The world is full of miracles that are so familiar to us that they seem self-evident. We are accustomed to the daily miracle of mobile communications, television, and a simple airplane in the sky.
But there are completely reliable facts that do not occur at every step and therefore seem incredible. Here are just ten of them.
10. A person’s finger can sense microscopic particles
Touch is our daily companion. Although vision delivers more than 95% of all information to consciousness, one always wants to touch a thing and even lick it. But it’s just amazing how sensitive our skin can be.
The finger pad seems to us a rather rough part of the body. It has a relatively thick skin, also covered with rough folds and grooves. Meanwhile, with your fingers you can feel a scratch or a speck of dust measuring just one thousandth of a millimeter on smooth glass. True, for this you have to gently drag your finger along the test surface.
It turns out that it is the grooves of the papillary pattern that allow you to feel such small details with your fingers. In this case, the grooves of the finger pattern act like small antennas, each of which independently “feels” the surface. There are many grooves, they are all of different shapes and, comparing the slightest differences in their signal, the brain makes an amazingly detailed picture.
9. Mammoths have long been our neighbors
Mammoths appeared much earlier than humans. But the last "shaggy elephants" became extinct only in the middle of the 10th century BC.
This happened a long time ago. But the famous complex of Egyptian pyramids was built over twenty thousand years ago. If we take into account that mammoths were found not only in Europe, but also in Asia and even in Africa, then it can be assumed that the Egyptian pharaohs could admire the handsome woolen, watching the construction of their tombs.
8. How many bacteria do we carry?
Usually we only think of such a suspicious neighborhood when we are ill. In fact, the human body is a complex symbiotic system. Millions and billions of tiny neighbors constantly live on us - and especially inside us. Mutually beneficial partnership provides microbes with a house and a table, they also allow us to be unpretentious in food and protect against dangerous occupation of our body by other dangerous residents.
How big is their number? If we consider microbes by the piece, then our guests are stably about 30 trillion microbes of 10 thousand different species. Despite the fact that they are tiny creatures, the total mass of microbes reaches two kilograms.
7. Can I get the same card layouts twice?
It turns out that despite the fact that there are only 52 cards in the standard deck, it will take billions of billions of years for all of humanity. The number of deck combinations represents a number with 67 zeros. And if all of humanity will be engaged in this tiresome work, we will need about 9 - and another twenty zeros after the "nine" - years. So, for the uniqueness of your distribution of cards you can not worry.
6. A number that is greater than the number of particles in the entire universe
Mathematicians like to juggle with numbers and terms that have no practical meaning for the uninitiated. Thus, integrals, complex calculus, and not very practical designations of very large quantities were invented.
To denote “a very large number,” the American mathematician Edward Casner, talking with his nephew, jokingly suggested calling “a unit with one hundred zeros” some funny term. They laughed, and proposed a new term "googol."
But this was not enough for the funny mathematicians, and the jokers at the same time suggested giving the name to a completely unrepresentable number, which can be described as "ten to the googol power". They called him "googolplex".
Both quantities are obviously larger than the number of elementary particles in the Universe known to us and are examples of mathematical oddities.
5. Americans read more books than eat hamburgers
The "system of public libraries" of the United States officially includes 66 thousand participants. According to McDonald’s Corporation reports, there are about 40 thousand restaurants of this brand operating all over the planet.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans visit libraries weekly. At the same time, approximately a third of readers took entertainment literature.
4. Koreans sweat odorless
It is very difficult for a European to find deodorants in South Korean stores. And all because Koreans almost never use them. Why?
It turns out that the intensity of the “underarm odor” is determined by the activity of the so-called “ABCC11 gene”. And in the inhabitants of Southeast Asia, the "active" gene of this sequence is found no more often than in one out of a thousand people. So trade in deodorants simply does not have commercial potential.
3. The population of Canada is less than the population of the US state of Florida
It would seem that such a large state, on the territory occupies almost a third of all North America. But the population is comparable to the population of Florida alone. According to the latest census, both the state and the state as a whole had approximately 40 million inhabitants.
However, censuses usually do not take into account the number of migrants, especially illegal ones.
2. Who has the longest neck?
Offhand, it seems like a giraffe. And if you count the number of vertebrae in the neck? The amazing thing: a giraffe, like a person, has only 7 vertebrae in the cervical spine. Occasionally, skeleton deviation occurs, in which the vertebrae may be 6 or 8.
In birds, the neck is "historically longer." A swan's cervical spine may consist of 22 to 25 vertebrae. But with a swan, everything is intuitive. And the sparrow? As many as 14 - and almost never see the neck.
With reptiles even more interesting. The crocodile’s neck is not even visible, and the cervical vertebrae are nine. Snakes and legless lizards have no neck at all, and the cervical spine in the skeleton does not stand out - just like fish.
1. There are only 2 escalators in Wyoming, but 32 islands
The population of the state is very small - about half a million people. Buildings are mainly one- and two-story, so escalators are a clear architectural excess.
However, for the sake of prestige and solidity, the administrations of the two banks arranged escalators in their buildings. Both competitor banks are located in the same city on neighboring streets.
But in the state there are as many as 32 islands, officially mapped and having their own geographical names. There is no access to the sea. The islands are formed by numerous seasonal spills and old riverbeds of numerous rivers.