Okay, the last one isn’t so cool. And this is a one-time thing, so don’t think
I’m turning this blog into Cracked, or anything like that. Also, if the first three are actually common
knowledge, I offer an embarrassed apology for wasting everyone’s time.
2. Light doesn’t actually travel at the “speed of light” (299,792,458 meters per second) in water. The water slows it down a little. This means that super low-mass particles like neutrinos can actually travel faster than light in water, though they still have to obey the 299,792,458 m/s speed limit.
3. If there was no moon, the earth would revolve so
fast that we’d all have continuous 50 to 150 mile per hour winds.
4. I once found an invertebrate fossil that I
suspect was a new species belonging to the class Paracrinoidea, a very obscure, extinct, distant
relative of sea urchins and starfish. It’s
now in the University of Kansas invertebrate paleontology collection. I don’t know if it's ever been positively identified
as a new species of Paracrinoidea.
Speaking of fossils, a number of fossils I had
stored in a garage, which included beautifully preserved cystoids, crinoids, trilobites, and other marine invertebrates from the Ordovician Florida Mountains Formation,
were stolen some years ago. I suspect that the thieves
wanted the display case and not the fossils, which they probably discarded, which was a shame.
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| Paracrinoids definitely have an extraterrestrial vibe |
