs about five hundred tons of water.
Although they seem light and fluffy, clouds contain millions of water droplets. The density of water is high, and the…
In the laboratory, scientists have managed to slow light to just 17 metres per second.
Using a Bose-Einstein condensate made of ultra-cooled sodium atoms, researchers at Harvard drastically reduced the…
If the Earth were compressed to become a black hole, it would be the size of a golf ball.
For an object to become a black hole, its mass must be compressed within the so-called Schwarzschild radius. In the…
Diamonds can burn like coal when exposed to high temperatures and oxygen.
Diamond is made of pure carbon, just like coal, and combusts at about 800 degrees Celsius in the presence of oxygen…
Glass is not a slow-moving liquid, but an amorphous solid.
A popular myth claims that glass flows over centuries, explaining why old windows are thicker at the bottom. In…
Sound cannot travel in the vacuum of space because there are no molecules to vibrate.
Sound is a mechanical wave that requires a material medium, such as air, water, or metal, to propagate. In the vacuum…
The Eiffel Tower can be fifteen centimeters taller during the summer.
This phenomenon is due to the thermal expansion of iron. When the temperature rises, the metal molecules agitate and…