No science junkies out there?

Well here are a few more, let me know what you think, post some cool science facts of your own.

“According to one estimate there could be as many as thirty million species of animals living in the sea, most still undiscovered.”

“Large areas of the North Sea floor are dragged clean by beam trawlers as many as seven times a year, a degree of disturbance that no ecosystem can withstand. At least 2/3rds of the species in the North Sea, by many estimates, are being overfished.”

“No one really knows, but there may be as many as a million types of protein in the human body...By the laws of probability proteins shouldn't exist...To make collagen (a type of protein) you need to arrange 1,055 amino acids in precisely the right sequence. The chances of a 1,055 – sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil. It just isn't going to happen. To grasp what a long shot its existence is, visualize a standard Las Vegas slot machine but broadened greatly – to about ninety feet, to be precise – to accommodate 1,055 spinning wheels instead of the usual three or four, and with twenty symbols on each wheel (one for each common amino acid). How long would you have to pull the handle before all 1,055 symbols came up in the right order? Effectively forever.”

“If you are in good health and averagely diligent about hygiene, you will have a herd of about one trillion bacteria grazing on your fleshy plains – about a hundred thousand of them on every square centimeter of skin.”

“Bacteria, never forget, got along for billions of years without us. We couldn't survive a day without them. They process our wastes and make them usable again; without their diligent munching nothing would rot. They purify our water and keep our soils productive.”

“Perhaps the most extraordinary survival yet found (of bacteria) was that of Streptococcus bacterium that was recovered from the sealed lens of a camera that had stood on the Moon for two years. In short, there are few environments in which bacteria aren't prepared to live.”

“Viruses prosper by hijacking the genetic material of a living cell and using it to produce more virus...They also have an unnerving capacity to burst upon the world in some new and startling form and then vanish again as quickly as they came.”

Here are some facts from "The Little Giant Book of Science Trivia" book by Glen Vecchione: (astronomy facts that is)


---A comet's tail can reach 93 million miles in length, but the total amount of vapor and dust it emits can fit into the trunk of a car.

---February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.

---If the sun were the size of the period at the end of this sentence, then the nearest star--Proxima Centauri--would be another period 10 miles away.

---Some astronomers believe that the earth's oceans were formed by water vapor from the tails of passing comets.

Originally posted by Monsterenergy791
---A comet's tail can reach 93 million miles in length, but the total amount of vapor and dust it emits can fit into the trunk of a car.

One could say the same thing about substance in a politician's speeches. *smirk*

Ok, here's one for ya, since I seem to be stuck on biology bits tonight... Dolphins and whales, recognized by many for having very complex and human like social and family structures, are much older than humans in the overall scheme of things. In fact, they used to be land dwellers, looking a lot like a horse to some extent.

Another interesting bit.. although it is more trivia than fact. Scientists have used the Taxomony tree (Zoological nomenclature) (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, subspecies) for a while. This was originally used to classify animals by traits such as hair, egg laying, etc. With the advent of the genome projects, however, scientists are quickly reinterpreting this system and reorganizing things according to their genetic heritage, although this is not an easy task when so many things have official names that can't be changed easily.

Some more info from the book -

“In 1916...people in Europe and America began to come down with a strange sleeping sickness...Victims would go to sleep and not wake up. They could be roused...to take food or go to the lavatory...however, the moment they were permitted to rest, they would sink at once into deepest slumber and remain in that state for as long as they were left. Some went on for months in this manner before dying...In ten years the disease killed some five million people and then quickly went away.”

“World War I killed twenty-one million people in four years; swine flu did the same in its first four months. Almost 80% of American casualties in the First World War came not from enemy fire, but from flu...Swine flu arose as a normal, nonlethal flu in the spring of 1918, but somehow over the following months – no one knows how or where – it mutated into something more severe. A fifth of the victims only suffered mild symptoms, but the rest became gravely ill and often died...Between the autumn of 1918 and spring the following year, 548,452 people died of the flu in America. The toll in Britain was 220,000 with similar numbers dead in France and Germany.”

I just wanted to say something more about the first part of the original post rather than a cool science fact. I've never read Bryson's book although I've read some of his travel books.

One thing I'd like to see more of on ATS is member book reviews. There are a lot of books out there on alternative subjects, some are brilliant, some are absolute bilge.

I'm currently reading The Secret History of the World by Jonathan Black and the jury is still very much out. Sorry for the slight off topic!

Super intresting tell me more.

Super intresting tell me more.

A couple more tidbits from the book -

"Your skin cells are all dead. It's a somewhat galling notion to reflect that every inch of your surface is deceased. If you are an average sized adult you are lugging around about 5 lbs. of dead skin, of which several billion tiny fragments are sloughed off each day. Run a finger along a dusty shelf and you are drawing a pattern very largely in old skin."

"There...are many surface features that tectonics can't explain. Take Denver. It is as everyone knows, a mile high, but that rise is comparatively recent. When dinosaurs roamed the Earth, Denver was part of an ocean bottom, many thousands of feet lower. Yet the rocks on which Denver sits are not fractured or deformed on the way they would be if Denver had been pushed up by colliding plates, and anyway Denver was too far from the plates edges to be susceptible to their actions...Mysteriously and over millions of years, it appears that Denver has been rising, like baking bread...Australia, meanwhile, has been tilting and sinking. Over the past 100 million years as it has drifted north toward Asia, its leading edge has sunk by some 600 feet. It appears that Indonesia is very slowly drowning, and dragging Australia down with it. Nothing in the theories of tectonics can explain any of this."

Anyone else with some interesting facts???