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[-] minnow@lemmy.world 93 points 2 weeks ago

Diamonds aren't stable and will eventually, over billions of years, decompose from their cubic molecular structure to carbon's more stable form, graphite, which has a hexagonal molecular structure.

Oh, here's another good gemstone related one!

Amethyst and citrine are both quartz varieties, and if the color source happens to be from traces of iron in the crystal lattice, one can be turned into the other. Heating amethyst can make citrine, and irradiating citrine can turn it into amethyst. This is because the only actual difference between the two is the valiance level of a specific election in the iron atom giving the stone its color.

[-] toynbee@lemmy.world 19 points 2 weeks ago

hexagonal molecular structure

You know, I think I've heard something about hexagons on the internet before ...

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[-] Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 65 points 2 weeks ago

Bedsheet thread counts have been artificially inflated for years by the shifty linen companies counting individual fibers that the threads consist of as threads themselves. It’s become a meaningless number, since there is zero regulation. If you want a nice thick heavy cloth, GSM is the number you want, but most companies won’t share this (looking at you, The Company Store) because they obviously don’t want you to know how thin and flimsy their products really are before you buy them.

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[-] Jentu@lemmy.ml 64 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

You know how geese fly in a “v” shaped pattern in the sky? One side of the “v” is usually longer than the other. The reason for that is that there’s more geese on that side.

You can tell by the way it is!

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[-] monovergent@lemmy.ml 54 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Several popular graphing calculators from Texas Instruments, including the TI-83 and TI-84, have a display resolution of 96*64, but only 95*63 pixels are used for graphing.

However, the earlier TI-81 did use all 96*64 pixels. The rationale for this change was to establish a central row and column for the axes and a central pixel for the origin. The cursor could only move pixel-by-pixel, and since the axes and origin would end up "between" pixels on the TI-81, they were inaccessible by the cursor.

[-] borokov@lemmy.world 50 points 2 weeks ago

There are more hydrogen atom in a single molecule of water than there are star in the entire solar system.

[-] locuester@lemmy.zip 24 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

…. There’s only 1 star in our solar system, the Sun.

I assume you meant the Milky Way galaxy, or perhaps the Universe?

EDIT: ah ok it’s a play on words a bit. Yes 2 > 1

[-] NKBTN@feddit.uk 49 points 2 weeks ago

I just touched my nose. Until I posted this, I was the only person who knew this fact.

[-] NKBTN@feddit.uk 26 points 2 weeks ago

But I'll give you one of my favourite obscure-ish fact instead: baby sloths are so inept, they sometimes mistake their own limbs for tree branches, grab hold of them with one limb, let go of the actual branch, and fall out of the tree

[-] DagwoodIII@piefed.social 14 points 2 weeks ago

Naw. Steve, the FBI agent assigned to you, and Dave, my roomie, were just discussing it.

I think Steve kinda likes you...

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[-] spittingimage@lemmy.world 37 points 2 weeks ago

Most male cats, when investigating something with a paw, will use the left paw.

[-] 2deck@lemmy.world 15 points 2 weeks ago
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[-] Sal@mander.xyz 36 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

If you catch a frog in between your hands and quickly flip it around, you can get the frog into a kind of paralyzed state called 'tonic immobility'.

Here is a photo from Wikipedia:

Frog stuck in tonic immobility

OK, well, many years ago I was very interested in this phenomenon and decided to look into the literature.

I found a paper from 1928 titled "On The Mechanism of Tonic Immobility in Vertebrates" written by Hudson Hoagland (PDF link).

In this paper, the author describes contraptions he used to analyze the small movement (or lack of movement) in animals while in this state. They look kind of like torture devices:

OK, but, that's still not it.... The obscure fact is found in the first footnote of that paper, on page #2:

Tonic immobility or a state akin to it has been described in children by Pieron(1913). I have recently been able to produce the condition in adult human beings.The technique was brought to my attention by a student in physiology, Mr. W. I.Gregg, who after hearing a lecture on tonic immobility suggested that a stateproduced by the following form of manhandling which he had seen exhibited as asort of trick might be essentially the same thing. If one bends forward from thewaist through an angle of 90°, places the hands on the abdomen, and after taking adeep breath is violently thrown backwards through 180° by a man on either side,the skeletal muscles contract vigorously and a state of pronounced immobilitylasting for some seconds may result. The condition is striking and of especialinterest since this type of manipulation (sudden turning into a dorsal position) isthe most common one used for producing tonic immobility in vertebrates.

