We feel “hungry” because it’s harder for us to control our emotions when our brains are low on glucose.
100 Mind-Blowing Low Facts
Elton John tried to commit suicide once by sticking his head in an oven with the gas on low and windows open. He was found and stopped by his best friend Bernie Taupin.
Giraffes hum to communicate with each other. It’s thought that the low-frequency humming could be a form of ‘contact call’ between individuals who have been separated from their herd, helping them to find each other in the dark. Some researchers think they sleep talk too.
The Philippines consists of 7,641 islands. The Philippines is an archipelago, which means it’s made up of a group of islands—7,641 islands, to be exact. That figure does not include the thousands of sandbars and other landforms that emerge during low tide.
South American river turtles talk in their eggs. Turtles don’t have vocal cords, and their ears are internal, so scientists believed that turtles were deaf and didn’t communicate through sounds. However, research has found that turtles communicate at an extremely low frequency that sounds like “clicks, clucks, and hoots” that can only be heard through a hydrophone (a microphone used underwater). These sounds even come from the egg before the turtle hatches. Researchers hypothesize that this helps all the turtle siblings hatch at once.
Turtles can talk to each other. If you’ve ever had a pet turtle, you would know they’re a silent bunch. However, scientists have discovered that they actually “talk” through low-frequency clicking and hooting.
Playing dance music helps ward off mosquitoes. According to a study in 2019, the song ‘Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites’ contains both low and high frequencies that yellow fever mosquitoes dislike. Just dance the mosquitoes away.
Flies hum in the key of F. The buzzing sound they make is caused by their wings when they fly. The sound will either be a low or high buzz depending on the species.
Quebec City, Canada has a low crime rate. This is one of the safest cities in Canada. It also has the same crime rate as Disney World.
The Netherlands has to import criminals to fill up their jails. Since 2004, the Netherlands’ crime rate has only gotten lower and lower. In 2013, a prison shut down because there were no criminals to put behind bars. This low crime rate makes this country one of the safest places on the planet.
7,641 islands make up the Philippines. A group of islands, especially 7,641 islands, make up the archipelago that is the Philippines. Many sandbars and other landforms that appear at low tide, numbering in the thousands, are not included in that estimate.
Lions have excellent night vision, which helps them hunt in low-light conditions and gives them an advantage over their prey.
The Milky Way smells of rum, raspberries and booze. In 2009, astronomers exploring a giant cloud of gas and dust at the centre of the Milky Way made a surprise discovery – the cloud was packed full of a chemical known as ethyl formate, which has a couple of intriguing properties: it is responsible for giving raspberries their flavour, and has the smell of rum. Another nearby region is also notable as it’s full of ethyl alcohol, or ethanol, the type we use to make alcoholic beverages. It contains enough alcohol to supply every person on the planet with 300,000 pints of beer per day for the next billion years! If bottled at the source, the proof for this beer would be very low, with an alcohol content of less than 1%, but as the cloud also contains plenty of other nasty chemicals, among them carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide, it would still leave you with quite a headache the next morning.
You could survive for a couple of minutes in a leaky spacesuit. Although films such as Total Recall show instant explosions and rapidly puffed-up spacesuits, the effects of being exposed to space are slightly less dramatic. Although it would be unpleasant, you could survive for a couple of minutes. After around 10 seconds, you would lose consciousness. The lower pressure of the vacuum would cause your blood to boil, along with other body fluids (the moisture on your tongue, for example) – but this boiling alone would not be fatal due to the pressure maintained by our blood vessels themselves. Gas bubbles would form in your bodily fluids, causing your body to swell up and bloat. The low humidity of space would cause you to cool down rapidly, and your eyes may freeze over. Within one to two minutes, the lack of oxygen would be deadly. The stress of the situation may make these symptoms worse – you would become oxygen-deprived more quickly. A rapid decompression would cause damage to your lungs, eardrums and sinuses, along with bruising and bleeding from soft tissues.
Dolphins only shut half their brain off when sleeping. The other half stays at a low level of alertness to protect against predators, obstacles, or other animals.
