Four (Sort-of) Cool Nature Facts

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.

1. About 300 tons of space debris hits the earth every day.  This means that the mass of the earth increases about 300 tons daily.

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.

Paracrinoids definitely have an extraterrestrial vibe

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.