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There’s no shortage of scientific facts that creep me out…the natural world is full of endless weirdness that can really unsettle a person when you stop and think about it for too long.
If that seems like something you’d be into today, have we got a list for you – these 15 people are sharing the creepiest science facts they know, and they really are some doozies!
1. We can do whatever we put our minds to.
If you believe strongly enough that you have been cursed, your brain can shut itself off entirely in severe cases. The psychological term for it is “Voodoo D**th Syndrome.” It’s just the fact you can literally think yourself to d**th that unsettles me so.
2. As you do, I suppose.
I remember witnessing a mantis egg case hatching in my high school science class. I asked the teacher: “What could possibly be small enough for them to eat?” and he was just casually like: “They’ll eat each other.”
3. I mean it might not be a bad way to go.
A gamma ray burst could wipe out all life on earth instantly with no warning.
An ultra powerful supernova that sends incredibly powerful blasts of Gamma rays across the galaxy at light speed.
If one hits earth everything is erased instantly. There is virtually no way to ever see one coming.
So we would never even know it happened before we were all k**led 🙂
4. It’s technically good, but…
A fever is your body way of saying:
“We don’t negotiate with terrorists! We either destroy the enemy or we d** with them!”
5. Too bad they’re so hard to get to.
When the titanic sank non of the shoes decomposed so there’s tone of shoes at the bottom of the ocean.
6. That cannot be comfortable.
Caterpillars turn completely into goo in their cocoon, and then become a butterfly.
Even then the synapses can survive for the most part with neurons sort of free floating.
Reminds me of the stories about those people with uncaught hydrocephalus who lead perfectly normal lives despite their brains basically getting squashed into about 10% of the normal volume
7. Who would have thought?
Just how big of a number a mole actually is.
I can still remember the mole song our chemistry teacher played for us.
The song is from when the world population was 5 billion.
8. It all happens so fast.
Your brain is making decisions before you are even aware of the decisions it has made.
It also makes decisions based off of learned behavior and you just go along with it.
9. The luck of the draw.
Some mutations of just one letter in the DNA code can k**l the fetus almost instantly, but some people live and have a seemingly healthy life while missing a whole chromosome.
If you understand anything about biology, that’s completely wild.
10. Honestly that makes sense.
Because of some pesticides used, roaches won’t go anywhere near a meth lab.
Meth labs have been known to produce toxic gas, like Phosphine, which a common insecticide.
Phosphine is often used in silos to deal with vermins.
11. The “call of the void.”
The sudden urge to jump off of a very high height.
You can be physically and mentally stable to the greatest degree and still have this feeling when at such a high height.
12. Not such a rosy prospect.
That as the permafrost melts, a lot of locked up methane will be released, and microorganisms there will “wake up” and do their jobs, breaking down organic matter, and release more methane and greenhouse gases.
13. Just don’t think about it.
Thinking about how breathing and lungs work freaks me out.
Once I start thinking about it all I can think about is my breathing and then I have to force myself to stop thinking about it.
14. Brains are amazing and weird.
The brain can play tricks on you:
When you look at a clock and the second hand seems to freeze for a moment, your brain is actually generating a false memory – and your perception of time stretches slightly backward.
This effect is called chronostasis.
15. Mother Nature is a twisted B.
Honestly nothing is more creepy than how deep sea anglerfish mate.
The deep sea is dark, and the anglerfish are spread very thinly. Therefore, when an anglerfish meets another anglerfish, it’s incredibly important they get the chance to mate over and over again.
The evolutionary strategy that deep sea anglerfish devised is extra creepy. The male latches onto the female, biting her and never letting go. That way he can inseminate the eggs she drops. Not that bad so far right? But wait, how does he eat if he’s latched on his mate?
Well, the circulatory systems fuse and the female provides nutrients for the male through this fused circulatory system. The true horror starts here. The organs of male start to wither and atrophy, being absorbed into the female. Eventually, the male is reduced to a lump of testicles the females use to fertilize their eggs. Females are often covered in bumps of several males that have melted into the female, becoming a literal body horror lump of meat on the female.
16. Your brain knows best.
When you move your eyes rapidly, you don’t see the things in front of you streaking across your field of view. What happens is that your brain just deletes that part. To fill in this gap in your perception, you would think the brain would stretch out that last image you saw before you moved your eyes (like a stuck video), but instead your brain takes the first thing you see after your eyes move, and does a copy and paste back over the blank couple of tenths of a second while your eye was moving. This fools your brain into thinking it sees the new view even before your eyes moved to where you could see it.
Why would your brain do this? Imagine you see a small, quick animal out of the corner of your eyes. As you snap your eyes over to look at it, the animal jumps out of sight in like a twentieth of a second, too fast to be perceived, normally. However, as far as your fooled brain is concerned, it looks like the animal froze in place for a few tenths of a second, which gives the mind part of your brain a better chance to register and understand that fleeting image.
17. Those poor babies.
Obligate siblicide.
In some species of animals, multiple offspring are born but only one is actually raised by the mother. The others are born only as backup in case the first-born doesn’t survive. When the first-born is fine, which is the typical case, it k**ls the others.
18. These scare the Hell out of me.
The existence of prions.
The prion mode of action is very different to bacteria and viruses as they are simply proteins, devoid of any genetic material.
Once a misfolded prion enters a healthy person – potentially by eating infected food – it converts correctly-folded proteins into the disease-associated form.
To date, nobody knows quite how this happens
19. Excuse me, what?
There is something called “the squeeze,” where when people had old scuba suits with tubes, you could actually get sucked into that tube if the pressure was off.
You are literally shredded through your own breathing tube.
