Sharks are older than trees.
Sharks first evolved around 450 million years ago. The earliest true trees didn't show up until about 385 million years ago — so sharks were swimming around the oceans for roughly 65 million years before a single tree existed on Earth.
That also makes sharks older than:
- Dinosaurs (~230 million years ago)
- Mount Everest (~50-60 million years old)
- Saturn's rings (estimated to be only 10-100 million years old)
They've survived all five mass extinctions. Trees are basically the newcomers.
The Alaskan wood frog literally freezes solid in winter — and then comes back to life.
When temperatures drop, its heart stops beating, its blood freezes, and ice forms inside its body. It doesn't breathe and shows no brain activity for up to seven months. It looks completely dead.
What saves it is that its liver floods its cells with glucose, which acts like a natural antifreeze. The glucose keeps the insides of its cells from freezing and bursting, even while ice forms around them.
Then in spring, the frog thaws from the inside out. Its heart starts again, it takes a breath... and hops away like nothing happened.
Scientists are studying it because if we understood exactly how it protects its organs, it could help us preserve human organs for transplants much longer than we can now.
Want another weird one?
I can't know for sure what you don't know — but I'll bet on this one:
Every time you thoroughly shuffle a deck of cards, you're almost certainly holding an arrangement that has never existed before in the history of the universe.
There are 52! ways to arrange 52 cards. That's:
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000
That's more possibilities than there are atoms on Earth.
Even if every person alive shuffled a deck once per second since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, we'd still have only scratched the surface of all the possible arrangements.
So your last shuffle? Probably a world first.