99 Fun Facts About Weird Science

On which planet does a single rotation take longer than a full trip around the Sun?

Venus turns so slowly, and backwards, that one spin takes 243 Earth days against 225 for its orbit; seen from its surface, the Sun would rise in the west.

Which planet is the only one in the Solar System less dense than water?

Saturn's average density is about 0.69 grams per cubic centimetre, so in theory it would float in a big enough bath, even though it has 95 times Earth's mass.

Which planet's day, from one sunrise to the next, lasts twice as long as its own year?

Mercury spins three times for every two trips round the Sun, and that slow turn makes the Sun crawl across its sky: sunrise to sunrise takes about 176 Earth days, two full Mercury years.

A sugar cube of material from which of these objects would weigh about as much as a mountain?

A neutron star packs more than the Sun's mass into a ball about 20 km across, a squeeze so fierce that its protons and electrons have merged into neutrons.

The molecular cloud Sagittarius B2 near the Milky Way's centre contains large amounts of what?

Alcohol fills the cloud as ethanol, methanol and vinyl alcohol; astronomers scanning it for amino acids in 2009 found instead ethyl formate, a chemical that helps give raspberries their flavour.

Solar eclipses look perfect because the Sun is about 400 times wider than the Moon and also 400 times what?

Farther away, so the two discs look almost equal in size from Earth; the match won't last, because the Moon drifts about 3.8 cm outward each year and will one day be too small to cover the Sun.

Viewed from space, what colour is the Sun?

White, because sunlight blends every colour of the spectrum; from the ground it looks yellow, orange or red only because the atmosphere scatters the shorter wavelengths out of the beam.

What colour are sunsets on Mars, thanks to fine dust scattering the light?

Blue, the reverse of Earth: Mars has a butterscotch sky by day, but its fine dust lets that one colour through slightly more easily, so a cool glow hangs around the setting Sun.

On Uranus and Neptune, methane is thought to be squeezed into what, which falls through the interior?

Diamonds were made in the lab to test the idea: laser shock waves fired through plastic mimicked the planets' interiors and locked nearly every carbon atom into tiny diamonds.

About 100 billion of which particles from the Sun pass through your thumbnail every second?

Neutrinos carry no electric charge and almost no mass, so they hardly ever interact with matter: they stream through you, and then through the whole Earth, without leaving a trace.

Which sea animal has three hearts?

An octopus has one heart for its body and one for each gill; the extra pumps are thought to make up for its copper-based blood, which takes high pressure to push round.

Which microscopic animals survived direct exposure to the vacuum of space on a 2007 satellite mission?

Tardigrades were sent up dried out and dormant; the vacuum alone did them no measurable harm, and once rehydrated on Earth they revived and laid eggs as normal.

Turritopsis dohrnii is nicknamed 'immortal' because the adult can revert to its juvenile form; what kind of animal is it?

A jellyfish smaller than a little fingernail: when injured or starving, the adult shrinks into a blob on the seabed and regrows as a polyp, its earlier life stage, within a day or two.

Which Australian marsupial's cube-shaped droppings won a 2019 Ig Nobel Prize for Physics?

Wombat intestines do the sculpting: stretchy and stiff zones in the gut wall mould the droppings into cubes, which don't roll away from the piles that mark the animal's territory.

The platypus hunts underwater with its eyes, ears and nostrils closed, relying on which sense instead?

Electrolocation: sensors in its bill pick up the faint electric signals given off by the twitching muscles of its prey, so it can find a meal in murky water with its eyes shut.

Which tree-dwelling mammal can hold its breath underwater for up to 40 minutes?

Sloth: it stretches a breath by slowing its heart, and though almost helpless on the ground it is a capable swimmer, moving about three times faster in water than on land.

Which burrowing rodent can survive 18 minutes without any oxygen by switching its cells to burn fructose?

The naked mole-rat lives packed into airless tunnels with hundreds of colony mates; starved of oxygen it stops moving, slows its pulse and runs on fructose, as plants do.

