Polar bears often hunt walruses by simply charging at a group of them and eating the ones that were crushed or wounded in the mass panic to escape. Direct attacks are rare.
100 Mind-Blowing Mass Facts
The voice of Stargazer in Mass Effect 3 was done by Buzz Aldrin.
28 is the atomic number of Nickel and the atomic mass of Silicon.
Jupiter has 69 moons. A few are 12-37 miles in diameter, but most are barely 1 mile in size. Jupiter itself is 317 times the mass of the Earth.
Somebody has been constipated for 45 days. In 2013, an unfortunate Indian woman had to undergo surgical removal of a faecal mass as large as a football.
People who eat whatever they want and stay slim have a slow metabolism, not fast. A skinny person tends to have less muscle mass than others, meaning their basal metabolic rate (BMR) is lower than those of a high muscle mass – this gives them a slow metabolism, not a fast one.
“Running amok” is a medically recognised mental condition. Considered a culturally bound syndrome, a person “running amok” in Malaysia starts with a period of brooding and then commits a sudden, frenzied mass attack.
Jellyfish almost caused mass nuclear explosions in 2013. In the extremely warm summer of 2013, several nuclear power plants across the world were forced to close down because of jellyfish. The sudden increase in jellyfish clogged the filters that cooled down the reactors, which led to the power plants being shut down for immediate maintenance and safety measures.
Polar bears charge at a group of walruses while hunting. They attack those who are crushed or left behind during the mass panic. Seeing a polar bear directly attack its prey is considered rare according to observations and studies.
Hugging trees is forbidden in China. Here’s one of our weirder did you know facts. Hugging trees was forbidden after the mass tree hugging that occurred outside of China’s imperial garden. The Chinese government speculated that the tree huggers were part of a suspicious cult and banned the activity in the country.
The human brain is the only brain that shrinks with age. Humans are the only animals that get dumb when they get older. Other animals’ senses would get dull, but they retain the same brain mass.
A meteor as strong as 10 atomic bombs exploded over Earth and everyone missed it. In 2018, a meteor 10 meters in diameter exploded over the Bering Sea. The massive space rock had a mass of 1400 tonnes and an impact energy of 173 kilotons of TNT – which was about 10 times the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
A laughing epidemic made 14 schools close down in Tanzania. In 1962, a laughing epidemic broke out in Tanganyika (now Tanzania). What initially started with a few school girls turned into almost a year-long mass hysteria across villages. Symptoms of the laughing epidemic included crying, fainting, rashes, and pain. Towards the end of the epidemic, 14 schools had already closed.
Dancing mania killed 15 people a day in 1518. Dancing mania isn’t an arcade game, but a mass psychogenic illness in the Middle Ages characterised by non-stop dancing. It may sound like a cartoon plot, but these people would dance until their feet bled and collapsed from exhaustion. Until now, the phenomenon has no confirmed explanation.
A woman was once constipated for nearly two months. After 45 days without a bowel movement, a 28-year-old woman from India had to have surgery to remove a “football-sized” mass of faeces.
The sun contains over 99% of the mass in our galaxy. Over a million Earths could fit inside the sun.
Jupiter’s magnetic field is bigger than the Moon. The region of space in which a mass’s magnetic field dominates is known as its magnetosphere. These regions surround planets, pulsars and even our Galaxy. The planets in our Solar System have magnetospheres that interact with and are shaped by the charged particles in the wind streaming from our Sun. The largest magnetosphere in our Solar System surrounds Jupiter. Jupiter rotates very fast and has a very strong magnetic field, and its magnetosphere is filled with plasma from its volcanically active moon, Io. These features, coupled with the fact that the solar wind is slower and less dense at Jupiter than at Earth, lead to a very sizeable Jovian magnetosphere. It is easily big enough to contain a body the size of our Sun and, if visible, would be larger than the Moon in our night sky; quite an achievement considering that it is over 1,500 times farther away.
Most Sun-like stars in our galaxy are in multiple star systems. Our Sun may be a single star, but it is in the minority. Over half of the Sun-like stars in the Milky Way are part of multiple star systems, binaries or triplets, with stars orbiting around a common centre of mass. Most lower-mass stars like red dwarfs, however, live alone without a companion.
Earth isn’t round. While this sounds like an elaborate joke, we’re serious. Earth isn’t flat, but it’s not perfectly round either. Earth’s rotation causes the planet to bulge at the equator and flatten at the poles, while the distribution of mass on Earth (which is not perfectly uniform) causes small variations in the gravitational pull at different locations on the planet. These variations are too small to be seen in pictures of Earth from space, so they appear round to the human eye. The shape seen in the video above is not technically the shape of the planet, but its ‘geoid’, the shape of its mean sea-level surface extending around the entire globe. The map was produced using data collected from ESA’s Gravity and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) and shows the most detailed map ever created of Earth’s gravity field.
ALL TOOTHED WHALES HAVE A ‘MELON’ IN THEIR FOREHEADS. It’s a mass of tissue which focuses the whales’ calls, vital for communication and echolocation. Like bats, they use this echolocation to “see”.
Travelling back in time is possible—theoretically, at least. According to Einstein’s theory, you could travel back in time by moving faster than the speed of light, as long as you could somehow have infinite mass. Since that probably won’t work, you could create “wormholes” between two points in space-time. (This would also be tough since humanity still hasn’t invented the technology to build a wormhole.) Or you could try bending space-time by plucking some “cosmic strings.” Two of these theoretical strings, which are thin streams of pure energy that are moving in opposite directions at very near the speed of light, could theoretically warp space-time enough to create a closed time-like curve—also known as a time machine.
The largest county in England is… Yorkshire: We’re continuing this guide on facts about England with a dive into the country’s geography. Taking up 11% of England’s land mass at 14,859 km², Yorkshire hails the title of being England’s largest county! Due to its large size, it’s no surprise that Yorkshire boasts a large variety of landscapes. From the stunning North Yorkshire Coast and Moors to the flat greenery of the Vale of York; there’s so much to explore here. The county is also home to a wealth of history, including two UNESCO World Heritage sites, Saltair & Salts Mill and Fountains Abbey & Studley Royal.