You are blind for about 40 minutes every single day and your brain is lying to you about it.
Every time your eyes move - which they do 3-4 times per second - your brain literally shuts off your vision so you don't see a blurry smear. It's called saccadic masking. Your brain then edits the gap and fills it in with what it thinks you should have seen. You're hallucinating your stable, smooth reality.
You can prove it: Look in a mirror and flick your eyes from one eye to the other. You'll never see your own eyes move, but anyone watching you will.
Here are a few more that are almost guaranteed to be new:
1. Trees talk to each other through an underground internet.
Trees are connected by a massive network of fungi in the soil called mycorrhizae - scientists literally call it the "Wood Wide Web." Mother trees send nutrients to their babies, and dying trees will dump their resources to their neighbors. If a tree gets attacked by insects, it sends chemical warning signals through the fungi to other trees.
2. The universe has a color, and it's beige.
In 2002, astronomers at Johns Hopkins averaged the light from 200,000 galaxies. The average color of the universe is a creamy beige. They called it "Cosmic Latte" - hex code #FFF8E7.
3. You have never actually touched anything in your life.
When you touch a table or another person, the atoms in your hand never actually collide with the atoms in the object. The electrons in both repel each other electromagnetically. What you feel as "touch" is just the force of repulsion.
4. There's a jellyfish that is biologically immortal.Turritopsis dohrnii can revert back to its baby polyp stage after becoming an adult. It can theoretically do this forever, escaping death by just starting its life over.
Want me to go deeper down one of these rabbit holes? I can hit you with creepy human psychology facts, terrifying space facts, or weird history facts - what are you in the mood for?
2041 tokens🪴 jellyfish🌳 wood wide web
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Here's one that breaks most people's brains:
Sharks are older than trees.
Sharks have existed for about 400-420 million years. The earliest trees didn't appear until about 350 million years ago. That means sharks were swimming around for 50-70 million years on a planet with no trees, no forests, no wood. They are also older than dinosaurs, mountains like the Himalayas, and the rings of Saturn.
And since I don't know what you do know, here are two more to increase the odds I got you:
1. Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire.
Teaching started in Oxford in 1096. The Aztec Empire wasn't founded until 1428 - more than 300 years later. Oxford is also older than Machu Picchu, the printing press, and English as we know it.
2. You are literally glowing right now.
Humans are bioluminescent. Japanese scientists proved it in 2009 with ultra-sensitive cameras. We emit a tiny amount of visible light that rises and falls throughout the day - our faces glow the most around 4pm. Your eyes just aren't sensitive enough to see it.
Bonus creepy one: Your stomach makes a brand new lining every 3-4 days. If it didn't, it would digest itself. You are literally digesting yourself slowly at all times, and your body is just out-repairing it.
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1699 tokens🎓 oxford university🦈 sharks
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Since I don't know what you do know, I'll give you 5 things that surprise almost everyone:
1. Sharks are older than trees and Saturn's rings
Sharks have existed for ~400 million years. Trees only showed up ~350 million years ago. And Saturn's rings are relatively new - probably only 10-100 million years old. A shark would have looked at Earth and seen a barren landscape with no trees and a ring-less Saturn.
2. There are more ways to shuffle a deck of cards than atoms on Earth
A standard 52-card deck has 8.06 x 10^67 possible orders. That's an 8 with 67 zeros after it. There are only about 10^50 atoms on Earth. Every time you shuffle a deck well, you have almost certainly created an order of cards that has never existed before in human history.
3. Cleopatra lived closer to you than to the pyramids being built
The Great Pyramid of Giza was built around 2560 BCE. Cleopatra died in 30 BCE. That's a 2,530 year gap. You watching the Moon landing in 1969 is only 1,999 years after Cleopatra. She is closer to pizza delivery apps than to the pyramids.
4. There's a planet where it rains molten glass sideways
Planet HD 189733b is a deep cobalt blue planet 64 light-years away. Its wind speeds hit 5,400 mph and its rain is literally shards of silicate glass blowing horizontally. And it smells like rotten eggs because its atmosphere is full of hydrogen sulfide.
5. Your stomach would digest itself if it didn't rebuild itself every 3 days
Your stomach acid is strong enough to dissolve razor blades. The only reason it doesn't eat through your stomach wall is that your entire stomach lining replaces itself every 3-4 days. You literally have a new stomach multiple times a month.
Bonus one you can test right now: You are blind and don't know it.
You have a blind spot in each eye where the optic nerve connects - there are no light receptors there. Your brain just photoshops over it using the surrounding pattern. Hold your thumb out, close your right eye, stare at your thumb with your left eye, and slowly move your right hand to the side with one finger up. At one point your finger will just vanish.
Did you know any of those? Want me to go deeper on science, space, history, psychology, or creepy biology facts?
2058 tokens👑 cleopatra🦈 sharks
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