Which North American amphibian winters frozen solid, with no heartbeat, breathing or brain activity?

The wood frog floods its cells with glucose, a natural antifreeze, as ice forms under its skin; it sits rock-hard all winter, then thaws in spring and hops off to breed.

The oldest known individual of which species was estimated at 392 years old, give or take 120?

The Greenland shark was aged by carbon-dating proteins in its eye lenses, which form before birth and are never replaced; it grows less than a centimetre a year.

The peacock mantis shrimp's strike creates what in the water, hitting prey a second time?

Cavitation bubbles form because the club moves so fast that the water beside it vaporises; their collapse lands a second blow, so even a punch that misses can stun or kill.

Which shrimp's colonies crackled so loudly that they interfered with US Navy sonar in World War II?

Pistol shrimp are smaller than a thumb, but each snaps one oversized claw, and the Navy had to call in wartime researchers to trace the din to dense beds of the tiny animals.

Which beetle defends itself with a near-boiling chemical spray from its abdomen?

The bombardier beetle makes its weapon only at the instant of use: chemicals react in a chamber at its rear, heating the mix almost to boiling and blasting it out in rapid pulses.

Which animal's heart rate can drop to just two beats per minute during a deep dive?

Blue whale heartbeats were first recorded in 2019 by a sensor tag stuck to one animal: its pulse sank as low as two beats a minute in a dive, then raced to 37 at the surface.

What colour is horseshoe crab blood, harvested to test for bacterial contamination?

Bright blue blood carries cells that clot around the faintest trace of bacterial toxin, which is why an extract of it is used to check that vaccines and injectable drugs are clean.

With which body part does a female butterfly taste a leaf before laying eggs?

Feet: the sensors there work only on contact, so by standing on a leaf she can taste whether her caterpillars will be able to eat it.

Which mammals may live more than 200 years, making them the longest-lived of all?

Bowhead whales have been caught still carrying stone harpoon tips from hunts long past, proof of lives well over a century; newer dating methods push the estimate past 200 years.

When startled, some sea cucumbers defend themselves by doing what?

Expelling their internal organs through the anus can startle or distract an attacker, and the sea cucumber simply regrows the missing parts afterwards.

Experiments that dressed horses in striped coats support which explanation for a zebra's stripes?

To deter biting flies: horse flies approached striped coats as often as plain ones but failed to slow down in time, so they overshot or bounced off instead of landing.

The 'zombie' fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis hijacks which insects, making them climb a plant and clamp onto a leaf?

Ants infected by it lock their jaws onto a leaf vein about 25 cm above the forest floor, where the humidity suits the fungus; it then kills the ant, grows out of the body and sheds spores to infect more.

Once said to outnumber our cells ten to one, the body's microbes are now put at how many by comparison?

About the same: a 2016 recount found roughly 1.3 bacteria for every human cell in a typical adult, replacing a ten-to-one figure that had been widely quoted but hardly ever checked.

A 2014 study suggested the average human nose can distinguish roughly how many different odours?

1 trillion was an extrapolation from volunteers sniffing mixtures of 128 odour molecules; a later reanalysis showed the same data could yield almost any number, so the real figure is still unknown.

Which acid does the human stomach secrete at a strength matching that of carrion-eating scavengers?

Hydrochloric acid keeps the human stomach near pH 1.5, far more acidic than most mammals'; one idea is that our ancestors ate carrion and needed a harsher filter to kill the microbes on it.

Toxoplasma gondii changes rodents' behaviour so they are more likely to be eaten by what?

Cats are the only hosts in which the parasite can reproduce sexually, so the manipulation helps it complete its life cycle.

Which seed-spreading animals cannot feel the burn of the capsaicin in chili peppers?

Birds have a version of the pain receptor that capsaicin cannot switch on, which suits the plant: they swallow the seeds whole and scatter them, while a mammal's molars would crush them.

The Mpemba effect is the surprising observation that, under some conditions, which liquid freezes faster?

Very hot water was the surprise Erasto Mpemba, a Tanzanian schoolboy, met when his hot ice-cream mix froze first; physicist Denis Osborne tested the claim and published it with him in 1969.

