100 Mind-Blowing Sort Facts

Local legend believes that there is a secret in this chamber due to the gold Egyptian hieroglyphs that are decorated on the door. This has led others to believe that it may be a time machine or a time chamber of some sort.

Hippopotamuses can’t swim. We always see them in the water, but hippos can’t swim. Their bones are large and dense, making it hard for them to float. Instead, they do a sort of “slow-motion gallop on the riverbed or on the sea floor.”

The heat from the Big Bang is still around today. The early Universe consisted of a hot soup of ionised gas: a sort of opaque plasma. About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, this gas cooled sufficiently enough that atoms were able to form. Radiation left over from the Big Bang is still around us today and is known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB). It can’t be seen with the naked eye, but various missions over the years have been able to study it in microwave light, including ESA’s Planck satellite and the WMAP mission.

The quietest place on Earth is in Minnesota. Pretty much wherever you go in the world, there’s always going to be some sort of background noise, whether that’s the chirp of crickets or the slow, lazy whoosh of a gentle breeze. That’s the case everywhere except Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where something called an anechoic chamber lies. While the background noise in a tranquil bedroom measures somewhere around 30 decibels, Orfield Laboratories anechoic chamber recorded an average of -13 decibels – that’s so quiet that the inner workings of your body are audible.

The US Army has its private herd of bison. Unfortunately, it’s not part of some sort of secret plan to create a mounted bison regiment. Instead, the US Army base of Camp Pendleton in California was gifted the bison back in the 70s. The San Diego Zoo entrusted the bison to the base for safekeeping, and they’ve done such a great job at it that the herd has grown from 14 to 90 or so! The herd is constantly monitored, not just to ensure they’re in good health but also because they’re quite dangerous wild animals!

At the same time, Caesar asked the astronomer Sosigenes to help reform the calendar. Most years were set at 365 days, but to make up for the fact that the Earth’s revolution around the sun doesn’t take exactly 365 days, leap years were implemented. Every four years the month of February was given an extra day to make up for what is a sort of rounding error in the calendar.

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