6 facts that do not fit in the head, which are scientifically confirmed

1. Vanilla flavor can be made from plastic bottles

Everyone knows the taste of vanilla - mmm, ice cream with it is divine! But few people think about the fact that a smaller part of the product consumed in the world is produced from natural pods. 85% vanillin synthesizedScientists convert used plastic bottles into vanilla flavoring / The Guardian artificially from petrochemical raw materials.

Chemists from the University of Edinburgh decided to go further and invented a way to drive vanillin from plastic waste. Particularly from bottles.

They are genetically modifiedJ. C. sadler. Microbial synthesis of vanillin from waste poly (ethylene terephthalate) / Green Chemistry an ordinary E. coli that lives peacefully in human entrails, and she learned to break down plastic to terephthalic acid, and then process it into vanillin.

In this way, you can get rid of 79% of the waste from this material, which, you see, is very good. Let's kill two birds with one stone: we'll clean up the planet from mountains of garbage, and

ice cream vanilla flavored bottles let's eat.

2. It's Safe to Swallow Lego Heads

Video fragment Akiyuki Brick Channel / YouTube

Children often swallow Lego pieces - instead of build12 Complex and Mostly Pointless Lego Great Ball Contraptions / Gizmodo some of them are interesting. For example, a ball processing plant or the Millennium Falcon. And the public is concerned about how ingested building blocks affect children's health. However, scientists were quick to dispel parental fears.

A team of pediatricians from the Western Hospital in Melburg conducted studyA. Tagg. Everything is awesome: Don't forget the Lego - Tagg / Journal of Pediatrics and Child Health and found out that the swallowed parts do not pose a health hazard. Selfless doctors experimented on themselves by eating human heads Lego.

Scientists have found that these parts pass through the digestive tract in an average of 1.71 days and do not cause any complications.

And advised parents not to worry too much about Lego. The human head, which can pass through the pylorus, can also leave the body naturally.

3. There are more trees on Earth than there are stars in our galaxy.

When people talk about space, they imagine truly impressive numbers and colossal scales: all sorts of black holes larger than the solar system, hypergiants, Great Attractors etc. Ask your friends what, in their opinion, is more - the stars in our Galaxy or the trees on Earth alone.

Most will most likely answer that there are probably more stars. The galaxy is such a hefty one. But they will be wrong.

NASA experts countedHow Many Stars Are in the Milky Way? /Space There are 200 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way. And another 25 to 100 billion brown dwarfs - so, small thingsK. Music. low‑mass content of the massive young star cluster RCW 38 / Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a cross between a star and some kind of Jupiter. And there are few trees on Earth moreR. Ehrenberg. Global forest survey finds trillions of trees / Nature 3 trillion.

And that is not enough: since the birth of human civilization, which was about 12 thousand years ago, their number has decreased by 46%. Apparently, we got carried away with working with axes and chainsaws a little more than we should.

4. There are poisonous birds

When we think of poisonous creatures, we imagine a variety of snakes, spiders, insects, at worst - frogs. Birds in the field of toxicity are inferior to the mentioned citizens. But some birds are trying their best to fix it. For example, the two-color thrush flycatcher, or two-color pitohu, from New Guinea.

This is a relative of the sparrow, which is able to poison its enemies. On skin and feathers present J. P. Dumbacher. Skin as a Toxin Storage Organ in the Endemic New Guinean Genus PitohuiLa Piel como Órgano de Almacenamiento de Toxinas en el Género Endémico de Nueva Guinea Pitohui / Ornithology the poison batrachotoxin is the same as that of the famous deadly leaf frogs.

It enters the body through the mucous membrane and can lead to cardiac arrest. Pitohu are unable to produce the toxin themselves, but compensate for this problem by eating poisonous bugs and storing the substance in their bodies.

Unlike frogs, pitohu can’t literally poison aggressors with just one touch, so you can pick it up. But God forbid you eat this sparrow.