Superfluid helium can do what that ordinary liquids cannot?

Superfluid helium moves with almost no friction, so a thin film of it can flow up and over the walls of its container and escape from an open cup all by itself.

Lightning heats nearby air to about what temperature, several times hotter than the Sun's surface?

30,000 °C is reached in an instant, and the heated air expands so violently that it sends out the shock wave we hear as thunder.

Until 2019, which unit was defined using water's triple point, where ice, liquid and vapour all coexist?

The kelvin was defined from 1954 by fixing water's triple point at exactly 273.16 K; since 2019 the unit has rested on a constant of nature, so that temperature is now measured, not decreed.

Since 20 May 2019, the kilogram has been defined by fixing which fundamental quantity?

The Planck constant replaced a small platinum-iridium cylinder kept in a triple-locked vault near Paris, because that object's mass could not be trusted to stay the same.

Compared with its speed in air, how fast does sound travel through water?

Four times as fast, about 1,480 metres a second against 343 in air; as a rule sound moves slowest through gases, faster through liquids and fastest through solids.

Which ultra-black coating made of carbon nanotubes did sculptor Anish Kapoor secure exclusive rights to use in art?

Vantablack traps light in a 'forest' of tiny carbon tubes; when Kapoor secured sole artistic rights to it in 2016, other artists objected loudly to one man owning the blackest black.

A popcorn kernel bursts at about 180 °C when its hard hull can no longer hold in what?

Steam from the water sealed inside each kernel builds pressure until the hull fails like an overloaded boiler; the softened starch then puffs up and sets as a crisp foam.

The hottest air temperature ever recorded on Earth, 134 °F (56.7 °C), was measured in 1913 where?

Death Valley, California regained the record in 2012, when the WMO threw out a 1922 Libyan reading of 58 °C that had stood for 90 years, partly because an inexperienced observer had taken it.

Which whole continent is classed as a desert because so little precipitation falls on it?

Antarctica gets so little snowfall that it counts as a polar desert, and its bare ice makes meteorites easy to find: one US programme alone has collected more than 20,000 there since 1976.

What is a leading explanation for reports of fish and frogs raining from the sky?

Tornadic waterspouts lifting them from water is the favoured explanation: a whirlwind strong enough to pick up small fish or frogs can carry them a few miles before it weakens and lets them fall.

What kind of organism, possibly the largest alive, spreads through over three square miles of Oregon forest?

A honey fungus, almost all of it hidden: it creeps from root to root as black bootlace-like cords, killing the conifers it reaches.

Pando, in Utah, looks like a forest of about 47,000 trees but is really one clone of which tree species?

Quaking aspen stems all sprout from one shared root system, so Pando is a single plant; it is struggling to renew itself because deer eat the young shoots before they can grow.

Given oat flakes arranged like the cities around Tokyo, a slime mould linked them in a pattern closely matching what?

The railways around Tokyo, planned by engineers, were matched for efficiency, cost and fault tolerance by a single-celled organism with no brain or central control.

Mature sunflower heads stop tracking the Sun and settle facing which direction all day?

East-facing heads warm up faster in the morning sun, and warm flowers draw more pollinating insects, which is why the mature plant stops following the Sun.

Mimosa pudica, the 'sensitive plant', reacts to a touch by doing what within seconds?

Folding its leaves inward and drooping happens when cells in the swollen joint at each leaf base suddenly lose water pressure, a collapse thought to put off grazing animals.

What do bees add to nectar that makes hydrogen peroxide, helping honey keep for years?

An enzyme, glucose oxidase, breaks down a little of the sugar and releases hydrogen peroxide; that and honey's high sugar, low water and acidity stop microbes growing.

A sleeping glass frog turns far more transparent by packing most of its red blood cells into which organ?

Liver: about 89 percent of the red cells are tucked into it while the frog rests, making the animal two to three times more transparent, and somehow the packed blood does not clot.

