The fact that planes are kept in the air by the shape of their wings, which forces air to go over at a pace when it can't push down on the wing as hard as it can push up from underneath. It's like discovering an exploitable glitch in a videogame and every time I fly I worry that the universe will get patched while I'm at 10,000 feet.
Retinal photosynthesis, also known as the Purple Earth Theory. Colours are weird. Earth plants absorb red and blue light, they look green to us because that’s the wavelength of light that cannot be used by the chloroplasts.
It’s hypothesized that this was advantageous on Earth because blue light goes further into water than the other wavelengths, facilitating the development of photosynthetic algae
Retinal photosynthesis is another viable chemical chain reaction that could be used to create ATP (usable biological energy) from light.
It’s another molecule similar to chlorophyll, but it absorbs green light instead of red/blue - alien planets might be purple!
There’s a viable parallel evolutionary pathway that leads to plants with magenta leaves
the implication of einsteins mass-energy equivalence formula is mind-blowing to me. one gram of mass, if perfectly converted to energy, makes 25 GWh. that means half the powerplants in my country could be replaced with this theoretical "mass converter" going through a gram of fuel an hour. that's under 10 kilograms of fuel a year.
a coal plant goes through tons of fuel a day.
energy researchers, get on it
For me, it's the sheer scale of celestial bodies.
Our Sun is humongous. UY Scuti's radius is 1700 times larger - 185300 times larger than the Earth's. And then there's TON 618, which has a mass 66 billion times larger than our Sun's.
And even those are barely grains of sand when compared to solar and galactic structures... It is humbling, to say the least.
Edit 2: I deleted the previous edit, because my first observation is correct (scale is maintained when going from comparing radii to comparing diameters...), which is why I have an Arts degree.
The size of the universe and the distance between everything in it. It takes about 8 minutes for light from our own sun to reach us. And the observable universe is about 5,859,000,000,000,000,000 times larger than that! That is quite a trip. I would need about 293,283,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 charging stops with my electric car to get to the end. I think I’ll pass.
(Someone smarter than me will probably find out that my math is wrong)
I dunno whether it counts: but that science has effectively cured AIDS.
In 2004, 2.1m people died from it. Twenty years later that figure was a little over a quarter at 630k. The goal for 2025 is 250k. I think that's absolutely remarkable.
As a child in the 80s I was terrified of AIDS. It made me low-key scared of gay men because the news made it sound like I could I could get it from any one of them. And here we now are, able to provide a medication that can almost completely ensure that you will never be infected by HIV.
Astonishing, really.
You can observe the chirality of some molecules from the crystals they form, sometimes they twist clockwise, other times they twist counter clockwise. Which way they twist is dependent on their molecular structure.
If math is actually uncovering fundamental laws of the universe, rather than just describing it at various scales, then there's a chance we can rewrite reality with our own set of rules that would render the current ones incompatible (by Gödel's-IT).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis
There are more stars in the visible universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world.
OK, it's really a mathematics equivalence, rather than a scientific fact, but Euler's Identity:
eiπ + 1 = 0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler's_identity
it shows a profound connection between the most fundamental numbers in mathematics.
cum
Infinity and Black Hole