Even an attempt to pluck it will cause a burning sensation in the hands, and even ingestion will lead to very sad consequences. Pitohu carcass 250 times more toxicJ. P. Dumbacher. Melyrid beetles (Choresine): A putative source for the batrachotoxin alkaloids found in poison‑dart frogs and toxic passerine birds / Chemistry strychnine. Poison is needed by the bird to get rid of skin parasites. As a bonus, it also reduces the number of predators who dare to devour the chick.

In addition to pitohu, there are other poisonous featheredR. Ligabue Brown. Poisonous birds: A timely review - / Toxicon, though not as brutal. For example, an ordinary quail can eat hemlock berries, and then the hunters who prepared it wonder where this nausea and diarrhea started. Spur goose, Australian bronze-winged pigeon and purple tanager warbler also eat all sorts of toxins to make themselves less attractive prey.

5. Carrots used to be white and purple

Carrots seem to be the most common thing in the world. But this root crop is not as simple as it seems.

The fact is that carrots, which are familiar to us, acquired a relatively recentlyW. Greene. Vegetable Gardening the Colonial Williamsburg Way. It was originally white, like parsnips and turnips. And about 1,100 years ago appearedHow did carrots become orange? / The Economist her violet-purple form. Farmers preferred it: firstly, it is easier to distinguish it from wild, and secondly, it is more beautiful.

Some historians suggest that the Dutch bred orange carrots to show their loyalty to Prince William of Orange.

It had a three-striped orange-white-blue flag, and the breeders decidedNNN / Why are carrots orange? It is political / Next Nature cling to.

But other scientists thinkFact check: Orange carrots occurred naturally, not created by Dutch / USA Todaythat this claim lacks conclusive evidence. Most likely, orange carrots appeared in Italy and Spain a little earlier - not in the 17th, but in the 16th century. And she's popular becameCarrots Used to Be Purple Before 17th Century / Insider, because it turned out to be more fleshy and dense than purple. Dutch traders simply spread this species throughout Europe and the New World.

However, purple carrot has not disappeared: there are many types of this root crop of a wide variety of shades - purple, white, red, and so on.

6. You can test for pregnancy using a frog or a rabbit

Now all pharmacies are flooded with pregnancy tests. But 100 years ago, such useful things had not yet been invented, and we had to somehow get out. Dr. Edward Elkan in 1938 found a way to very accurately determineE. R. Elkan. The Xenopus Pregnancy Test / British Medical Journalwhether the woman is pregnant or not. He named it the Hogben test, after Lancelot Hogben, a biologist and researcher of African clawed frogs.

And what about the frog? We take an amphibian and prick her thigh with a little urine of a pregnant woman. If the amphibian begins to spawn, congratulations to the lady who owned the urine on the future replenishment.

Don't worry about the frog, she's fine. It simply reacts to the pregnancy hormone, human chorionic gonadotropin, contained in the urine.

Thousands of frogs around the world from the 1930s to the 1950s divorcedDoctors Used to Use Live African Frogs As Pregnancy Tests | Smart News/Smithsonian Magazine in hospitals as live pregnancy tests. And they began to refuse to use them only in the 1960s. It was then that kits for immunological tests appeared, working on the principle of modern ones.

The Hogben test was a big step forward. Prior to the discovery of such beneficial properties in frogs, rabbits were used for the same purpose. The rabbits were injected with urine, a few days later they opened and checked the size of the ovaries. Increased - it means that the woman is in an interesting position.

This test inventedM. Friedman. The assay of gonadotropic extracts in the post-partum rabbit / Journal of Endocrinology in 1931 Maurice Friedman and Maxwell Edward Lapham. But after the study of clawed frogs, it was abandoned, because putting a whole rabbit under the knife for the sake of one injection was too wasteful.

By the way, the British still have the expression "the rabbit died"usedL. BUT. Terebneva. The history of pregnancy tests and modern methods for determining short-term pregnancy / Gynecology as an analogue of the phrase "she's in position." Some believed that the urine of a pregnant woman poisoned the animal to death, while the urine of a non-pregnant woman had no effect. But in fact, the autopsy killed the animal.