42 Totally Fascinating Facts For Science Nerds


Science can be endlessly fascinating—from physics to chemistry to biology, there are so many interesting and wonderful ways in which the world works. Here are 42 totally fascinating facts for science nerds. 


Science Facts

42. Science Scam

In 1898, inventor Nikola Tesla once tricked an entire crowd into believing that they could control a toy boat by shouting commands. In fact, the boat was an early example of a radio-control toy, and Tesla was piloting the boat himself wirelessly, interpreting the verbal cues of the crowd into directions transmitted to the boat.

 Pixabay

41. These Eyes

The most complex eyes in the animal kingdom belong to the mantis shrimp. The shrimp’s eyes can interpret several types of light polarization throughout the entire visible spectrum. This allows the tiny shrimp to see and distinguish least ten times as many distinct colors as humans can.

 Wikimedia Commons

40. They Still Make You Just as Wet

Raindrops actually don’t fall in the form of a teardrop. Instead, because of surface tension and the flow of air around the drops, they are shaped more like the top half of a hamburger bun.

 Pixabay

39. Chatty Fellow

A budgerigar (more commonly called a “budgie”) named Puck was awarded the 1995 Guinness World Record for largest vocabulary of any bird—he knew 1,728 words. Puck was even said to be able to generate new and unique sentences with his large vocabulary, and his owner claimed that on Christmas morning, Puck chattered, “It's Christmas. That's what's happening. That's what it's all about. I love Pucky. I love everyone.” It’s no “God bless us, everyone,” but it’s pretty good for a bird.

 Needpix

38. Looks Can Be Deceiving

Male peacocks are known for their brilliant colored-feathers, while their female counterparts are a drab brown. In fact, the feathers of male peacocks are also pigmented brown, but they have microscopic structures that interfere with light, reflecting blue, green, and turquoise, and creating their appearance of bright iridescence.

 Wikimedia Commons

37. Structural Integrity

Because the concrete of the Hoover Dam was poured into individual, rectangular shaped sections—rather than with a single, continuous pour—the physical dam itself may survive up to 10,000 years and could be one of the last remaining visible and recognizable monuments of humans on the planet. Unfortunately, because of falling water levels in Lake Mead, the dam might not be able to generate power even a decade from now.

 Wikipedia

36. It Really Helps

Swear words are processed in a separate part of the brain from regular speech and swearing has been found to actually reduce pain levels. #%&*!!!!

 Shutterstock

35. Reaching New Heights

Scientists attached stilts to the legs of ants to prove that ants return to their nests by counting their steps. The ants on stilts overshot their nest by roughly 50% due to the new length of their steps.

  Wikimedia Commons

34. Workaround

After Beethoven went deaf, he found he could affix a metal rod to his piano and bite down on it while he played, enabling him to hear perfectly through vibrations in his jawbone. The process is called “bone conduction”.

 Flickr, Royal Opera House Covent Garden

33. Namesake

In 2009, Stephen Colbert won a NASA competition to have a module of the International Space Station named after him, but NASA opted to name it ‘Tranquility’ instead. They did, however, name a treadmill on the ISS after him. It is called the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill (C.O.L.B.E.R.T.).

 Getty Images

32. Tribute

J.R.R Tolkien got the name for Lord Of The Rings character Samwise Gamgee from a doctor named Joseph Sampson Gamgee. Gamgee was the inventor of ‘Gamgee tissue’, an absorbent gauze surgical dressing made from cotton wool. Samwise’s wife was named Rosie Cotton.

 Tolkien (2019), Fox Searchlight Pictures

31. Self-Experimentation

Bill Haast, of Miami, Florida, injected himself with snake venom during most of his adult life to build up immunity to an array of venomous snakes. Haast lived to age 100 and survived a reported 172 snake bites. He also donated blood to be used in treating snake-bite victims when suitable anti-venom was not available—more than 20 of those treated with his blood survived their wounds.

