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Fact of the day: Ionized positive hydrogen is just a lone proton, so why don't we call it a rouge proton? This is because it's still the atom of hydrogen which can have isotopes like deuterium and tritium, which is a lone proton with one and two neutrons respectively. Second fact, it is deuterium and tritium that is needed to undergo fusion for hydrogen to make helium, that or you get some rouge neutrons in the mix.
Fun Fact: When a nuclear power station explodes, this is due to a hydrogen gas build up caused by the heat from the hot and/or melting down reactor. The water and oxygen get separated from the heat and radiation overtime and begin building up pressure in the system. Generation 1, 2, and (maybe) 3 nuclear power plants manually pump this gas out of the chambers, but if the pumps fail, the gas builds up and eventually leading to rupture, and due to the high amounts of oxygen and hydrogen, a flash spark can be created causing the typical explosion. Generation 4 and 5 nuclear plants don't use pumps but rather a passive pressure valve system, thus preventing these kinds of explosions in the future.
Fact of the day: There is a fish known as the Blobfish (Psychrolutes marcidus) which lives deep in the ocean. This fish is famous for looking like a a hideous blob; however, this is caused by decompression damage as the fish is meant to be under enormous pressure in order to survive, so in their natural habitat the blobfish looks smooth and like any other fish you'd expect to see.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychrolutes_marcidus
Fact of the FEESH: Viperfish are a deepsea fish that live between 80m and 1,520m, coming up to the shallower depths at nigh. These fish have long fangs that are too large to fit inside their own mouth, so in order to close their jaws, their teeth can fold back into their head. The Viperfish uses an elongates dorsal fin with photophores on the end to bait in pray, along with ventral photophores. If the Viperfish catches it's prey, the long fangs pierce the animal, killing it for the Viperfish to swallow it whole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viperfish
https://youtu.be/YdMjfkgk1Lg
Fact of the Day: A location in Antarctica known as Blood Falls contains a rather alien ecosystem within it's icy interior. This ecosystem lives inside the Fall's salt water and has access to little oxygen. The micro-bacterial organisms (of which there are 17) that live in these harsh conditions have evolved a metabolic process that uses sulphur and ferrous (iron), this means, that instead of using oxygen reacting with carbon such as most life on Earth, these little fellas effectively breath sulphur and iron ions to live.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Falls
Fact of the day: Forward swept wings are wings built with the end tips leading in front of the rest of the wing. This channels airflow over the whole edge of the wing creating far greater lift for the plan, at the cost of increased drag. These wings are also rather unstable due to how much lift they can create for themselves at high speeds, leading them to be ripped off if you fly too quickly; however, with the introduction with modern materials we're now over coming this issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-swept_wing
Fact of the day: Kraft Dinner is considered a de facto national dish of Canada due to how many Canadians eat it, and how it's part of the holy trinity of Canadian foods: The Tim Horton's Doughnut, the A&W Teen Burger, and Kraft Dinner. It's also different in Canada and the rest of the world from the U.S. version of Kraft Dinner which has more artificial colouring and flavours.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraft_Dinner
Fact of the day: Crab bodies have evolved on several separate occasions from multiple crustacean species and families that are not of the standard Crab family. This has happened to many times scientists have coined the term Carcinisation to describe it; does this mean the perfect body is the crab body?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation
Fact of the day: There is a squid that can launch itself out of the water and use it's fins to fly up to 30m at a time, they do this to evade predators and to use less energy while they migrate. They're most commonly found around Japan, which has given them the nickname of Japanese Flying Squid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_flying_squid
Fact of the day: In the cold lands of Canada, Northern Europe, and Siberia, there are large swaths of Bogland (known as Muskeg in Canada and Alaska) that are absolutely horrendous to build and move through. During the winter, the ground freezes to the point it's harder than rock, but during warm days, it thaws out and becomes a sinking swamp that can swallow up entire vehicles, which then freezes over once it's cold enough, trapping the swallowed object.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muskeg
Attack of the Killer Bog!
Nitralia and SteamPunkFishTree
Fact of the Day: In a Battletech* large scale table top game that had over two dozen players partake in it, and which would be written into the game's lore, one member decided to make a custom machine that got approved by the game masters. This custom machine was a simple Urbanmech (the cheapest and one of the slowest mechs in the game) with a single nuclear missile launcher, which he then used to nuke people several tables away.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleTech
Fact of the Day: There things called Thermobaric weapons that are mostly fuel (which gives them the other name of Fuel Air Bomb). These weapons have a two step detonation, step one the canister separates and spreads the fuel, having it mix with the air, step two the charge detonates and ignites the air itself. This causes a massive fire ball explosion that has been noted to suck the air out of the environment (including ripping lungs out or animals) and being so hot that the ground beneath the blast it turned to glass. Some weapons that utilize this are the U.S. Mother of All Bombs, the Russian Father of All Bombs and TOS-1 Burantino.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermobaric_weapon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOS-1
(I find that Russia seems to have a massive love for this kind of weapon.)