Which Mexican salamander, a favourite of regeneration research, can regrow whole limbs and even parts of its brain?

Axolotl wounds heal without scarring, which is why limbs, spinal cord and heart tissue can grow back; in the wild the animal is critically endangered, clinging on in lake remnants near Mexico City.

What moves the 'sailing stones' that leave long tracks across Racetrack Playa?

Thin ice sheets pushed by light winds shove the rocks along at a few metres a minute; nobody had seen it happen until the winter of 2013, when researchers with GPS-tagged stones were watching.

What turns the water of Blood Falls red as it seeps from the Taylor Glacier?

Iron oxides form when salty, iron-rich water sealed beneath the glacier since an ancient sea retreated meets the air and rusts; the explorers who found the falls in 1911 blamed red algae.

Which eel-shaped fish defends itself by releasing slime that instantly clogs an attacker's gills?

Hagfish slime chokes a predator so fast that attackers were filmed letting go at once; the same cameras caught these supposed scavengers hunting live fish themselves.

Which gas burst from Cameroon's Lake Nyos in 1986, suffocating more than 1,700 people in nearby villages?

Carbon dioxide from magma had built up unseen in the lake's deep water until it burst out all at once; being heavier than air, the cloud sank into the valleys and villages below.

Which sea-ice formation, nicknamed the 'finger of death', grows downward and freezes starfish and urchins on the seabed?

A brinicle forms when new sea ice sheds very cold, very salty water, which sinks and freezes the seawater around it into a hollow tube; one was first filmed growing in 2011.

Despite having at least 12 types of photoreceptor in each eye, mantis shrimp are surprisingly poor at what?

Telling colours apart: in tests they failed to separate hues that people distinguish easily, which suggests each receptor type simply flags its own colour, a quick shortcut that needs little brain work.

Which farm animal, nicknamed Mike, lived for 18 months after a Colorado farmer cut off its head in 1945?

A chicken named Mike survived because the axe missed his jugular vein and left most of his brain stem intact. His owner fed him milk and water with an eyedropper and took him on tour with sideshows.

The first mammal cloned from an adult cell, a sheep born in Scotland in 1996, was named after which singer?

Dolly Parton inspired the name because the sheep was cloned from a mammary gland cell, a joke the scientist Ian Wilmut owned up to. The lamb had three mothers: one gave the egg, one the DNA and one carried her.

Whose notebooks and papers from the 1890s are still so radioactive that they are kept in lead-lined boxes?

Marie Curie carried test tubes of radioactive isotopes in her pocket and kept them in her desk drawer, admiring their faint glow. Readers of her papers must wear protective clothing.

Apollo astronauts who tracked moondust into their cabins reported that the clinging powder smelled like what?

Spent gunpowder was Gene Cernan's verdict once the helmets came off, though the two substances are chemically nothing alike. The sharp, very adhesive grains clung to suits after every moonwalk.

Which African animal oozes a red 'blood sweat' that works as a sunscreen and slows bacterial growth?

The hippopotamus releases the fluid colourless, and it turns red-orange within minutes; it is neither blood nor sweat. Its two acidic pigments soak up ultraviolet light.

Engineer Percy Spencer is said to have hit on microwave cooking after a radar set melted what in his pocket?

A candy bar is the snack in the legend, which has Spencer standing in front of an active radar set while building magnetrons. He then tried popcorn kernels, making the first microwaved popcorn.

The world's first webcam was set up at the University of Cambridge in 1991 to keep watch on what?

A coffee pot in the Computer Laboratory was the target, sparing staff a wasted walk to an empty machine. The last of the pots shown online was later auctioned on eBay for £3,350.

Oobleck, the cornstarch-and-water goo that stiffens when struck, takes its name from a book by which author?

Dr. Seuss gave the goo its name in his book Bartholomew and the Oobleck. The kitchen version is a shear-thickening fluid: it flows under slow motions and briefly becomes a near solid on a sudden impact.

Several species of horned lizard repel canine predators by squirting an aimed stream of blood from where?