 Pixabay

30. Sneaky Disguise

The macrocilix maia moth confuses its predators with a wing pattern that realistically resembles two flies eating bird excrement. The moth even releases a pungent odor to drive home the deception.

 Wikimedia Commons

29. Tumbling Across the Globe

The tumbling tumbleweed (Kali tragus), a longstanding symbol of the lonely American West, is actually a foreign introduced species from Asia commonly called ‘Russian thistle’. The tumbleweeds were introduced to South Dakota in the 1870s when flaxseed contaminated with kali tragus seeds was imported from Russia.

 Wikimedia Commons

28. Counter-Espionage

It’s suspected that Leonardo da Vinci deliberately left errors in the designs of his inventions, specifically those relating to war machines and weapons, in order to prevent it from being put to practice by unauthorized people.

 Wikipedia

27. Unnecessary Adaptation

The adult Luna Moth has no mouth and dies of starvation. The adult moths live only to mate, and usually die in under a week.

 Needpix

26. Girl Party

On 5 April, 2010, there were four women in space at the same time. This was considered to be the largest gathering of human females off the planet to that point.

 Wikipedia

25. Double-Dipping

Many people believe that placing a chip in dip, biting off the chip and then placing it again into the dip spreads bacteria into the dip. In 2015, the popular science TV show Mythbusters debunked this myth, by double-dipping chips and testing them, but found that the difference in germs compared to non-double-dipped chips was negligible. They found that many store-bought dips already contained bacteria, though well below levels that were at all harmful.

 Pixabay

24. Goth Birds

A breed of chicken called the Silkie has black skin, black flesh, black bones, and black internal organs. The birds’ color is due to an excess of pigment cells. They are said to have a similar flavor to normally-colored chickens, and although their skin and bodies are jet-black, they can grow pure white feathers.

 Wikimedia Commons

23. Seeing Sights

Veronica Seider, a woman born in Germany in 1951, was found to possess vision 20 times better than an average person. She was able to identify people from more than a mile away.

 Shutterstock

22. Illegal Hobby

In 2011, a Swedish man tried to build a nuclear reactor in his kitchen. He was arrested after he contacted the Radiation Safety Authority to ask if his homemade reactor was legal—it wasn’t. He’d built the device with radium scavenged from old clocks, as well as materials sourced from smoke detectors and a Coleman lantern. He’d written on his blog, “My project is to build a working nuclear reactor. Not to gain electricity, just for fun and to see if it's possible to split atoms at home.”

 Wikimedia Commons

21. Bad News for Jurassic Park Fans

Researchers in New Zealand have calculated that DNA has a 521-year half-life, meaning the oldest clone-able samples of DNA could be no more than 2 million years old. This would rule out any possibility of ever replicating dinosaurs, as the last dinosaurs died out more than 65 million years ago.

 Pxfuel

20. Tuxedoed Bandits

Adelie penguins covet pebbles so much that it leads some penguins to a life of crime. The penguins were observed by a team from BBC’s Frozen Planet series, and were seen to steal rocks and pebbles from the nests of other penguins in order to construct their own nests.

 Flickr, Kathleen

19. When Good Crabs Go Bad

Hermit crabs form “gangs” to steal other hermit crabs’ shells. Small groups of crabs will pry a more desirable shell off another crab, then fight amongst themselves for who gets to live in the new shell.

 Pikrepo

18. A Long Trip

In 1822, Europeans realized that storks migrate to warmer climates during winter after a stork in Germany was discovered to have an arrow from a Central African tribe embedded in its body. To this day, around 25 storks carrying African spears have been found in Europe.

 Pixabay

17. Art Imitates Life

The Corrupted Blood Incident was an unintentional glitch in World of Warcraft in 2005 that simulated the spread of a deadly pandemic. The incident was later studied by epidemiologists, due to the reaction of the gamers and its resemblance to the general populace.

 Shutterstock

16. Radioactive Treats

In the ruins of the Chernobyl nuclear reactors, scientists have found a type of fungus that uses gamma radiation as its energy source. These radiation-eating fungi could potentially become a possible food source for astronauts.

