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Briefly Curious

@brieflycurious_

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The most interesting thing you'll learn today ๐Ÿง  New reel daily
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cats landing on their feet is not luck, it is straight up physics cheating drop a cat upside down and it flips itself right side up in mid air, with literally nothing to push against. no wall, no floor, nothing. it just twists and lands like it planned the whole thing. here is how it actually works. a balance organ in the inner ear spots which way is down in a split second. then the cat bends in the middle and twists its front and back halves in opposite directions, so it can turn over without pushing off anything. about thirty flexible back bones and no working collar bone let the front half spin ninety degrees while the back barely turns. and falling is built for it too. a cat tops out near sixty miles an hour, about half a human, and spreads out wide like a tiny parachute to slow the drop. one famous vet study found ninety percent of cats survived high falls, but it only counted the cats who actually made it to a vet, so it is definitely not a guarantee. so be honest, could a human ever learn this trick, or are we just built too stiff? #facts #didyouknow #cats #reels by @brieflycurious_
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3 hours ago
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the moon illusion is actually wild because the moon never gets bigger at all it looks absolutely huge when it rises over rooftops and trees, then it climbs up and looks like a little coin. same moon, same night, same size. if you photograph it low and high with the same zoom, the disc is literally the same width in both shots. the part that broke my brain: the horizon moon is actually farther away from you, by about one whole earth radius, so it should look slightly smaller, not bigger. and the atmosphere is not magnifying it either, it actually squashes the low moon a tiny bit flat. what is probably happening is your brain treats the sky like a flattened dome, so stuff near the horizon feels way farther away, and when something looks that far away but still looks that big, your brain decides it must be giant. scientists still argue about the exact reason though, nobody has fully settled it. you can test it yourself next moonrise, hold a coin at arm's length and cover the moon, then do it again when it is high. same cover both times. so be honest, which one messes with your head more, the giant horizon moon or the tiny overhead coin? #facts #didyouknow #moon #reels by @brieflycurious_
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a day ago
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you're not touching your phone right now. you're hovering above it. every atom in your hand is almost completely empty โ€” blow one up to the size of a stadium and its center would be a pea. the reason your hand stops anyway is the cloud of negative electrons around every atom. push two clouds together and they shove back hard. that shove is all touch has ever been. there's a backup rule too. no two electrons can share the same spot โ€” the pauli exclusion principle. it's what holds up floors, stops your hand, and keeps matter from collapsing into itself. so be honestโ€ฆ have you ever actually held someone's hand, or have you just hovered really close to it your whole life? #facts #didyouknow #physics #reels by @brieflycurious_
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2 days ago
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popcorn doesn't pop from the outside โ€” it detonates from the inside like a tiny pressure bomb ๐Ÿฟ each kernel is a sealed pressure chamber with about 14% water locked inside a nearly waterproof shell. heat it fast and that water turns to superheated steam, climbing past 9x normal air pressure. at around 180ยฐc the shell gives up and the kernel turns inside out in a fraction of a second. and the pop sound? it's not the shell cracking โ€” scientists filming at 2900 frames per second found it's the steam escaping after the crack. also, a cracked shell is why you always end up with a few sad unpopped old maids at the bottom of the bowl. did you think the sound was the shell breaking? be honest ๐Ÿ‘‡ #facts #didyouknow #popcorn #reels by @brieflycurious_
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3 days ago
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your brain literally can't feel pain โ€” so what IS brain freeze?? it's called sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia (yeah, try saying that with a frozen mouth). when something ice cold hits the roof of your mouth, the blood vessels back there freak out โ€” they clamp shut, then spring back open. that rebound fires a pain signal up your trigeminal nerve, but your brain misreads the address and you feel it in your forehead instead of your throat. that's referred pain. fastest fix: press your warm tongue flat against the roof of your mouth. calms everything down in seconds. and wild bonus โ€” doctors think migraines might hijack that exact same nerve wiring. so be honest โ€” are you a chugger or a sipper? ๐Ÿ‘‡ #facts #didyouknow #brainfreeze #reels by @brieflycurious_
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4 days ago
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there's a lake in tanzania that turns animals to stone ๐Ÿชจ okay, not exactly โ€” the lake doesn't strike them dead. birds and bats found dead on the shores of lake natron get coated in natron salt (the same stuff egyptians used for mummification) and preserved like statues. nobody knows exactly how they die โ€” maybe the mirror-like water confuses them. the water can hit ph 10.5, almost as caustic as ammonia, and 140 degrees fahrenheit. it sits next to ol doinyo lengai, the only active volcano on earth with sodium-rich lava. at its reddest the lake glows crimson from salt-loving microbes โ€” the same microbes that make flamingos pink. and here's the twist: this lake of death is where three quarters of the world's lesser flamingos hatch. their legs are basically armored in leathery skin, and the caustic water keeps every predator away. would you visit a lake like this? #facts #didyouknow #lakenatron #reels by @brieflycurious_
