• Question: what is your favourite semi - useless piece of science information (something like trivia)

    Asked by anon-285356 to Rob, Megan on 3 Mar 2021.
    • Photo: Megan Metcalfe

      Megan Metcalfe answered on 3 Mar 2021:

      Well, it’s related to my job, but I think a cool fact is that during periods of low sea level (linked to the different Ice Ages) much of the North Sea would have been dry land, so you would have been able to walk all the way from the UK to mainland Europe! We know that people and animals were there because we find things like flint tools and mammoth teeth on the seabed.

Comments

  • Photo: Felicity

    Felicity commented on :

    Hi George, this is my favourite fact: there are 100 trillion bacteria (microbes) living in your gut which is a bigger number than the human cells in your entire body! You could think that makes us more microbe than human….we’re essentially walking microbial planets!

  • Photo: Jo

    Jo commented on :

    My favourite bit of science trivia is the fact that most people can (fairly easily) tell the difference between the sounds of hot water versus cold water being poured. There’s also the fact that most of us don’t even realise that we can do it! When you tell people they can do this they might not even believe you. Can you tell the difference? Have a listen on Steve Mould’s video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri_4dDvcZeM
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    The fact that I can easily tell the two sounds apart means that, throughout my life, whenever I’ve heard hot or cold water being poured my brain has been paying attention to the sounds and working out the difference – even though I’ve not consciously noticed it myself. I didn’t know my brain was doing that (and now I wonder what else it’s been getting up to!).
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    Fans of the radio show The Archers complained to the show when they used cold water instead of hot when re-creating a ‘someone is making tea’ water-pouring sound effect https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/may/24/the-archers-tour-bbc-mailbox-birmingham-radio-4
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    This certainly seems like a fairly useless piece of information but it might turn out that it tells us something interesting about the ways our ears and brains process sound, and also the way our brains learn. I suppose it tells us that it’s possible to learn something without even knowing that we’ve learned it!
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    If I’m allowed another favourite bit of semi-useless trivia it’s that the ‘seismic velocity’* of Moon rock (and therefore its density) is more similar to cheese than it is to rocks found on Earth. I’m not sure this information is of much use at all – other than perhaps as a warning to check other information and evidence first, before we come to the wrong conclusion that the Moon might be made of cheese 😉
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    Further reading: “Improbable science: The moon ‘sounds’ like cheese, is still not cheese” https://imgur.com/gallery/wNa0IWo
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    *Seismic velocity = the speed at which a shockwave (e.g. from an earthquake, or from hitting something) moves through something (like our planet, or a bit of cheese). The speed is affected by the density of the material or substance.
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    Jo