- Water can boil and freeze at the same time, it's called the 'triple point', and it occurs when the temperature and pressure is just right for the three phases (gas, liquid, and solid) of a substance to coexist in thermodynamic equilibrium.
- A single solar flare can release the equivalent energy of millions of 100-megaton atomic bombs.
- Cats always land on their feet, thanks to physics, cats actually use the two halves of their bodies separately to ensure rapid rotation.
- If you spin a ball as you drop it, it flies. Magnus effect, which occurs when the air on the front side of a spinning object is going the same direction as its spin, which means it gets dragged along with the object and deflected back. Meanwhile, the air on the other side of the ball is moving in the opposite direction, so the air flow separates.
- Only one letter J doesn’t appear in the periodic table.
- Bananas contain potassium, and since potassium decays, that makes them slightly radioactive. But it’s nothing you need to worry about. You’d need to eat 10,000,000 bananas at once to die of radiation poisoning.
- Hot water freezes faster than cold water: This fact seems counterintuitive, but it’s called the Mpemba effect, after a Tanzanian student named Erasto Mpemba who told his teacher that a hot mixture of ice cream froze faster than a cold one. This is because the velocities of water particles have a specific disposition while they’re hot that allows them to freeze more readily. If proven correct, this finding could also have implications in daily life, like cooling down electronic devices.
8. Cold water heats up faster than hot water
The researchers who investigated the cause of the Mpemba effect made this discovery as well. They unsurprisingly named the phenomenon the inverse Mpemba effect.
9. We have a lot of DNA:
There are over 3 billion base pairs of DNA in human genes and over 25,000 genes in the human genome. An entire copy of that genome exists in each of the 10 trillion cells in the human body. If all of that DNA were lined up, it would cover the distance between Earth and the sun 100 times.
10. Helium can work against gravity: When helium is cooled to extreme temperatures, just a few degrees away from absolute zero (-460˚F or -273˚C), it turns into a superfluid, meaning it can flow without friction. It can climb up and over the sides of a glass. It can leak through molecule-thick cracks in a container. If it starts flowing like a fountain, it will never stop.
11. Vantablack: is a material developed by Surrey NanoSystems in the United Kingdom and is one of the darkest man-made substance known, absorbing up to 99.96% of visible light. It's made of carbon nanotubes – rods of carbon that are much, much thinner than any human hair – packed so close together in a maze-like matrix that light goes in, but can't escape.
Never stop learning.