Science is excellent, perfect, and intuitive, right? In the end, science just describes the reality we live in, yet sometimes this reality can be tricky to understand. Today I will show you some of the most counterintuitive science facts, and I will try to blow your mind.
- We all know what bacteria is, right? Those living organisms that are so small that we need microscopes to see them, those that give us disease, so we wash our hands to eliminate them. Well, when something is as tiny as a bacteria, it is easy to forget how much bacteria is in the world. In fact, bacteria make up 13% of the world’s mass. Just to give you an idea of how much this is, humans only make up one ten-thousandth of the world’s mass.
- Another fact that will blow your mind has to deal with the weight of a cloud. The fact is that if most of us were to guess the weight of a cloud, we would guess a relatively low number. This happens because they seem like they are made of cotton, or just air, which are extremely light. However, what we fail to realize is first how big clouds are, and second, the fact that clouds are made of water. In reality, a medium sized cloud would weigh 500000 kilograms.
- For this fact, let’s think for a second about the Moon, that celestial object in the sky, that enormous ball of mass capable of controlling the tides, and the object that has been the interest of scientists for hundreds of years. Well, in fact, the Moon is not as enormous as we think it is, since just Australia is wider than the Moon. Australia is 400 kilometers wide, while the Moon’s diameter barely reaches 3400km.
- We all have once heard about the wonders of genetics, how we are a perfect mix of our parents’ genes, while they are an ideal mix of their parent’s genes. Genes define most of us, from what we look like to our character. But did you know that a tomato has almost double the genes of a human? Humans have about 20000 genes, while tomatoes have 35000. Truly amazing!
- Finally, let’s talk about the sun, another celestial object that has powered life on Earth for thousands of millions of years. But did you know that most of the water in the world is older than the sun? This is because the water on Earth comes from the cloud of gas that originated from the sun. This way, water on Earth is, by definition, older than the sun.