Their eyes are the launch point: the lizard restricts blood flow leaving its head until tiny vessels around the eyelids burst. The blood tastes foul to dog-like and feline hunters.

Which world, discovered in 1930, will not finish its first full orbit of the Sun since that discovery until 2178?

Pluto needs about 248 Earth years for one lap of the Sun. Clyde Tombaugh found it as a moving speck on photographic plates after nearly a year of searching.

Which metal, with a melting point just under 30 °C, turns to liquid in the warmth of a person's hand?

Gallium melts at 29.76 °C, well below body temperature, so a solid lump puddles in the palm. The figure is dependable enough to be used as a temperature reference point.

Which animals became the first sent into space, aboard a V-2 rocket launched by the United States in 1947?

Fruit flies made the trip from New Mexico in February 1947 and beat the first primates by two years. The aim was to learn what radiation at high altitude does to living things.

Which reptiles became the first living beings to circle the Moon, aboard the Soviet probe Zond 5 in September 1968?

Tortoises, two of them, flew in place of the cosmonauts the Soviets had first planned to send. The pair splashed down in the Indian Ocean and were recovered safely, changed mainly by hunger.

Which railroad foreman survived an 1848 blast that drove an iron rod clean through his skull and frontal lobe?

Phineas Gage lived another 12 years, but friends said the man who came back was 'no longer Gage'. His case became a landmark in linking the front of the brain to personality.

Whose brain was removed at autopsy in 1955 by pathologist Thomas Harvey and stored in two mason jars for decades?

Albert Einstein's brain weighed 1,230 g and was cut into pieces at a University of Pennsylvania lab. Whether he ever agreed to its being preserved is still disputed.

Which woman's cancer cells, taken without her knowledge in 1951, became the first immortal human cell line?

Henrietta Lacks died that October, yet her HeLa cells still multiply in laboratories around the world. Her family was not told the cell line existed until 1975.

Which Indonesian volcano's 1815 eruption caused the 'Year Without a Summer', when crops failed across New England?

Mount Tambora set off a volcanic winter that cooled Earth's land by about one degree Celsius. In the eastern United States a persistent 'dry fog' dimmed the sunlight and brought summer frosts.

The Carrington Event of 1859, the most intense geomagnetic storm recorded, knocked out which communication network?

The telegraph failed across Europe and North America as induced currents shocked operators and started fires in stations. Some operators unplugged their batteries and kept sending anyway.

Which 1908 explosion above Siberia flattened millions of trees across more than 2,150 square kilometres of forest?

The Tunguska event is put down to a meteor bursting in the air, as no fragment was ever formally identified. At the very centre the blast stripped the trees of branches but left them standing.

Variations in the smell-receptor gene OR6A2 make which leafy herb taste like soap to some people?

Cilantro, the leaf of the coriander plant, sets off a receptor that is highly sensitive to aldehyde chemicals. People without the aversion call the same leaves lemony and refreshing.

In which fish does the male carry up to 1,500 eggs in a brood pouch and release the fully formed young?

The seahorse female places her eggs in a pouch on the front of the male's tail, and he carries them for 9 to 45 days. The newborns emerge fully developed but very small.

Which marsupial has fingerprints so like a human's that even an electron microscope can struggle to separate them?

The koala evolved its fingerprints separately from primates, a case of convergent evolution. Ridged fingertips tend to turn up in animals whose lives involve climbing or grasping wet objects.

Which Australian songbird has been recorded mimicking chainsaws, car alarms, camera shutters and even crying babies?

The lyrebird works such imitations into its own song with great fidelity. A recording of one copying workmen and an electronic shooting game is kept in Australia's national sound archive.

The emerald jewel wasp stings which insect in the brain, then leads it to a burrow by one antenna like a leash?

The cockroach loses its escape reflex after the sting to the head, so the much smaller wasp can simply walk it home. The wasp then lays an egg between the roach's legs, and the larva feeds on its host.

Some tropical beaches owe much of their white sand to coral rock ground up and excreted by which reef fish?