Antarctica is home to the largest ice sheet on Earth. More than six times as large as Greenland, Antarctica is the southernmost continent and is the coldest and windiest place on Earth – with temperatures that can drop as low as -89.2°C and winds that can exceed 320 km per hour. Antarctica is home to the largest ice sheet on Earth, containing a staggering 30 million cubic kilometres of ice. This represents an incredible 70% of Earth’s freshwater and 90% of its ice. As a result, changes to the Antarctic ice sheet can have significant implications for global sea levels and ocean currents. Monitoring the Antarctic ice sheet is therefore of paramount importance and satellite data plays a crucial role in this effort. Data from satellites such as CryoSat, ESA’s ice mission, allow scientists to track changes in the thickness and movement of the ice sheet over time, providing insights into how it is responding to a changing climate. ESA has recently teamed up with NASA and the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) to carry out an ambitious campaign in Antarctica which involved taking simultaneous measurements of sea ice from ESA’s CryoSat and NASA’s ICESat-2 satellites. This research is essential for informing policy decisions on issues such as climate change and sea level rise, and for developing strategies to mitigate their impact on coastal communities around the world.
A “glisk” is sunlight that is glimpsed through a break in the clouds, a fleeting glance at a glittering sight, a brief glow of warmth from a fire that’s burned low. It can also mean a sudden flash of hope in the heart.
In Singapore, when you turn 21, you’re automatically registered as an organ donor. The Human Organ Transplant Act (HOTA) was first introduced in 1987 due to extremely low organ donation rates. It was only in 2009 that citizens and permanent residents were automatically registered as organ donors. You can opt out, but you may not want to as you’ll be lower on the waiting list for organs should you need a transplant.
Psy didn’t want to upload Gangnam Style to YouTube because he didn’t want to be humiliated. The Korean pop superstar didn’t even really know much about YouTube when his friends recommended uploading his music video. Psy felt he would be humiliated with low views because he wasn’t very well known internationally. He couldn’t have been more wrong, though, as Gangnam Style became the first music video to reach 1 billion views on YouTube!
Elephants sing to each other, but their songs are at a frequency too low for humans to hear.
Music content makes up 5% of YouTube. Even though 5% seems like a low number, it is the most engaged type of video on YouTube. They count for 20% of YouTube’s total views!
The South East of England is mostly flat: England’s topography is quite varied, with the Lake District National Park being a great example of the country’s high elevation. If you venture towards the South East, you’ll find the opposite. This part of the country is mostly low-lying, offering flat countryside with uninterrupted views. Some of the best places to experience these views are the Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, including the Cotswolds and Chiltern Hills. The glorious South Downs National Park offers a stunning mixture of coastal and countryside sights, including the Seven Sisters cliffs. It’s well worth checking out!
Billions of funds are transferred each year: In 2021, money transfers to low and middle-income countries reached US $605 billion according to the latest World Bank data. It’s estimated that around one billion people worldwide (or 1 in 7 people) are involved in international money transfers, with around 200 million migrant workers sending money back home and 800 million people receiving it.
You Can Make Your Money Crisp by Ironing It: Ready for a surprising money fact that involves a little bit of fabric know-how? If you’ve got a creased, crumpled, or wrinkled dollar bill, you can make it look new by pressing it with your iron. As mentioned earlier, U.S. dollars are 75% cotton and 25% linen, so it’s fabric. To iron the money, dampen the dollar bill slightly with a spritz bottle, sprinkle water by hand, or use the spray function on the iron itself. Set the iron to low heat, put a towel under the bill and another on top of it, and then iron the money in a circular motion. Set aside to air dry. Presto! You should have a nice flattened bill.
ChatGPT 4o, also known as GPT-4o, is an updated version of the underlying large language model technology that powers ChatGPT. It was released in May 2024 and is touted as a “natively multimodal” model that can reason across audio, vision, and text in real-time. This new version is significantly faster than its predecessors, with response times as low as 232 milliseconds for audio inputs, which is comparable to human response times in conversations.
Low-code or no-code AI is a big trend in 2022 that would pave the way for the “ongoing ‘democratization’ of AI and data technology.” This means that people could customise AI with only written or voice instructions that don’t require complex technical knowledge.