5 scientific facts that do not fit in the head
Miscellaneous / / April 03, 2023
It's time to meet the world's largest bacterium and find out how bees create lightning.
1. There are bacteria that you can see with the naked eye.
We used to think of bacteria as an extremely small form of life - such that without a microscope it is pointless to look for them. But in fact, there are microbes that can be seen without any magnifying glasses. And it's not a joke.
A bacterium called Thiomargarita magnifica reaches 2 centimeters long! By words researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, it's like a person would be the size of Mount Everest.
Thiomargarita magnifica is not only hefty, but also contains three times more genes than other members of the kingdom bacteria. It lives in the water of mangroves in Guadeloupe, in the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean.
2. Whales used to live in the deserts of Africa
About 150 kilometers southwest of Cairo, there is a valley filled with the skeletons of these creatures half-buried in the sand. It is called Wadi al-Khitan, which is, in fact, from Arabic
translated "valley of the whales"The fact is that in the Eocene, from 50 to 33 million years ago, oceans overflowed on the site of African deserts. You can see how our planet looked then on this map.
Over time, the water dried up, leaving only a misunderstanding called the Mediterranean Sea. whales as well sharks, crocodiles, turtles and rays that lived here, migrated or died out, leaving behind skeletons in the desert sands. And these finds in Wadi al-Khitan are very important for science, because they allow you to recreate the course of evolution of the ancestors of modern marine mammals.
3. A swarm of bees creates as much electricity as a thundercloud
What is produced bees? Obviously honey, royal jelly, wax, maggots and bee venom. But not only. These little furry creatures can also generate static electricity. At least, if they gather in a large enough crowd.
Study, conducted by biologists at the University of Bristol, showed that a flying swarm of honey bees generates an electrostatic field. When an insect flaps its wings, they rub against its fur, creating static.
Have you ever been electrocuted by a sweater? And the bee lives in such a “sweater” all his life, not counting the stage of the larva.
One insect, of course, cannot create a lot of electricity, but when there are a lot of them... In general, bees can generate a field with a strength of up to 1,000 volts per meter, which is almost eight times stronger than that of a rather large thunderstorm clouds.
Scientists believe that bees potentially able even influence the weather. Well, not to cause lightning, of course, but to redirect dust particles in the air with their electric fields. And those, in turn, affect the distribution of precipitation in the habitat of bees.
4. Mushrooms can make oil
In general, fungi have many talents - for example, they can hunt worms, zombify insects and serve as an ingredient for ice cream. But what scientists at Montana State University certainly didn't expect was that they would accidentally discover a species in the Patagonian rainforest in South America that can convert vegetable waste into oil.
The fungus, called Gliocladium roseum, parasitizes trees. It literally converts cellulose into combustible hydrocarbons in the course of its nutrition. And if it is possible to cultivate and improve this fungus, then humanity will be able to create cheap high-quality fuel literally from waste.
Gliocladium roseum even forced scientists to revise the theory of the origin of oil. It is believed that she formed due to the fact that ancient microorganisms and algae, buried under tons of silt and sand, were exposed to high temperature and pressure for millions of years.
But it is quite possible that in fact the “black gold” was made by mushrooms.
5. Chickens don't like ugly people
Once upon a time, scientists from Stockholm University in Sweden came up with an amazing idea - to find out the views of poultry on the generally accepted standards of human beauty.
To this end, researchers selected a lot of photographs of random men and women and, after interviewing students, sorted them: who is beautiful, who is scary, and who is so, the middle into half.
And then they became show pictures of specially trained roosters and hens. The birds were supposed to peck at the portrait of whoever they liked and ignore those who were unpleasant, sort of like a chicken Tinder.
And what do you think - chickens enthusiastically pecked at photographs of all kinds of beauties and playboys, and less attractive poor fellows were bypassed.
The aesthetic taste of these birds was developed just fine - their attractiveness ratings matched with the results of the students surveyed at 98%. According to scientists, this indicates that our ideas about beauty are not determined by social factors, but by the peculiarities of the properties of the nervous system inherited from animal ancestors.
And such things as, for example, the symmetry of features, people (and chickens) feel subconsciously, and do not evaluate in a rational way.
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