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Turritopsis nutricula, the immortal jellyfish, is a hydrozoan whose medusa, or jellyfish, form can revert to the polyp stage after becoming sexually mature. It is the only known case of a metazoan capable of reverting completely to a sexually immature, colonial stage after having reached sexual maturity as a solitary stage.[2][3] It does this through the cell development process of transdifferentiation. Cell transdifferentiation is when the jellyfish "alters the differentiated state of the cell and transforms it into a new cell". In this process the medusa of the immortal jellyfish is transformed into the polyps of a new polyp colony.

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mellowparty said:
What ex spy?

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The dead one.






Read that thing about the redbacks as 'rednecks' at first. I was confused.

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closed veil said:
Marijuana grows naturally on 6 of 7 continents, Antartica is the one hold out.

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Looks like we need to start planting some MJ seeds in Antarctica then. 

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Johnny Depp said:
Polonium 210 that's what that ex spy was poisoned with a few years back

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Polonium 210, also conveniently found in cigarettes.

Also, this isn't really a scientific fact just something interesting I noticed: all the continents (if you exclude the north and south in the Americas) except Europe start and end with the letter A.

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Doc_T said:
Read that thing about the redbacks as 'rednecks' at first. I was confused.

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mellowparty said:
Science

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Im not trying to glorify my username at all

But i want to propose this soon to be factual concept as i truly believe it will embody our scientific understanding of the universe's creation.

Also because its 

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In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is a type of matter hypothesized to account for a large part of the total mass in the universe. Dark matter cannot be seen directly with telescopes; evidently it neither emits nor absorbs light or other electromagnetic radiation at any significant level.[1] Instead, its existence and properties are inferred from its gravitational effects on visible matter, radiation, and the large scale structure of the universe. Dark matter is estimated to constitute 84% of the matter in the universe and 23% of the mass-energy.[2]

Dark matter came to the attention of astrophysicists due to discrepancies between the mass of large astronomical objects determined from their gravitational effects, and mass calculated from the "luminous matter" they contain; such as stars, gas and dust. It was first postulated by Jan Oort in 1932 to account for the orbital velocities of stars in the Milky Way and Fritz Zwicky in 1933 to account for evidence of "missing mass" in the orbital velocities of galaxies in clusters. Subsequently, other observations have indicated the presence of dark matter in the universe, including the rotational speeds of galaxies, gravitational lensing of background objects by galaxy clusters such as the Bullet Cluster, and the temperature distribution of hot gas in galaxies and clusters of galaxies. According to consensus among cosmologists, dark matter is composed primarily of a new, not yet characterized, type of subatomic particle.[3][4] The search for this particle, by a variety of means, is one of the major efforts in particle physics today.[5]

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The snap can also produce sonoluminescence from the collapsing cavitation bubble. As it collapses, the cavitation bubble reaches temperatures of over 5,000 K (4,700 °C).[15] In comparison, the surface temperature of the sun is estimated to be around 5,800 K (5,500 °C). The light is of lower intensity than the light produced by typical sonoluminescence and is not visible to the naked eye. It is most likely a by-product of the shock wave with no biological significance. However, it was the first known instance of an animal producing light by this effect. It has subsequently been discovered that another group of crustaceans, the mantis shrimp, contains species whose club-like forelimbs can strike so quickly and with such force as to induce sonoluminescent cavitation bubbles upon impact.[16]

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Doc_T said:
What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?

Answer here: http://what-if.xkcd.com/1/

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drewo said:
The platypus is the most poisonous mammal.

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drewo said:
The platypus is the most poisonous mammal.

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boredcertified said:
It is impossible to fold ANY size piece of paper completely more than six times

It is impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.

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Mythbusteers busted the hell out of both of these.
Adam sneezed with his eyes open in front of the high-speed camera.

Edit-

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How about a mathematical fact.  Point nine repeating equals one, exactly. 

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An upper bound and a close approximation of the actual paper width needed for alternate-direction folding is



For single-direction folding (using a long strip of paper), the exact required strip length L is



where t represents the thickness of the material to be folded, W is the width of a square piece of paper, L is the length of a paper piece to be folded in only one direction and n represents the number of folds desired.

These equations show that, in order to fold anything in half, it must be times longer than its thickness, and that, depending on how something is folded, the amount its length decreases with each fold differs.

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Britney Gallivan, Wikipedia

just click on the link to see the equations better.

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boredcertified said:
Winning!!! Lol
Pm me I will get my list for ya
I don't watch television... That was cool
BC

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starfire_xes said:
In Intel's current 22nm (nanometer) process for CMOS transistors, the metallized gate layers of the transistors have a thickness of about 5 atoms.

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Researchers from the University of Alberta in and the National Institute for Nanotechnology in Canada created the sharpest object ever made. The new nano object is tungsten needle tapering down to about the thickness of single atom. The breakthrough might help improve future scanning tunneling microscopes.


