Let's Find Out - 15 Science Facts You [Probably] Didn't Know | ASMR

Episode Date: July 7, 2019

Science facts you never knew you didn't need in your life! Thanks for listening. #ASMR #science #facts

Welcome back guys. We're going to be looking at the website known as Cora today. If you don't know about it, it's just a website, a place people can ask questions and anybody can answer. So if you happen to be an expert in dust motes, someone's probably got a question for you to answer. But today, this evening, we're going to be looking at lesser known scientific facts. There's a lot of information out there. And hopefully my channel is, I think to the extent I'm going to have success with this channel, it's going to be due to at least partially my ability to filter information for you guys. That's what makes content valuable.

Filtering out from the noise, some sort of patterns that are ideally useful for your life. and if not immediately useful a interesting piece of the puzzle that you'll eventually put together to make sense of the world and that's that's really my whole agenda on this channel let's find out means for me there's a lot out there and only some of that is worth finding out about and and I'd like to find out the most interesting, useful, compelling facts that keep us in awe and amazement of the situation we're all in, the world, thrown into the world, as it were. Let's get started. Water can boil and freeze at the same time.

You might not have realized this. So it's called the triple point. and it occurs when the temperature and pressure is just right for not two but three phases gas liquid and solid of a substance to coexist in thermodynamic equilibrium and what that means is pressure and boiling point a liquid at high pressure has a higher atmospheric pressure so as you go up in the air thins on the opposite end of of that spectrum. As the pressure decreases in the atmosphere, then the boiling point lowers as well. So it doesn't take 212 degrees Fahrenheit to boil water, but actually 200 degrees.

If you get that just right, then 32.018 degrees Fahrenheit and the pressure of 611.657 and the pressure of 611.656.7. 7 pascals or 0.006-03659 atmospheres. Perfectly balanced combination with only micromanicule adjustments to either of those variables. An individual would be able to... It's possible to change all of the substance from ice to water to gas very rapidly within... small, small amounts of time. So I guess the practical aspect of that would be for some sort of technology that would benefit and would become extremely useful. If we would rapidly change the water inside it, from water to ice to gas. maybe in space that would be useful somehow to uh if you have to rapidly change the volume

of something maybe because ice expands when water turns to ice its volume actually increases so it's pretty interesting now a single solar flare can release an equivalent energy of millions of 100 megaton atomic bombs, a single solar flare. And you look at those sometimes, they're pretty much the size of entire planets, size of the Earth. And you can imagine that, you know, even though they're 90 million miles away, it's still, it's incredible. amount of energy. That's the death star, really, I guess.

That's amazing. A hundred million, millions of a hundred megaton atomic bomb. And then it gets, sometimes coronal mass ejections. CMEs get burst, burst right out into the solar system. And of course, we're so small with respect to the volume of the solar system. So it's certainly pretty rare for the coronal mass ejection to be exactly on the trajectory of towards Earth. But no doubt it would wipe out the entire planet if it ever did hit the Earth. Even including our, considering that we have a pretty significant magnetic field blanket wrapped around our planet. it's still a huge potential threat to all the life on our planet.

So number three, cats always land on their feet to go to something a little more trivial. But still interesting because it took physics for us to really figure that out. It's the fact that cats can twist their bodies in two... separate motions at once. The front half and the back half twist to create a kind of gyroscopic effect and this ensures a rapid rotation. So it's kind of like when you, well it's the same principle roughly I would say as being able to tuck your arms in when you're spinning in a chair or at a higher level of human ability when a athlete is able to do a triple. triple axle on the ice rink and they tuck their arms in to get a really really

tight faster spin and that's what cats are able to do apparently so it's pretty interesting speaking of spinning we've all seen the YouTube channel do that but it's kind of hard to picture this spinning basketball I think the one I saw was spinning basketball thrown from a dam and what's called the Magnus effect and it's the same thing that allows a baseball pitcher to curve the ball when they're throwing a curve ball they they put a spin on it that interacts with the air and creates a drag more so on one side and therefore creates like a force that makes the the ball move so the Magnus effect it's like an unbalanced force that makes the ball move so the Magnus effect it's like an unbalanced force that makes the ball kind of drop or move forward or whatever it might be

relative to the direction that you put the spin on the ball. When the air on the front side of a spinning object is going in the same direction as its spin, which means that it's getting dragged along with the object and deflected back. Meanwhile, the air on the other side of the ball is moving in the opposite direction, so the air the airflow separates. So maybe that looks like, or the earlier I forgot to incorporate the doodle because I love pins. Let's see if in that direction, the airflow, and now if it's running in this direction, you see the airflow here, been on the ball like that, and the ball's generally moving in this direction right here, then what happens is the airflow