Parrotfish bite off chunks of reef, digest the edible parts and pass the rest as sand. A single humphead parrotfish can produce 90 kg of it in a year.

Which plant holds the growth record, with some species gaining about 91 centimetres in a single day?

Bamboo can add almost 40 millimetres an hour, roughly a millimetre every 90 seconds. For all its woody height it is a grass, and giant bamboos are the largest members of that family.

The titan arum, whose giant bloom lasts barely a day or two, attracts pollinators with a powerful scent of what?

Rotting flesh is the smell, and the bloom warms itself to about 37 °C to pump it out through the night. Its stench chemicals include ones shared with limburger cheese, garlic and sweaty socks.

Between 18 and 35% of people inherit the 'photic' reflex, which makes them do what on looking at a bright light?

A sneeze, or a whole fit of sneezing, follows the glare in a trait jokingly labelled ACHOO syndrome. It is a real hazard for pilots, who meet bright sunlight just when they need precise control.

The sharp crack of which simple tool is a small sonic boom, made as its tip outruns the speed of sound?

A whip sends a ripple racing along its length, gathering speed until the tip breaks the sound barrier. Whips were probably the first human-made objects to do so.

Which aquatic mammal has only six neck vertebrae, one fewer than humans, giraffes and nearly every other mammal?

The manatee's odd count may be due to mutations in its homeotic genes, which help lay out the body plan. Almost every other mammal has exactly seven, however long or short its neck.

Who wrote and directed the 1985 teen comedy Weird Science, taking its title from a 1950s comic magazine?

John Hughes based the film on 'Made of the Future', a 1951 comic story by Al Feldstein. Critics split: Roger Ebert awarded it three stars, Gene Siskel one and a half.

Which actress played Lisa, the woman two teenagers conjure up with a computer in the 1985 film Weird Science?

Kelly LeBrock was a replacement: the first Lisa, a fellow model, left after two days over creative differences. Roger Ebert called LeBrock 'wonderful' in the role.

Which new wave band, fronted by Danny Elfman, wrote and performed the title song of the 1985 film Weird Science?

Oingo Boingo's singer wrote the song himself in the year he scored his first studio film. He has since composed more than 100 feature film scores.

Which glowing element did alchemist Hennig Brand discover around 1669 while heating residues of boiled-down urine?

Phosphorus dripped from his furnace-heated retort, burst into flames and set into a solid with a pale-green glow. Brand had been hunting the philosopher's stone, hoping to turn base metals into gold.

Yttrium, terbium, erbium and ytterbium are all named after Ytterby, a single village in which country?

Sweden's Ytterby, on an island in the Stockholm archipelago, is the richest single source of element discoveries in the world. Holmium, scandium and thulium were also first discovered there.

Earth's equatorial bulge makes the summit of which mountain, not Everest, the farthest point from the planet's centre?

Chimborazo, in Ecuador, peaks 2,585 m lower than Everest above sea level yet stands about 2.1 km further from Earth's centre. The planet is thicker at the Equator than from pole to pole.

Which ultralight solid, nicknamed 'frozen smoke', can be as much as 99.8% empty pores filled with air?

Aerogel began as a bet: in 1931 Samuel Kistler wagered he could replace the liquid in a jelly with gas without making it shrink. The result is a dry, rigid solid, despite its name.

Which household item did Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov use in 2004 to peel graphene from a piece of graphite?

Sticky tape lifted ever-thinner layers off the graphite, a trick now known as the Scotch tape technique. The humble method helped win the pair the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Which seashore mollusc scrapes rock with teeth that outdo spider silk as the strongest known biological material?

Limpet teeth reach tensile strengths of up to 6.5 gigapascals, against 4.5 for spider silk. The animal carries over 100 rows of them but feeds with only the outermost 10.

Over which South American lake does 'Catatumbo lightning' flash for about nine hours a night, 140 to 160 nights a year?

Maracaibo, in Venezuela, was so reliably lit that colonial sources called the storms the 'Lighthouse of Maracaibo'. The display stopped from January to March 2010, apparently because of drought.