The needle, made by Moh'd Rezeq in the group lead by Professor Robert Wolkow at the University of Alberta and the National Institute for Nanotechnology, was initially much blunter. The needle was exposed to pure nitrogen atmosphere which made it thinner and thinner. Tungsten is chemically highly reactive and the nitrogen is used to roughen the tungsten surface. But at the tip, where the electric field created by applying a voltage to the tungsten is at its maximum, N2 molecules are driven away. This process reaches an equilibrium condition in which the point is very sharp.

Furthermore, what N2 is present near the tip helps to stabilize the tungsten against further chemical degradation. Indeed, the resultant needle is stable up to temperatures of 900 degrees Celsius even after 24 hours of exposure to air.

The probe tips used in scanning tunneling microscopes (STMs), even though they produce atomic-resolution pictures of atoms sitting on the top layer of a solid material, are not themselves atomically thin. Rather their radius of curvature at the bottom is typically 10 nm or more.

According to Wolkow says that although a narrower tip will be useful in the construction of STM arrays (you can pack more tips into a small area; and a wide array might even permit movies of atomic motions) the spatial resolution won't improve thereby. The real benefit of the sharp tungsten tips, he believes, will be as superb electron emitters. Being so slender, they would emit electrons in a bright, narrow, stable stream.

The picture shows a field ion microscope (FIM) image of a very sharp tungsten needle. The small round features on the image are individual atoms. The lighter colored elongated features are traces captured as atoms moved during the imaging process (approximately 1 second).

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starfire_xes said:
Here is an undisputed fact:  Half the people graduating from US high school are below the mean....

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Only if the population is strictly normal, which it cant be exactly...

The median is what you are looking for.

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DieCommie said:
How about a mathematical fact.  Point nine repeating equals one, exactly. 

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Can you explain that please or give a link.  I don't understand why .9 repeating would be equal to 1 unless you're are rounding up.


Wish I had something great to contribute but I don't - I do have these googled facts though...

The age of the universe is the time elapsed since the Big Bang. The best current estimate of the age of the universe is 13.75 ± 0.11 billion years[1][2] (4.339 ± 0.035 ×1017 seconds) within the Lambda-CDM concordance model.[1] The uncertainty range of 0.11 billion years has been obtained by the agreement of a number of scientific research projects, such as microwave background radiation measurements by Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and other probes.

The age of the Earth is 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years (4.54 × 109 years ± 1%).[1][2][3] This age is based on evidence from radiometric age dating of meteorite material and is consistent with the ages of the oldest-known terrestrial and lunar samples.

Which means if other planets do have life on them it could potentially be millions or billions of years more evolved than life on earth  

If we discover this life it will be the next copernicus style paradigm shift for the human race - to realise our place in the universe.

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Can you explain that please or give a link.  I don't understand why .9 repeating would be equal to 1 unless you're are rounding up.

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I'll tackle this one. It took me forever to believe it too, but its true and a lot of upper level math depends on/uses it. There are two ways to prove it that I know about and I'll present both.

1) We know that 1/3 is equal to .3 repeating. Now multiply it by 3 and you get 3/3 equal to .9 repeating, hence 1=.9 repeating.

2) Let x=.1 repeating. Multiply x by 10 and you get 1.1 repeating. Now subtract 1x from that and you get 9x is equal to 1. However, 9 times .1 repeating is .9 repeating, therefore 1 equals .9 repeating.

I hope that makes sense. If it doesn't I'll explain it some more

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Reports indicate that the soon-to-be-deployed scanner is so powerful that it can detect everything from “what you had for breakfast to the adrenaline level in your body.”

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http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/12090-dhs-to-deploy-new-scanners-that-secretly-search-from-50-yards-away

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Shroomism said:
A dolphin's cerebral cortex and frontal lobe is ~40% bigger than a human's

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abltsandwich said:
less evolved

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MorphinTime said:

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abltsandwich said:
less evolved

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I think all species currently in existence are equally evolved.

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DieCommie said:

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MorphinTime said:

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abltsandwich said:
less evolved

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I think all species currently in existence are equally evolved.

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How so?  I suppose you are using time to measure 'how evolved' a species is.  But time is not what evolves a species, iterated reproduction and mutation does.  A better way to quantify how evolved something is, is to count the iterations of reproduction or count the changes in DNA from mutation.  For example, early primates and crocodiles have been around for a couple hundred million years.  But look at the changes that primates have gone through while crocodiles didnt change much at all.  They each evolved for the same amount of time, but one changed much more than the other.

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DieCommie said:

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MorphinTime said:

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abltsandwich said:
less evolved

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I think all species currently in existence are equally evolved.

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How so?  I suppose you are using time to measure 'how evolved' a species is.  But time is not what evolves a species, iterated reproduction and mutation does.  A better way to quantify how evolved something is, is to count the iterations of reproduction or count the changes in DNA from mutation.  For example, early primates and crocodiles have been around for a couple hundred million years.  But look at the changes that primates have gone through while crocodiles didnt change much at all.  They each evolved for the same amount of time, but one changed much more than the other.

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