compounds it creates a superposition of like forces so they call them two two waves supplement each other they either cancel or they compound it's like an amplitude effect I was looking for destructive and constructive interference patterns but I don't even think that's really applicable here it's it's more about you know if you put a car on a treadmill and you you made the treadmill go fast, the car wouldn't have as much traction as if the treadmill was really going the opposite direction as its rotation, the rotation of its tires. Whereas this easiest way to visualize the overall effect of what's happening here, the effect of the spin reacting against

the air. If the air is flowing in this direction, and the ball is spinning that direction, so the top is going to be resisting the airflow. You can see. And the bottom is actually going to be going with the airflow. So the bottom isn't putting up any resistance. So there's much less drag, much less friction in that direction. Whereas the top here, because it's directly opposing the spin of the ball, is directly opposing the direction of the airflow, there's resistance.

Like when you push on a table, if you push on something that's already going down, you don't really feel much of a resistance. If you push on a table something solid, the resistance that the firm, rigid object you're pushing on, it gives you, it's going to create, it's going to make you, give you an opposite counteracting force, what's called a normal force in physics. and that's going to push you away from the exactly the opposite direction from the direction you're pushing And so what that means is that the ball is going to be based on that we can tell that the ball is going to be pushed Downwards that's a There's a whole area of engineering called Aerodynamics. It's a aerospace. It's a aerospace. It's a engineering, I guess.

I definitely wouldn't get hired at SpaceX. But it's fascinating that, you know, let alone airplanes, I mean, airplanes and jets, let alone rocket ships that go orders of magnitude faster than jets, at least once they're out of the thickest parts of the atmosphere. It's like when you're diving in a pool, the water seems pretty, um, pretty malleable, pretty flexible, pretty fluid, versus jumping off a bridge. If you guys have ever done that or gotten close to it, if you get up more than about 20 feet, the water pretty rapidly starts feeling more and more solid rather than fluid.

And it's an interesting change of dynamic when objects start to have a greater velocity. the drag and the friction forces of something as innocuous as the atmosphere, the air that we breathe. I can move my hand pretty quick. But if I'm going out the window, if I stick it out the window of a car driving 100 miles an hour, I'm not going to be able to move my hand so freely, you know, especially if it's like this, capturing air. So that fascinates me that, you know, we've, as a species, have done enough work to be able to put scientific equations and general understanding of the way atoms interact with particles with other atoms at greater and greater speeds. ultimately that's where relativity kicks in if you take that that thought experiment i guess

train of thought to its ultimate conclusion being the what happens with particles when they interact at the speed of light not just a thousand miles an hour or 17 thousand miles an hour like the space station travels something like that

So that's, again, putting pieces of the universe together to pieces of seemingly microscopic perspectives of the universe together to ultimately, hopefully, ideally make a comprehensive, somewhat comprehensive at least understanding of the universe. Here's, okay, here's a... completely useless fact other than maybe it tells us something about humanity in our version 2 a particular letter of the alphabet because only one does not appear in the periodic table give you guys five seconds to try to come up with an answer put that in the comments below if you're uh if you're still awake or if you're paying attention you care it's the first letter of the most recent jeopardy phenomena. That would be James, so it's a letter J.

What is J? Does not appear on the periodic table. Yeah, pretty useless. But speaking of the periodic table, did you know that? You probably didn't know that bananas contained potassium. But what you might not have known is that potassium is a relatively unstable element. And so therefore it decays more than most elements, making it slightly radioactive.

You might not have realized that. But it's nothing you need to worry about since you got to eat about 10, 10,000, no, excuse me, 10 million bananas at once to die of radiation poisoning. As much as I like smoothies, I guess I'm pretty safe. Now here's a counterintuitive fact. Some of the best kinds of facts are counterintuitive. Hot water freezes faster than cold water. I wouldn't have thought that. This fact seems counterintuitive, but it's called the Memba effect.

