We live in a world where strange things are, paradoxically, normal. Science has helped explain many phenomena, from how the Earth orbits the Sun to why we get sick at particular times of the year. The things science does not understand now may seem strange, but we've accepted the fact that in the future, they may not be as strange anymore. But there are some things science understands now and has sufficient evidence for, yet still seem strange to us. No matter how many times we hear them explained or talked about, they still sound weird and wrong.
These things maintain their power to hold us in awe, even though some may have simple explanations. Here are 11 of them.
1. Upside Down
In the 1950s, Austrian professor Theodore Erismann proposed that if your vision is inverted for a long time, your eyes will adjust, and your vision will return to normal. He created a pair of goggles that inverted vision through a system of lenses to test his hypothesis. He made his assistant and student, Ivo Kohler, wear the glasses for a week. At first, Kohler stumbled and crashed into objects. He couldn't walk around chairs or hold a cup out to pour water into it. But after a week, his eyes adjusted, and the upside-down world became normal again in his eyes. He could perform tasks as though he wasn't wearing the goggles.
2. Earth's Orbit
It is a scientific fact that the Earth orbits the sun, but there's a little more to the story. What happens is the eight planets and the Sun orbit the center of the solar system called the barycenter. The sun isn't a static object around which every other planet revolves. It revolves around the solar system's center in a small circle, just as the planets revolve in a wider arc. Think of it like the sun playing with eight hula hoops.
3. Heat Death
If you add more heat to certain stars rather than become hotter, some actually cool down. Adding heat energy to the Sun causes it to expand. As a result, the atoms slow down, making the sun's temperature drop. This temperature decrease can also be predicted using the “virial theorem.”
4. Water Can Cut Steel
An industrial water jet cutter can cut through tough materials, including steel. Suffice it to say that if you pass your hand through it, you might lose the hand. It manages to do this because the machine uses a high-pressure stream of waterjet to cut through heavy materials. Abrasives are also always added to the water jet when cutting metal to make the cutting process easier.
5. Building a New Road Can Make Traffic Congestion Worse
Somehow, the opposite effect can be achieved when trying to solve traffic problems by building new roads. This situation has been researched and named Braess' Paradox. It occurs because sometimes, adding a new shortcut encourages a large number of drivers to choose paths that lead to the shortcut. As a result, traffic becomes more congested along those paths, slowing everyone down.
6. Quitting Alcohol
If an alcoholic wants to quit drinking, they have to keep drinking. It sounds antithetical, yes. But the truth is, going “cold turkey” in terms of quitting alcohol can be very dangerous to the individual. Unlike nicotine, which has painful withdrawal symptoms but can still be managed, alcohol withdrawal symptoms are not just painful but can kill if not handled properly. This is because the body's chemistry changes drastically when alcohol is consumed constantly for years. So, quitting abruptly would affect its operation. The best way to quit would be cutting down on intake slowly over weeks or months or getting medical advice on the best way to quit.
7. Breathing
When you take a deep breath in through your nostrils and breathe out, what you don't realize is that you breathe out of only one nostril at a time. This is true for 85% of all humans. Breathing switches from one nostril to another in about four hours. The body also reacts differently depending on which nostril we breathe out of. Using the right one may increase alertness and concentration, while the left one may help reduce stress.
8. Cold Room
The coldest known natural place in the universe is the Boomerang Nebula. This place is located in the Centaurus constellation, about 5,000 light-years from Earth. Its average temperature is – 272 Celsius (about 1 Kelvin). But the other coldest place in the universe, even more than the Boomerang Nebula, was created at the European Space Agency's Bremen drop tower. A team of German scientists were able to achieve a chilling temperature of -273.15 Celsius, making it the coldest temperature ever known anywhere in the universe.
9. Bald Eagle
Why is the Bald Eagle called “Bald” when it has a head full of hair? The word “bald” comes from the Old English word meaning “white.” While it means “lacking hair on the head” in present usage, zoology still retains the original meaning of “Having white feathers or markings on the head, as in some birds or mammals.” This is where the “Bald” in the name comes from.
10. Brain Power
There are more synapses or nerve connections in the brain than there are stars in our Milky Way galaxy. There are more than 200 billion stars in the Milky Way, so you can imagine how many synapses it takes to power our brains.
11. Walmart Who?
There's a Banyan tree near Kolkata, India, that is bigger than the average Walmart. The 250-year-old Great Banyan tree has aerial roots that cover 3.5 acres of land. This equals roughly 156,000 square feet or 14,400 square meters.
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Source: Quora.
