Time: "According to quantum theory, the shortest moment of time that can exist is known as Planck time, or 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 second."
Sleep: "A six-year study of a million adults showed that people who get only six to seven hours of sleep a night have a lower death rate than those who get eight hours. Maybe it's those late nights watching QVC."
Sex: "Marvin Gaye breaks it down in “Let’s Get It On”—what could be simpler? Psychologists at the University of Texas at Austin take a different view. They surveyed 444 people [pdf] and found 237 reasons why people have sex... Believe it or not, biologists cannot agree on the reason for sex either."
Fire: "Fire is an event, not a thing. Heating wood or other fuel releases volatile vapors that can rapidly combust with oxygen in the air. Most of the fuels we use derive their energy from trapped solar rays. In photosynthesis, sunlight and heat make chemical energy (in the form of wood or fossil fuel); So a bonfire is basically a tree running in reverse."
Alcohol: "According to the Drunken Monkey Hypothesis, our zest for alcoholic beverages derives from our distant ancestors’ impulse to seek the ripest, most energy-intensive fruits."
Water: "Before 2009, federal regulators did not require water bottlers to remove E. coli... Actually, E. coli doesn’t sound so bad. In 1999 the Natural Resources Defense Council found that one brand of spring water came from a well in an industrial parking lot near a hazardous waste dump."
Light: "In the confined space of an Easy-Bake oven, a 100-watt bulb can create a temperature of 325 degrees Fahrenheit."
Nothing: "In space, no one can hear you scream: Sound, a mechanical wave, cannot travel through a vacuum. Without matter to vibrate through, there is only silence... So what if Kramer falls in a forest? Luckily, electromagnetic waves, including light and radio waves, need no medium to travel through, letting TV stations broadcast endless reruns of Seinfeld, the show about nothing."
Skin: "Fingerprints increase friction and help grip objects. New World monkeys have similar prints on the undersides of their tails, the better to grasp as they swing from branch to branch." (Also, see "HANDS!")
Digestion: "Your stomach’s primary digestive juice, hydrochloric acid, can dissolve metal, but plastic toys that go down the hatch will come out the other end as good as new. (A choking hazard is still a choking hazard, though.)... Same with crayons, hair, and chewing gum—all of which will pass through within a few days, no matter what you’ve heard."
Obesity: "Stand by your man: More than a decade ago, Manuel Uribe, now weighing 1,200 pounds (the equivalent of five baby elephants) and bedridden for the past five years, was abandoned by his wife because she was frightened by his increasing size."
Death: "The trigger of death, in all cases, is lack of oxygen. Its decline may prompt muscle spasms, or the "agonal phase," from the Greek word agon, or contest."
Clouds: "When moist, warm air rises to a cooler elevation, water condenses onto microscopic “seeds” like dust, ash, or bacteria. Water + seeds + updraft = clouds."
Magnetism: "Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machines generate a field 60,000 times as intense as the earth’s to vibrate the hydrogen atoms in your body; in response, the atoms emit radio waves that are analyzed to produce a map of your insides."
Stress: "Stressed rats’ brains showed shrunken neurons in the dorsomedial striatum (an area associated with goal-directed behavior) and growth in the dorsolateral striatum (related to habitual behavior)."
Lab Accidents: "The world has scores of superpowerful particle accelerators. Last year, a fireball created at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Upton, New York, had the characteristics of a black hole. Physicists are reasonably sure that no such black holes could escape and consume Earth."
Money: "Filthy lucre: In a study last year, researchers found more cocaine residue on U.S. bills than on any other currency. Also found on money: staphylococcus bacteria and fecal matter."
Language: "Grüss dich, Dunkelheit, mein alter Freund. Three- to five-day-olds born into French-speaking families tend to cry with the rising intonation characteristic of French; babies with German-speaking parents cry with falling tones, much like spoken German. Infants may start learning language in the womb, it seems."
Genius: "In the 1990s Bell Labs found that its most valued and productive electrical engineers were not those endowed with genius but those who excelled in rapport, empathy, cooperation, persuasion, and the ability to build consensus."
Future: "In 2205 humans reconquer Earth and hire polymer engineers to replace melting glaciers with plastic substitutes that are identical to the originals in every way, except that they aren’t wet or cold."
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