Fact of the day: Quantium teleportation is the observed entanglement of two particles, although typically photons, by which if one action is taken upon one of the entangled, the opposite can be observed happening on the other. A simple example of this is if you imagine each particle or photon has a north and south poll based on the axis they spin, typically if you observe a photon it's state would collapse from a waveform to its particle form with it either being in an up state or down state (this is rather simplistic for what's going on and is the spark notes of it) and depending upon what you observe, its partner would have the opposite state. What this effectively means is that the information of particles can be transferred instantaneously and faster than light. No matter is transferred, only information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation
Interestingly, there is an experiment that used quantum teleportation to change the outcome of something that already happened.
https://youtu.be/8ORLN_KwAgs
This also allows unbreakable encryption methods that utilize two sets of entangled particles (again, namely photons since they are super easy to entangle) to create an access key that can be used to unlock access to encrypted files. How this is done, is that (let's say a bank is sending you information that you requested) sends you a packet of these entangled particles are sent to you and your computer reads them out and communicates this with the bank, if their set of the entangled particles reads out the same information, then your line of communication is secure, if it shows that the information states of the particles changed, it means that someone had intercepted your data and thus the line of communication is flagged as unsafe. (Although I'm not well versed on this topic so I recommend to take what I say with a mountain of salt.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cryptography
Mega FAAAACTS!!
Fact of the day: Quantum Tunnelling is the process of subatomic particles effectively "teleporting" through very thin bits of matter. This happens because at this scale, all matter can technically be seen as an energy wave, this energy wave when pushed against something slightly phases through an object giving a relative ratio based chance that the particle may shift its existence on the other side of a barrier.
This has real world implications with computer processors where, now that they have gotten so small, they are now suffering the issue of quantum tunnelling by the electrons that power them, sending out false signals. This means we've effectively gotten to the maximum capabilities with traditional computational chips.
Quantum Tunnelling also plays a role in nuclear decay and the fusion in stars. For nuclear decay, there is a small chance at any given moment that a neutron will leave the atom it is housed in, this is has only been observed in isotopes and atoms with a mass greater than Iron.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunnelling
Fact of the day: The Ocean Sunfish can weigh between 247kg and 1,000kg when they're an adult, but don't let this fool you, they are capable of high bursts of speed with the use of their anal fin, allowing them to jump several metres out of the water; however, they typically lazily cruise about at a speed of 3.7km/h. When Sunfish reproduce, they do so with egg clutches of up to 300,000,000 in an instance. Even though their mouth is the size of a human head, they only eat jellies and plastic bags, which lead to their deaths. The Sunfish is also the largest bony fish on Earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_sunfish
Fact of the day: King Tut's gems are made of glass that predates the formation of Egypt. This indicates that they were made by a meteor impact in the sahara. Also, in the black stone inside the Kaaba, it is made of a strong heat treated glass, this is also thought to be created by a meteor impact.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5196362.stm
Fact of the day: The 22nd Polish Artillery Supply Corp's logo is that of a bear holding a shell. That bear is named Wojtek (he who loves war) and was an actual bear that served in the 22nd Artillery Supply Corp. He was gifted to the Polish soldiers by a Syrian when they were marching through the region. During the battle of Monte Casino, Wojtek helped the soldiers in lifting and carrying supply crates to the artillery pieces that eventually levelled and destroyed the monument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wojtek_(bear)
Fact of the day: The Russian made TT pistol was chambered for 7.62x25mm which was also used by the PPSh smg. Due to how these bullets were made in the USSR, the design and powder used in these bullets made them rather powerful; this allowed these Russian guns to take german ammunition of the same calibre, but the germans couldn't use these rounds as their weapons would explode upon use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TT_pistol
Fact of the day: During the meeting between the allied powers to discuss what to do with the now conquered Axis powers, the U.S. and U.K. used the the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings to gain more influence during the conference to leverage a better deal, threatening the U.S.S.R. that if they escalate, they'll get nuked next. The thing that the U.S.S.R. didn't know at the time, was that the Allies only had two nuclear weapons, both of which were used on Japan.
Fact of the day: Most species of shark breath through a process called ram ventilation; this means that thy must continuously swim in order to breath and not asphyxiate. Due to this, shark species have been known to swim even while they're asleep, with other species learning where ocean currents can flow over their gills for them.
Fact of the day: Sharks and other big fishes have been noted to have high internal body temperatures, which is odd due to them being cold blooded. It was then discovered that sharks and these large fishes have counterflow heat exchange blood vessels that pump cold blood into the core of the body that gets warmed by out going blood. The internal blood is warmed, not by the metabolism, like in warm blooded creatures, but by the active use of their internal swimming muscles, which, by staying warm, have a higher energy cost, but are far more responsive and powerful, whereas the rest of the body stays cold and thus has a lower energy cost.
Fact of the day: Ever wonder why insects are so smaLL? Ever wonder why they didn't get huge? Well in the Permian, there were huge insects, such as the largest the Meganeuropsis permiana a huge crow sized dragonfly, other species of bugs included a millipede that was over 2 metres long! This was caused by the huge amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere at the time, 23 vol % of the total atmosphere, or 115 % of the modern level of O2. This is a theory that was initially dismissed by the scientific community but has been gaining more and more traction in modern times for insect size limitations. We think this O2 link with size has something to do with how bugs breath, being that they breath directly through its trachea, rather than having lungs which are more efficient. Another part of this theory now includes that a lack of predators may have allowed these creatures to have gotten so large.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meganisoptera#Size
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meganeuropsis
https://entomology.unl.edu/scilit/largest-extinct-insect
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