 PxHere

15. Undersea Experimenters

There is a permanent underwater laboratory called Aquarius that is owned by Florida International University but used by NASA to study how people handle extreme living conditions. Residents are referred to as “aquanauts”, and the project is called NEEMO (an acronym for NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations)—also a nod to Captain Nemo, the submarine captain in Jules Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea.

 Wikimedia Commons

14. Occam’s Razor

According to Popular Mechanics, faking the moon landing in 1969 would have been harder than actually going to the moon.

 Getty Images

13. Snakes in a Mine

Fossils of the largest-known extinct species of snake were discovered in a coal mine of Columbia. Titanoboa lived about 65 million years ago, and the species clocked out at approximately 48 feet in length and weighed roughly 2,500 pounds.

 Wikimedia Commons

12. Deep Water

The Mariana Trench is the deepest point on earth, stretching 6.8 miles below the surface of the ocean. If you threw a stone overboard above the Mariana Trench, it would take an hour for it to hit the ocean floor.

 Shutterstock

11. Lazarus Lobster

As far as scientists have observed, lobsters are functionally immortal. They show no measurable signs of aging—that is, no loss of appetite or changes in metabolism, no change of reproductive behavior or ability, and no decline in strength or health—and seem to only die from external causes.

 Wikipedia

10. Dangerous Behavior

The World Health Organization classifies tanning beds as a Level 1 carcinogen, the same level as plutonium and cigarettes. California passed legislation in 2011 banning teenagers from using tanning beds, as skin damage is cumulative, those who use tanning beds in their younger years are more at risk.

 Wikimedia Commons

9. Grandpa Caveman

According to genetic researchers, all non-Africans are part Neanderthal and have residual Neanderthal DNA. You can get DNA testing to tell you how much Neanderthal you are as well as your ancestral lineage, and any potential genetic health problems.

 Flickr, Paul Hudson

8. Banana Equivalent Dose

Bananas—specifically, the potassium present in bananas—give off enough radiation that a truckload of them can cause false alarms when checking for nuclear materials at US ports. The amount of radiation in a single banana (or even in a whole bunch) is completely safe for humans to be around.

 Wikimedia Commons

7. Scientific Progress

In the last 40 years, the overall survival rate for children’s cancer has increased from 10% to nearly 90% today. The survival rate for rare cancers is still far lower, and much more research is needed.

 Shutterstock

6. Sounds Terrible

Guam’s jungles have as many as 40 times the amount of spiders as nearby islands due to a lack of forest birds. The decline in bird population is attributed to the accidental introduction of the brown tree snake in 1940.

 Wikimedia Commons

5. Blaming Himself

Bob Ebeling, one of the main engineers behind NASA’s Challenger rocket, revealed that after NASA would not heed his warnings against launching in the cold weather, he told his wife the night before the launch, “It’s going to blow up.” The next day, on January 28, 1986, the Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff, instantly killing the seven astronauts aboard.

 Flickr, NASA on The Commons

4. Feels So Good

The brain releases so much dopamine during orgasms that brain scans can resemble those of someone on heroin.

 Shutterstock

3. Misguided Theories

Before the theory that birds migrated during winter, the question of where exactly birds disappeared to was a contentious one. Naturalists posited that birds hibernated at the bottom of the ocean—or turned into mice during the winter.

 Pixabay

2. Spontaneous Combustion

A solar plant in the Mojave Desert in California generates so much heat that it can incinerate birds in mid-flight. Between 1,000 and 28,000 birds are killed each year (depending on whether you ask the plant itself, or groups advocating for the birds).

 Wikimedia Commons

1. Times Have Changed

In the early 1980s, the Vatican invited Stephen Hawking to a conference where he had an audience with the Pope. Pope John Paul II had trouble understanding Hawking and knelt down beside his wheelchair to hear him better, prompting one scientist to comment that “things certainly have changed since Galileo.”

 Getty Images

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46