SCIENCE FACTS

1. A human organ that no-one knew about has been hiding in plain sight all
this time. Called mesentery, it connects the intestine to the abdomen and is
believed to perform important functions for the body ranging from helping the
heart to aiding the immune system.
2. The Earth appears to have a whole new underground continent
called Zealandia. The discovery itself isn’t new – some geologists have been
arguing for its existence for many years. However, in 2017 a team of scientists
concluded Zealandia fulfils all the requirements to be considered a drowned
continent.

3. Pugs’ cute little flat faces are the result of a genetic mutation. Their features
have been strongly linked to a gene variant called SMOC2.
4. For the first time in human history, gene-editing has been performed to fix
a mutation for an inherited disease in embryos. Using a powerful tool
called Crispr-Cas9, scientists successfully altered the DNA in defective embryos
so they were no longer programmed to develop congenital heart failure.
5. Your appendix might not be a useless organ after all. Research suggests it
might play a role in the immune system as a secondary defensive organ, acting as a
“safe house” for helpful gut bacteria.
6. Giant penguins about the size of a grown man waddled around New
Zealand about 59 million years ago.
7. The world’s smallest fidget spinner is 100 microns wide. It is smaller than the
width of a human hair and is barely visible to the naked eye.
8. Lungs do more than help us breathe – a surprising discovery has found they
also make blood. The organ, present in mammals, is believed to produce more
than 10 million platelets (tiny blood cells) per hour.
9. A new state of matter exists (alongside solid, liquid and gaseous states) and
it is known as time crystals.Created in the lab, the outrageously hard-to-grasp
time crystals are structures that repeat periodically in time rather than space,
potentially defying the laws of physics.
10. Great apes, including chimpanzees and orangutans, have absolutely no
appreciation of music whatsoever. Research has shown they can’t tell the
difference between Beethoven and Bieber, and that music is all just meaningless
sound to them.
11. The dinosaur family tree may have to be redrawn for the first time in 130
years. New evidence revealed the two categories of dinosaurs – the lizard-hipped
meat-eaters (like the T. Rex) and plant-loving bird-hipped beasts (like the
stegosaurus) – should actually be grouped together, making you question
everything you ever learnt about these extinct animals in school.
12. Humans accidentally created a protective bubble around Earth. Decades
of use of very low frequency (VLF) radio communications have resulted in an
artificial cocoon that could help protect the planet from solar flares and radiation
particles.
13. Precious metals on earth, such as gold and platinum, may have originated
in the stars. Scientists confirmed this after detecting a titanic collision of two
super-dense neutron stars 130 million light years from Earth.
14. The Kepler-90 star system has as many planets as our own solar system,
making us tied for the most planets revolving around a single star known so
far. Combining data from the Kepler Space Telescope with Google’s artificial
intelligence system, Nasa uncovered an eighth planet – called Kepler-90i – that
astronomers missed in their previous analysis.

15. Pandas are black and white because their patterns serve as a combination
of communication and camouflage, according to a study published
in Behavioral Ecology.
16. The moon once had an atmosphere. Recent tests from lunar samples
collected by the Apollo astronauts reveal volcanic eruptions that occurred about
four billion years ago released trillions of tonnes of gas. Since the gases were being
produced faster than they could escape into space, an atmosphere was formed. The
gases eventually became lost to space.
17. Scientists may finally have an answer to why eggs come in different shapes
and, apparently, it is all down to the bird’s flying ability. It seems the best fliers
are the ones that lay more “pointy” or elliptical shaped eggs while the others are
more likely to lay rounded or oval-shaped eggs.
18. It is theoretically possible to travel back and forth in time. Two physicists
developed a mathematical model for a time machine based on Einstein’s theory of
relativity (which was proven in 2015), that gravitational fields are caused by
distortions in the fabric of space and time. What’s holding us back is that the
technology that can physically bend this space-time fabric hasn’t been invented
yet.

19. Scientists at Harvard have stored a GIF animation of a galloping horse in

the DNA of bacteria, using the Crispr-Cas9 tool.
20. Bees have been shown to understand the concept of zero. Scientists
discovered this after training the insects to count shapes, following previous
research that revealed they can count to four.
21. Humans are still evolving. Researchers tracking eight million mutations found
that a number of genes – such as the one that predisposes you to Alzheimer’s
disease – are gradually being filtered out of human DNA.
22. There are extraterrestrial dust particles on your rooftop. They are called
micrometeorites and are about 400 microns in size. More than 100 billion
micrometeorites are believed to fall to Earth each year.