There's an Mpemba before the P. That's hard to pronounce. Mpamba effect. After a Tanzanian student named Arasdo Mepamba. Rastomabemba, who told this teacher that a hot mixture of ice cream froze faster than a cold mixture. This is because the velocities of water particles have a specific disposition while they're hot that allows them to freeze more readily. If proven correct, the finding could also have implications in daily life, like cooling electronic devices, which is a huge barrier to technological advancement right now is we're just trying to figure out

we can make faster and faster and smaller devices although we are kind of hitting the atomic limit with that too but but nonetheless anybody who is a gamer knows very well the pitfalls of modern technology and just how quickly are even our well especially our fastest most powerful microchips tend to heat up inverse i guess effect of the one we just described cold water actually heats up faster than hot water i guess it's called the inverse and pemba effect as of now so here's one everybody knows we got dna that's pretty much It's four separate compounds set in billions and billions of different combinations that essentially dictate and inform all the rest of the cells as we're growing and consuming nutrients

that help us grow and help our bodies. They're sending them for grow. evolve into our final form. But did you realize just how much DNA we have? There's over 3 billion base pairs of DNA in human genes and over 25,000 genes in the human genome. So the 3 billion base pairs are segregated into 25,000 segments that all each specific, I guess, patterns that are communicated to the rest of our body to represent

and ultimately manifest traits like, you know, hair color and skin color and oddities, the predispositions for excessive wellness or excessive disease, I guess. An entire copy of that genome exists in each of the DNA. 10 trillion cells in our bodies. If all that DNA were lined up, it would cover the distance between the earth and the sun 100 times. So that's 900. It's pretty much a billion miles worth of DNA. That's insane. Thanks to, you know, imaginative minds that are creating incredible scientific breakthroughs and then also fiction authors that are keeping our imaginations and optimism stimulated.

It really just helps stay in amazement of the world. It's fascinating, I think, that we have no idea how DNA came to evolve, you know. It's so elegant, so simple yet. It's like binary logic. It creates the entire network of technology that we use, from the light to the microphone, to my cell phone recording me right now. The image that you're seeing of my face is captured and reproduced on your screen as just a series of millions, maybe billions, of ones and zeros.

That's it. The ones and zeros are put in increasingly longer segments. or patterns to represent larger values other than just one and zero it's multiples of two so it's two and four and eight sixteen and using just two simple units in DNAs in our case it's four four units we can yeah we create the body and we create technology it's just I don't know it's cool it's for for anyone to think that life is meaningless. It's like just go out and read a book about what we know about history and science and even philosophy. And man, if you think we're at the end of the

road of not just scientific but just human discovery and human exploration and venturing into physical space, you know, and in, and, in, the sense of going out and exploring the solar system and the stars like the voyager spacecraft and the bottom the depths depths of the uh what seven miles down in the marionis trench but also the intellectual space the emotional space the um spiritual numinous space of our brains it's we we haven't even begun to understand ourselves you know what makes us tick who's actually in control when you want to lose weight and you're like consciously i'm going to lose weight but then you cheat and you eat a cupcake or whatever who's who is that making those contradictory

decisions i don't know so much more to explore number 10 many of you know what a superfluid is but it's bears repeating nonetheless it's phase of of helium, so water is hydrogen, two hydrogen atoms, one oxygen atom, H2L. But if we took pure helium, which is normally in a gas, use to inflate balloons, helium can work against gravity if the temperature of it is set low enough. So as temperatures generally decrease, every element, every molecular configuration, all I have their own, their own boiling and melting points. But generally, gases condense into water

and as the temperature lowers, it goes from gas to water and water to a solid. Now if we take this pure helium and you lower the temperature enough, I guess maybe helium never reaches a solid. solid, but it goes from gas to a liquid cooled down to just a few degrees from absolute zero. 460 below zero Fahrenheit or negative 273 Celsius. It turns into a super fluid.

It can flow without friction. And remember like we were talking about fast moving objects through the atmosphere through air, That resistance you feel is a form of friction. In the air it's called drag. Or maybe in the water, maybe in fluid too. Nonetheless, there's no friction. That means there's zero resistance against surfaces. So if you start this superfluid,

even if it's sitting in a basin, in a jar, sitting in a jar like this glass container maybe mind you it's negative 460 degrees below Fahrenheit if you now start it you might not even have to start it but it's somehow just because of the the weird counterintuitive phenomenon of not having friction we're just we're just not used to that in everyday life your butt in the seat the cars on the tires on the road I mean anything, anytime you feel anything. Friction is what's keeping this pen from sliding out of my fingers right now. This stuff is so interesting. It just flies. It goes against gravity and just leaves. I guess it wants to, uh, it's so fluid. It's like, I was about to arrive at the word superfluid without thinking.

it is beyond a fluid like superman is beyond man it's super fluid it's so fluent that it the general properties of a fluid which are if you pour a fluid out it wants to submit to gravity as finally as it's able to and this thing is so super fluid that that I guess instead of defying gravity I think it's actually obeying gravity to such an extent that we're not familiar with anything with those properties. It's so gravity that this cup wouldn't be enough to contain it. It would want to be completely flat and evenly distributed under the force of gravity, I believe, is what, That's how I interpreted at least. So we would want to climb over the walls of this cup.