Apparently this or a similar effect can be observed in humans too?! In this paper, the author himself claims to have done this and that it works! I tried to locate more recent resources describing this phenomenon in humans but I could not find them... Is this actually possible? If so, why is this not better documented? Or, maybe it is better documented but understood as a different type of reflex today? Not sure.

[-] zipsglacier@lemmy.world 10 points 2 weeks ago

Excellent fact, and bonus points because the fact is only recorded in a footnote of a writeup about an already moderately obscure fact.

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[-] lime@feddit.nu 33 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

the roslagsbanan commuter rail is the only actively used 2 ft 11 ^3^⁄~32~ in railway in the world.

...honestly, with a wikipedia article that extensive it hardly qualifies as "obscure".

so, bonus:

the siljan area of sweden has a history of building observation towers:


the tower in the black-and-white photo, which started this trend, was financed by a man who made a fortune making and selling multiplication books. basically like books of logarithm tables but only for multiplication. 1×1 to 9999×9999.

also that entire area is europe's largest meteorite crater:


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[-] hperrin@lemmy.ca 31 points 2 weeks ago

The dot above the letter i is called a tittle.

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[-] lefty7283@lemmy.world 31 points 2 weeks ago
[-] DaCrazyJamez@sh.itjust.works 18 points 2 weeks ago

Additional fun fact about nipples:

In mammals, a species' typical litter size is one less than their normal number of nipples.

[-] missfrizzle@discuss.tchncs.de 28 points 2 weeks ago

Chinese scientists worked to create the "humanzee," a human-chimpanzee hybrid in the '60s. Female chimpanzees were impregnated with human sperm. The experiment was cut short by the Cultural Revolution - the scientists were sent to labor camps and a three-months pregnant chimpanzee died of neglect. The Soviets attempted a similar program in the '20s.

[-] DreasNil@feddit.nu 13 points 2 weeks ago

This sounds like a bunch of b***shit so I had to look it up. Seems like you're actually right... 😳

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[-] hperrin@lemmy.ca 27 points 2 weeks ago

A lot of people know of the April Fools 418 I’m a Teapot error code, but did you know there’s a full Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol from the same RFC for running a coffee pot server? It even includes an HTCPCP method named “WHEN” to let the pot know it has poured enough cream.

[-] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 27 points 2 weeks ago

Ancient Egypt was ancient before it ended. The time when Cleopatra ruled is about as close to today as it was to the first pyramids.

[-] rmuk@feddit.uk 22 points 2 weeks ago

It's actually even wilder than that.

The earliest know pyramids date back to around 2600BCE, and Cleopatra reigned around 50-30BCE, so her reign is closer to the modern day than to the first pyramids by about 600 years. One of the earliest surviving pyramids, Djoser, was built by Imhotep (with help, I assume) during a period called the Third Egyptian Dynasty meaning, as it's name suggests, the unified Kingdom of Egypt was already well-established by the time it was built. The First Dynasty started about 3100BCE so even ignoring the proto-Dynasty period of Egypt, that's pretty humbling: if you drew a timeline with the founding of Ancient Egypt on the left and the founding of OnlyFans to the right, Cleopatra would be three-fifths of the way along it.

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[-] theywilleatthestars@lemmy.world 27 points 2 weeks ago

There are no extant recordings of George Orwell's voice

[-] CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml 17 points 2 weeks ago

Also, the word doublespeak isn't from Orwell. In Nineteen Eighty-Four he used the term Newspeak, meaning a sort of clipped form of language designed to limit expression of thought, and doublethink, the practice of holding two contradictory thoughts at the same time and believing both to be true, but he never used the word doublespeak.

Interestingly though, it actually predates Nineteen Eighty-Four, but nobody really knows who coined it exactly.

[-] missfrizzle@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 2 weeks ago

Newspeak was inspired by Esperanto, because George Orwell had an annoying Esperantist roommate. "bad" in Esperanto is "malbone," literally "un-good." "terrible" in Esperanto is "malbonege," literally "very ungood."

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[-] Suck_on_my_Presence@lemmy.world 26 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Living at high altitude for long periods of time can cause a disease that is otherwise most associated with cocaine and meth.

Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension has some weird causes, but it seems that high altitude and having to work for enough oxygen can cause the body to revolt.

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[-] fulcrummed@lemmy.world 25 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

The tiniest park in the USA is located on a city street corner in Portland, Oregon. Mill Ends Park

Edit: I fell down a rabbit hole. Corrected myself having posted it originally as “world’s smallest park” which is how I knew it - apparently it carried that distinction until Feb this year when a tiny space on a Japanese street (which was created in 1988) formally applied for, and was awarded the Guinness book of records title of World’s Smallest Park.