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5 days ago
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this metal melts in your hand. literally. gallium (ga, element 31) has a melting point of 29.76ยฐc, which is lower than your body temp โ€” so a solid chunk just liquefies the longer you hold it the famous party trick: a spoon made of gallium that disappears when you stir hot tea with it here's the scary bit โ€” liquid gallium destroys aluminum. it creeps between the grains of the metal until it turns brittle and falls apart, which is why it's restricted on aircraft and in 1871 mendeleev predicted an element exactly like this (he called it eka-aluminium) before it was even discovered. today gallium is in leds and semiconductors everywhere science is wild. what's the craziest element you know? ๐Ÿ‘‡ #facts #didyouknow #science #gallium #reels by @brieflycurious_
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6 days ago
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the reason you can't tickle yourself is kind of rude tbh go ahead, try it. run your fingers across your own ribs as hard as you want โ€” nothing. hand the job to someone else and it's instant chaos. the touch is identical. what changed is who ordered it. here's what's happening: every time you move, your brain photocopies the command and sends it to your cerebellum. that little structure predicts exactly what the touch will feel like, then subtracts its guess from the real sensation. self-tickle gets deleted before it even registers. a surprise touch carries no prediction to cancel, so it hits you at full strength. back in 1998, researchers at university college london watched this live on brain scanners. self-tickle = quiet touch centers. someone else's tickle = those same areas lighting up. your brain does this with your own touch all day long, by the way. clothes on your skin, your tongue in your mouth โ€” all quietly turned down so your brain can save its attention for the unpredictable stuff. but scientists found the loophole. delay your own touch by a fraction of a second and the prediction breaks โ€” suddenly, self-tickling works. your brain never saw it coming. have you ever tried to tickle yourself just to prove this wrong? be honest ๐Ÿ˜ญ save this one, it's a great party trick explanation #reels #psychologyfacts #didyouknow #brain by @brieflycurious_
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7 days ago
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boston was hit by a 25-foot wave of molasses in 1919 2.3 million gallons burst from a steel tank in the north end and tore through the streets at 35 miles an hour. 21 people died, 150 were hurt. the tank leaked from day one. neighborhood kids showed up with buckets to catch the free molasses dripping down its sides. a freak warm spell did the rest โ€” the steel couldn't take it and the tank ripped open at lunchtime. harvard scientists later figured out why it was so deadly: the cold thickened the molasses and trapped people inside it. a hundred years later, locals say the north end still smells like molasses on hot days. had you ever heard of this? what's the strangest true story you know? ๐Ÿ‘‡ #history #weirdhistory #boston #reels by @brieflycurious_
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8 days ago
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a planet that looks like earth but rains glass sideways?? meet hd 189733b, a hot jupiter about 63 light-years from us. it's roughly the size of jupiter and glows this deep cobalt blue from space โ€” the exact same blue as earth. except earth's blue is oceans and this one's is a scorching atmosphere full of silicates, the raw material of glass. hubble measured its true color back in 2013 โ€” the first planet outside our solar system to ever get its color measured, which is wild when you think about it. here's the scary part. it sits so close to its star that its year is only about two days long. dayside temps hit nearly 2000ยฐf. the silicate particles melt into molten glass droplets, and winds at 4,500+ mph (seven times the speed of sound!!) whip them sideways. nonstop. that's the forecast every single day. an earth-colored world with the worst weather in the galaxy. space is unhinged. what's the wildest planet fact you know? ๐Ÿ‘‡ #facts #didyouknow #space #reels by @brieflycurious_
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9 days ago
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the octopus is basically an alien that lives in our oceans ๐Ÿ™ it's a cephalopod โ€” a boneless mollusk โ€” and the smartest invertebrate on earth. two-thirds of its neurons are in its arms, which means each arm can taste, touch, and problem-solve on its own without checking in with the brain. it has three hearts and blue, copper-based blood that grabs oxygen better in the deep ocean. the main heart stops beating when it swims, which is why octopuses mostly crawl along the seafloor instead. it can change color and texture in a fraction of a second to vanish into its surroundings, squeeze through any gap bigger than its beak โ€” the only hard part of its body โ€” and it's got nine brains. well, one central brain and eight mini-brains, one at the base of each arm. what's the weirdest deep sea creature you know? #facts #didyouknow #ocean by @brieflycurious_
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10 days ago
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honey is the only food humans eat that never goes bad ๐Ÿฏ bees make it by collecting flower nectar and fanning it with their wings to evaporate the water out, then sealing it with wax. what they're left with is basically sugar with almost no water โ€” around 17% โ€” plus natural acidity and an enzyme that produces hydrogen peroxide. that combo makes it a place where bacteria literally cannot survive. that's why archaeologists have opened 3,000-year-old egyptian tombs and found honey still perfectly edible. and if yours crystallizes? that's not spoilage, that's just glucose separating. warm it up and it's good as new. what's the oldest thing in your kitchen right now? #facts #didyouknow #food by @brieflycurious_
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11 days ago
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