'What Is A Scientific Fact That Absolutely Blows Your Mind?': People Share 35 Incredible Facts About Our World

When you dream, one portion of your brain creates the story, while another part witnesses the events and is really shocked by the plot twists.

I spent some time with Gene Cernan, the Apollo 17 astronaut who was the last guy to walk on the Moon. He told me two things that I couldn’t stop telling people:

1. the Earth is round in space like a ball, not flat looking like the Moon is to us. He said while looking up from the lunar surface, the Earth just hung there, like a grapefruit that he could almost grab if he just jumped high enough. Could see the weather change too.

2. because of the smaller size of the Moon, not only is it’s curve very visible, the apparent horizon is also much closer so he said there were moments where if he ran too fast or jumped too high he felt like he was going to fall off.

Trees can communicate and cooperate using a network of underground mycelium. They can store excess energy in it for later use, can trade different nutrients with neighbors so their needs are met, take care of their young when they're unwell, and even warn others of a spreading disease or parasite.

The time period in which dinosaurs lived is so vast, there were dinosaur fossils when dinosaurs were still alive.

Whales will grow up singing a specific song based on where they were born, but they’ll learn verses of other songs from whales they encounter throughout their lives!

Hippos sweat sunscreen. They produce "sweat" made of one red and one orange pigment. The red pigment contains an antibiotic, while the orange absorbs UV rays.

Some forms of anaesthesia don’t numb you to pain- they make you forget that you felt it.

The knowledge that the atoms of our bodies contain elements only forged in the center of stars, and that such stars upon death blow the elements via supernova across the universe and into our very existence. We are made of star dust.

I recently read about the Split-Brain experiments. There is a procedure for severe epilepsy that involves cutting the connecting nerves of the two brain hemispheres, resulting in the two hemispheres being unable to communicate with each other. The experiment shows that both halves can answer questions independently of each other, have seperate opinions/preferences, form memories independantly. Basically suggesting that there are two minds in the brain. That just blows my mind(s).

Caterpillars basically dissolve into liquid in the cocoon. The only thing left are the so called ‘imaginal discs’, groups of cells that contain all the information and the mechanism to turn that soup into the various body parts of a butterfly (the same applies for other insects).

If the entirety of the Earth’s history were compressed down to a single day, humans of any sort wouldn’t appear until the last second before midnight.

That there is a species of jellyfish called Turritopsis dohrnii, that can become young again when damaged or stressed. So they become young again. So they are immortal. Just an addition, the tardigrades. They can survive the vacuum of space.

A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.

The size of animals still blows my mind. You can read about how a manta ray is 23 feet long and 3 tons but it doesn’t really hit you until you realize that’s heavier than most cars.

When you lose weight it leaves on your breath.

So when people lose 100 lbs/ 50 kg, they have exhaled that much carbon.

An object has every color except the one you think it has, because its the only color that doesn't get absorbed.

If some sort of super-advanced alien species on a planet 80 million light years away from Earth built a high-tech telescope that let them see objects on the Earth's surface, they would be seeing dinosaurs right now.

Sharks are older than trees, also, trees almost destroyed all land life on earth as there use to be nothing that could decompose them, so dead trees covered the ground and killed all other vegetation. Only once fungus evolved did trees start decomposing.

If you put 1 of every animal in a bag and then pick one out you have a 1/5 chance in picking a beetle.

Voyager 1 has been traveling >30,000 mph for 43 years and it's only 20 light hours away.