Also this one just popped into my head - the Guinness Book of Records was originally conceived as a means of settling arguments by compiling factual “records”. The original argument related to a shooting trip in England in which the Managing Director of Guinness Breweries partook, where a missed shot led to a disagreement about the fastest game bird. The realisation that arguments such as this would be commonplace, and that no resource existed to settle such matters - the niche for capturing these types of facts was identified and the book was born.

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[-] memfree@piefed.social 24 points 2 weeks ago

The entomology book Life on a Little Known Planet taught me that bebugs mate via "traumatic insemination". The female has no opening, so the male pierces the exoskeleton and the wound later heals over -- all of which allows entomologoists to count the number of times a female has mated by the number of scars on their abdomen.

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[-] Nemoder@lemmy.ml 23 points 2 weeks ago

When a drug company in the 80s scaled up production they accidentally created seed crystals that spread around the entire Earth's atmosphere that prevented other companies from manufacturing a generic drug without it attaching to the seeds and converting to the patented drug.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_polymorph#Paroxetine_hydrochloride

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[-] daggermoon@lemmy.world 23 points 2 weeks ago

HD-DVD and Blu-ray weren't the only HD video disc formats competing for dominance in the '00s. HD VMD which was basically a DVD containing more layers unsuccessfully tried to compete with the two. The company who produced it dissolved in 2008 and only a few titles were ever released on the format.

[-] dave@feddit.uk 22 points 2 weeks ago

2” x 4” construction timber is 1.5” x 3.5” because of industrialisation (not shrinkflation)

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[-] drzoidberg@lemmy.world 21 points 2 weeks ago

Fun fact, you can, in fact, make sourdough with the yeast from a yeast infection, and bake with it.

[-] Focal@pawb.social 29 points 2 weeks ago
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[-] P00ptart@lemmy.world 20 points 2 weeks ago

Diabetics piss has so much sugar in it that you can make high end whiskey with it.

[-] Turd_Ferg@sh.itjust.works 17 points 2 weeks ago

Wouldnt it be low end whiskey? For various reasons.

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[-] selkiesidhe@sh.itjust.works 18 points 2 weeks ago

Not obscure but apparently a lot of people aren't aware that sheep don't have top teeth in front.

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[-] NotASharkInAManSuit@lemmy.world 17 points 2 weeks ago

Darwin drank tortoise piss and, according to his documentation, didn’t hate it.

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[-] toomanypancakes@piefed.world 17 points 2 weeks ago

Barnacles, relative to body size, have the longest penises in the world

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[-] Ceruleum@lemmy.wtf 15 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

The Latin meaning of the color ultramarine is "over the sea" Also, they once made a pigment called mummy, which was literally made out of finely grinded mummy.

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[-] Unusable3151@lemmy.ml 13 points 2 weeks ago

There is a dust layer in the ice at the South Pole about 2km under the surface that interferes with about 5000 photomultiplier tubes spread out over a cubic kilometer in the ice that are watching for light created from high energy muons moving faster than the speed of light in the ice that were in turn the result of the very rare chance of a high energy neutrino interacting with the nucleus of a single atom in the ice.

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[-] Blackfeathr@lemmy.world 13 points 2 weeks ago

The smallest extant flightless bird in the world is the Inaccessible Rail.

[-] rodbiren@midwest.social 13 points 2 weeks ago

A large amount of visual inspections on the inside of nuclear reactors is done literally with a camera duct taped to either a really really long pole assembled in sections or a rope. Operators "swim" the cameras to various locations and camera handling is basically an occupation in that field. You also need camera shots for any work being done on the inside of the flooded reactor with, again, really really long poles that end up acting more like pool noodles at such a length. It is silly and difficult work. Also you basically are wearing a trash bag sitting above a hot tub while doing this work. So it is a wild experience.

[-] Lokoschade@feddit.org 11 points 2 weeks ago

Not that obscure, but most orange cats are male since the orange gene is tied to the x-chromosom, so male cats only need one copy to appear orange. Female cats have to have the orange gene on both x-chromosom to be fully orange.

And usually only female cats can be calico/tortoise since the orange gene is co-dominant, so if they only have one copy of the orange gene both the orange and black will be visible.

A seemingly male calico/tortoise cat is usually intersex and sterile.

[-] capuccino@lemmy.world 10 points 2 weeks ago

licking doorknobs is illegal on other planets

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this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2025
134 points (100.0% liked)

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