SHANGRALA'S

AMAZING SCIENCE FACTS 2!

Even if you don't consider yourself a scientifically-minded person, you'll enjoy reading about these unbelievable or even bizarre scientific facts. After all, scientists always have plenty of stuff to teach us, and sometimes, it just happens to be about interesting scary things we never knew before!     Here Are More Little-Known Science Facts. Enjoy! :)       The only reason malaria isn't endemic in the USA anymore is mosquito control. Not any new meds or anything like that. We used to have summer malaria epidemics all the way up into the New England states, AS WELL AS Yellow Fever, which is a hemorrhagic fever like Lassa and Ebola. The thing keeping them out is mosquito control. Which relies on all of us.       Scars aren't regular skin; they are actively maintained by the body. A fully formed scar is made of tough, dense bundles of collagen and other connective tissue, with no sweat glands or hair follicles. This messy mix of hardened tissue isn't like other skin. There are fewer cells to be renewed and replaced.       Those collagen molecules are there forever, creating a tough, fibrous tissue that keeps scars on our bodies for years, decades, or even a lifetime. Sometimes our bodies overdo it on collagen production, resulting in large or raised scars.       It would take you about two hours to walk out of our breathable atmosphere if you could walk straight up.       Polar bears are one of the rare animals that will actively hunt people. Not chase, *hunt*. They can smell prey up to 20 miles away! However, polar bear attacks on people don't happen very often, but when they do, the results are usually deadly. What makes polar bears different is that many of these attacks are not about defense they're about food. In fact, polar bears are one of the few animals on Earth that may actually see humans as prey.       EDIT: As a bonus legal fact, in Longyearbyen, Norway, you are required by law to own a large-caliber rifle to defend yourself against polar bears.       Tattoos only work because our immune systems are trying to protect us from the ink free floating in our blood stream, so it sends cells that just trap the ink there as best they can. Slowly, particles of the ink will rearrange within or escape through their barriers, which is why tattoos fade and/or get fuzzy over time. Also sunburns can cause tattoos to fade because it forces the body to send extra immune cells and fluids to the area, which breaks down or washes away ink particles at a faster rate. Not necessarily super scary outside of thinking about how our bodies are trying to protect us and we're just like 'ooooh cool!' and doing it anyways.       Every fossil we have likely represents only less than 1% of every species that lived on Earth. Most species are completely lost to time with no proof they ever existed.       To date, microplastics have been found in over 1,300 species, including throughout the human body. Nano and microplastics can accumulate in various human organs, including the brain, liver, and kidneys, potentially leading to health issues such as inflammation, oxidative stress, and disruptions in cellular functions. Research suggests that these particles may also be linked to conditions like cancer and reproductive problems.       A Sneeze can, if you sneeze hard enough, pop a hole in the tube that carries your cerebrospinal fluid down your spine. You get a spinal headache, like you can get after an epidural or spinal draw, except nobody poked a hole in your spinal fluid system with a needle, you just sneezed and tore a hole.       This can happen at any time. Your spinal fluid will be leaking out the hole into your body and you won't know. You'll get debilitating headaches from standing or sitting up because your brain isn't floating on enough fluid, but they'll go away if you lie down. It takes forever to diagnose and then most of the time they'll just wait to see if it heals on its own. (They can do a blood patch, which they do after an epidural or a spinal, except they don't know where the hole is so they don't know where to send the patch.)       AND - What could happen to you if you hold in a sneeze? Ruptured blood vessels; damage to eardrums; sinus problems; increased pressure inside your eyes; ruptured blood vessels. There aren't any reported cases of death due to holding in a sneeze. (Can Holding in a Sneeze Hurt You?, Cleveland Clinic 2024)       Most meds are never tested on women and when they are, the results are not segregated as such (so if the results are different, it's not visible) and the dosages are made for the male body.       As a result, meds can be more or less effective or with higher negative effects for women. Some meds could have been flaged as infective but could have been great on a woman's body, etc. (Also not even talking about the effect of hormones and hormonal fluctuations on the results). A recent study, for example, noted that beta blockers prescribed after heart attacks aren't effective on women.       A rogue planet is a planetary mass object that is not gravitationally bound to any star, and while there are no confirmed rogue planets within our solar system, they may originate from other systems and could potentially pass through. The Milky Way is estimated to contain billions to trillions of rogue planets, but the odds of one entering our solar system are extremely low, about one in a trillion.       Yellowstone is a supervolcanic caldera formed by three massive eruptions, with the most recent occurring about 640,000 years ago. It is located primarily within Yellowstone National Park and spans parts of Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana.       It could blow apart much of the American West, bury the US under ash, destroy crops and infrastructure, darken the skies, cool the planet, and cause worldwide famine if it erupts at full force. Given that supervolcanoes like this blow every 600,000 years or so, there's no telling how close we are for the next one. (This was from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson).       Some people know this, but it's not common knowledge: 'alcohol causes cancer'. The World Health Organization has it in the same category as tobacco and asbestos. I think technically it's not the alcohol itself that causes cancer, but it's the substance that our bodies turn alcohol into, that does it. The way I understood it is that that stuff damages DNA, which means that when the cells rebuild, they can become cancerous.       WHAT IF - In the unlikely event that we're in a 'false vacuum', at any time a 'real vacuum' could spontaneously form somewhere in the universe and begin expanding at the speed of light until it reaches us?       Everything would end instantaneously. No warning, no time to even realize what's happening, just *Poof*.       Just as investigators use trace amounts of genetic material (like DNA) left at a crime scene to help identify suspects, scientists are now using environmental DNA (eDNA) to discover which species have been in an ecosystem.       Like terrestrial organisms, marine species constantly shed genetic material - hair, skin cells, scales, waste products, even dead tissue - into the environment. This is called aquatic eDNA. In the ocean, scientists collect and analyze water samples, which contain biomolecules of all the organisms that live in the area. Using a complex process called metabarcoding, scientists can analyze specific genetic sequences to identify the presence of multiple species - a genetic fingerprint/snapshot of the ecosystem, ranging from microbes to whales. Source 1, Source 2

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