20. There are always more questions.
Humans are bioluminescent (nothing to do with body temperature).
We emit visible light that can be photographed in specific conditions.
But, this light isn’t visible to us. Which makes it a strange thing to have evolved, and begs the question
“what organisms is this light visible to, and why?”
21. Beware the bugs.
Doctors/ scientists are BARELY keeping up with the influenza virus. It keeps on mutating rapidly. It really wants to get inside you.
22. I hope to never encounter one.
Rogue black holes. There are black holes that just are floating around in space and potentially f*cking up solar system just by passing through it.
23. We could do it if we tried I bet.
That so many vegetables came from the same plant. Broccoli, kale, kohlrabi, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, etc.
They are, botanically speaking, the same species. Humans have just bred them to emphasize different traits (buds, leaves, tubers…)
Imagine if humans were as genetically flexible.
Imagine a person walking around with GIANT toes, but otherwise normal.
Actually, plant genetics in general is a weird, weird world.
24. No thank you.
Not exactly scientific or creepy but, it’s close enough and I want to contribute.
Mouth pipetting was a thing in labs in the 1980s. A pipette is, for simplicity sake, a glass straw that lab staff would use to transfer liquids. Now a days we use special bulbs, that when squeezed, would suck up the liquid for us. Kinda like a turkey baster or eye dropper.
Before we had these bulbs lab workers had to use their mouths to suck up the liquid. Which meant if they weren’t careful they’d get whatever they were sucking up in their mouth. I’m currently training to be MLAT and those fluids would usually be urine, liquid stool, sputum and so on.
25. It’s your brain’s world.
Your brain literally creates your own reality and your senses and body just go along with it.
26. You are a whole universe.
There is more micro organisms on your body than people in earth.
27. How is this a thing?
Also a lot of schizophrenics are pretty normal well adjusted people aside the schizophrenia, so like if you were sitting in your room and a dog floated in attached to a balloon or the number 7 started telling you you’re worthless at first you’re gonna get freaked out by it but once you confirm that it’s not there you’re going to realize “okay this is me”, it helps that a lot of hallucinations are recurring as well, so if you know they happen you can just tell yourself they’re not, even though everything in you is saying that’s not the case
It’s really weird but it’s fascinating
The really hard stuff is like extreme paranoia, I worked with a woman whose whole family basically was schizophrenic, her included, and there were a few times she’d say things like “you’re not hacking my phone right?” Or “the mayor is stalking me”, that kind of thing and for someone who has experienced similar paranoias (to a considerably lesser degree) I can understand that those aren’t really that easy to shake
28. This makes a lot of (creepy) sense.
Spider webs were used as bandages in ancient times.
My grandpa was from rural Eastern Europe and he told me about his grandma and mom using spider webs on wounds. It’s not even that ancient of a thing
29. It’s hard to wrap your mind around.
The way quantum mechanics works is pretty creepy to me for reasons I can’t exactly pin down.
Particles aren’t points, at least not that we can possibly ever observe. The best physical description of a particle’s position is a wave over at least a four-dimensional volume showing where it probably is. I say four-dimensional because there’s a non-zero time uncertainty as well. This isn’t a limitation on what we can observe, it’s an actual testable property of particles, that they don’t have exact positions, velocities, energies, times. When they’re “observed” by interaction, the wave collapses, which still doesn’t make it exact, just more likely to exist in a smaller space. The argument that there really is an exact point in there somewhere and it’s just always hidden from observation isn’t true; the Bell inequality proved that. For example, because of this uncertainty, it’s physically impossible to cool helium enough to freeze it at atmospheric pressure.
This uncertainty even applies to the vacuum. It can’t be at zero energy, because that would violate the uncertainty principle. So sets of virtual particles pop into existence in the vacuum and stick around for an incredibly short amount of time, given by the time uncertainty, before annihilating each other in a zero net energy process. This is, very simply put, how black holes hypothetically lose mass; pairs of virtual particles are spontaneously created near the event horizon, one enters, one escapes. The one inside annihilates a particle within, the one that leaves becomes real. Information is transported outside the event horizon in an incredibly obfuscated, but still existent, form, meaning information isn’t destroyed by black holes.
Then you get into the weird math. It starts raising questions about what “real” is. Can we say something’s real if it’s not testable, or is the math describing the situation the closest to “real” that we can get? For example, you could look at the predicted path for a particle. There’s a non-zero chance for it to take any path between two points. So you basically take all the possible paths, account for the probability that it takes that path, add ’em all up, and you can recover Newtonian mechanics from it in the classical limit. Is this actually what’s happening? It isn’t really testable.
Even the Bell inequality that I mentioned earlier has some crazy philosophical implications. It basically says one of three things are true: information travels faster than light (which we have never seen), cause doesn’t always come before effect (wtf), or the universe is superdeterministic (which would disprove free will). We don’t know which.
People make a lotta crazy claims based on quantum mechanics, and I think a lot of it has to do with how uncomfortable the idea of living in a universe that seems to be inherently uncertain is.
30. You can be convinced of anything.
You can be convinced you committed a crime. You can also give false confessions.
31. If only we could replicate that.
You get and cure cancer in your own body thousands of times a day…..
Your body produces thousands and thousands of cells with damaged dna.
It’s a bit of exaggeration to call them cancer but if any of these cells were to survive they could become cancerous. Your immune system destroys them before they get to that point.
This is also why if you were to live forever you would eventually get cancer because the chances of your body missing them statistically increases. This occurs thousands upon thousands upon thousands of times a day
32. What are yours?
A doctor once told me, on average every human has three anomalies. Not all are visible.
I can never un-read some of these, that’s for sure.
Share the creepiest fact in your arsenal with us down in the comments!
