Because of the convenience of acquiring knowledge, people nowadays seem to like to watch all kinds of information on their mobile phones in their spare time, which contains some interesting cold knowledge. After all, even if it deviates from our conventional understanding, there is still a lot of interesting information in this world. For example, do you know how long it takes for sunlight to reach our planet? Which country does this country with the shortest per capita height in the world belong to?
1. A spoonful of neutron star material weighs 6 billion tons
It is estimated that there are about 1 billion neutron stars in our galaxy. These stars are about 1.3-2.5 times the mass of our own sun. Neutron stars contain the densest known matter that can be directly observed. A spoonful of neutron star material weighs a whopping 6 billion tons, roughly the weight of Mount Everest. The pressure in a star's core is so high that most of the charged particles, electrons and protons, fuse together to form a star that consists mostly of uncharged particles called neutrons.
2. Chalk is made from trillions of tiny plankton fossils
Chalk is made from lime mud, but what many people don't know is that lime mud is formed from the microscopic skeleton of plankton. In fact, tiny single-celled algae known as coccolithophores have lived in Earth's oceans for 200 million years. Unlike other marine plants, they are covered with calcite. Just 100 million years ago, the conditions were just right, and coccolithophores gathered on the seafloor covered in a thick layer of white ooze. As more sediment built up on top, the pressure compressed the chondrite-forming rock, creating chalky deposits. Coccolithophores are just one of many prehistoric species preserved in fossil form.
3. It takes 8 minutes and 19 seconds for light to travel from the sun to the earth
In space, the speed of light reaches 300,000 kilometers per second. Even though that speed sounds pretty impressive, it would take a lot of time to cover the 150 million odd-numbered kilometers between us and the sun. However, the 8-plus minutes it takes for the sun's rays to reach Earth is actually quite short when compared to the 5.5 hours it takes for the sun's light to reach Pluto.
4. Drinking too much coffee may make your breasts smaller
An interesting study published in the British Journal of Cancer seems to have bad news for coffee-loving women. The study, which looked at the daily coffee intake of more than 300 women, found that women who drank three or more cups of coffee a day had breasts that were 17 percent smaller than those who drank no three cups of coffee. It all comes down to this, the researchers say: Too much caffeine has an effect on the body's hormones, which can affect the size of a woman's breasts.
5. The average height of Indonesians is the shortest in the world
According to data collected by The Telegraph from different sources around the world in 2017, although there are tall and short people in any country and region, on average, Indonesia's population has the shortest stature in the world. The average height of an adult is about 157cm. The Netherlands has the highest average height, with an average adult height of 180cm.
6. If you exclude all empty spaces in the atoms of the human body, then all human beings can be packed into the volume of a sugar cube
The atoms that make us look solid, but are actually more than 99.99999% empty. An atom consists of a small, dense nucleus surrounded by a cloud of electrons, distributed proportionally over a wide area. This is because electrons are not only particles, but act like waves. Electrons can only exist where the crests and troughs of these waves add up correctly. Moreover, the position of each electron is not distributed on a point, but distributed in a probability range. So they take up a lot of space.
7. A flea can accelerate faster than a space shuttle
A jumping flea can reach a dizzying height of 8 centimeters in a millisecond, more than 20 times faster than the space shuttle. The reason fleas have such powers is a stretchy, rubbery protein that stores and releases energy like a spring.
8. Boys and girls depend more on male genes
According to a study involving 927 family trees conducted by research scientist Corey Gellatly of Newcastle University in the UK, male genes play a very important role in having boys and girls. The conclusion is that a man is more likely to have sons if his parents have more sons, and conversely, he is more likely to have daughters if the remainder of his parents are mostly daughters. This ability appears to be genetic and appears to be associated only with males.