Find its way onto a completely flat surface so that there's no more uneven distribution under the weight of gravity or the force of gravity. Even if you have a molecule thin crack. And because no friction, it just leaks, leaks right through that. And once it starts flowing, it never stops. like a fountain. But you might ask, well, if it's like a perpetual machine, why don't we just use that to power things? It's because it takes a ton of energy to cool anything down, even in space, that's cool. So the energy it takes to create those conditions, create a super fluid. It doesn't balance out. Bacteria cells. than human cells.

So, by weight, I think it's something like ridiculous number by bacteria cells. Bacteria by mass, human body. And trillions of microorganisms outnumbering human cells 10 to 1 because of their small size, however, microorganisms make up only 1 to 3% of the body's mass. So in a 200-pound adult, which, unfortunately is exactly me 6 pounds 2 to 6 pounds of me is bacteria

but they play a vital role in human health so I don't have to jump in the shower just yet I couldn't survive without them and to help you understand that just think about what it takes to digest food it's actually something I recently learned actually is that

to digest food we actually rely heavily on gut bacteria. So the bacteria in your gut actually, I don't know if this is irrefutable yet or if this is still just a hypothesis, but the bacteria in our gut apparently inform our urges, our cravings. Sorry.

That was on the tip of my tongue. are craving so partially you know our bacteria in the gut i think our body is uh in a way they help break down so you want to have that's why you have antibiotics or pro biotics which means good bacteria or good living organisms in your body that's uh that can be very beneficial so Yeah, I think it's kind of weird to think that there's creatures that don't have human DNA, just surrounding the walls, the lining of our guts. Yeah, this is interesting because, speaking of gravity a lot, we're actually taller in the morning after we've been stretched out,

laying on our backs or our sides all night. And when we're walking around all day vertically, gravity compresses the discs and the fluids in our bodies to make us about, on average, half an inch smaller at the end of the day. So always measure yourself in the morning, guys. This is another really awesome phenomenon, maybe a little more interesting for the engineering oriented mind. but if two pieces of metal touch in space remind you space is so cold we would instantly pretty much freeze it's I don't think it's near zero but it's it's close to being near absolute zero just like negative 400 something degrees this phenomenon is called cold welding it's where two metals touch in a low enough

temperature, they will bond and be permanently stuck together. And as you can imagine, that's certainly a video, I believe, on YouTube, but, uh, or as Veritasium has a video on that. Hey, how about this, talking about being inspired by the plethora of universe left to explore. We're nowhere near knowing what, uh, you know, ultimate nature of the universe there's so much left to know as far as we know right now could always change of course that's the beauty of that actually practice science and not dogmatic science where they just believe everything they're told or they're too rigid to change their theories because at least

too rigid to change their theories in the face of facts because they too closely identify with their life's work. So that's always something to watch out for. Egos get in the way of truth. But the universe is made up of 50 galaxies, 50 billion galaxies. In the Milky Way alone, there might be as many as 100 billion Earth-like planets.

You still think we're alone? I'd like to do a video on the Drake equation sometime soon. There's a good chance that it's out there that have a lot of life, but not necessarily evolved to the complexity and intelligence, you know, relative intelligence that we have right now. Here's an interesting little tidbit is that an individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit around the human body. Now, is that a coincidence that we broke the day up into 60 second? um that's 24 times 60 60 is 240 plus 1200 so 1440 so 1440 1440 minutes a day is there a reason is that maybe is there some sort of correlation between eventual our rival breaking the day up in the 60 units of 60 I don't know maybe

makes up only about 2% of a person's body weight, but needs 20% of the oxygen, and 15% of the energy used up by the heart is attributed to the brain. That's, uh, you know, the brain isn't the only thing that helps us, you know, think and feel. but it certainly is capstone you know of our

of our being so yeah the brain is such a sphinx that we have yet to crack I think it's beautiful it's a beautiful thing so much left to explore about it and uh relative optimism I guess

I'm gonna leave you guys hopefully you learned some interesting things And you can enjoy this enough to zone out and sleep or just focus, procrastinate. Either way, whatever you used me for, thank you for using me, guys. Thanks for tuning in and watching.

As always, I greatly appreciate your viewership and your subscriptions and comments. I think I really enjoy the comments more than anything, so let me know what you thought. and sincerely I really enjoy your feedback it really helps me know what to do or what not to do and it's just fun to engage with all of you so hope you guys enjoy it but if not let me know let me know what you didn't like about it and with any luck we learned a little bit more about the world than when you hit play to begin with so get some sleep and we'll see you guys next

time. Bye.