General Discussion

[quote name="EmeraldSands315" date="2022-02-07 12:31:14" ] While horses are herbivores, their diets primarily being plant-based, given the opportunity they will eat meat! [/quote] so will deer humans share 99.9% of our DNA because of a massive genetic bottleneck that happened as some of us were leaving Africa mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is passed down only through the matrilineage and has around 16,000 base pairs, is a whole lot easier to study in relevant fields than nuclear DNA, which is jumbled up with every generation and has around 3 billion base pairs theoretically, with mtDNA, every AFAB person on earth today can be traced back to one or a few women who survived that genetic bottleneck humans are the only living species with chins the wreck of the titanic is being eaten! rusticles have hard shells with fragile tunnels and cavities with nutrients inside. they're formed by bacteria that live both in the tunnels and on the shell and they're extracting iron and minerals from the wreck. there's a limited amount of regular rust on the wreck because of the lack of oxygen down there

Pigeons have been clocked flying 92.5 mph (148.9 km/h) average speed on a 400-mile (640 km) race. They appear on Wikipedia's fastest animals list before cheetahs. I'm shocked!

Avocados and some other new world plants with large, pitted fruits are thought to have evolved in symbiosis with mammoths and ice age giant ground sloths! The megafauna would eat the huge fruits and deposit the seeds away from the parent tree. When these animals went extinct, the trees continued to propagate with the help of humans. So you have good old Sid to thank for that guacamole! ;P (source)

Also, ice age ground sloths were so beautifully weird. Some species had osteoderms embedded in their skin beneath the fur to act as armor. At least one species was semi-aquatic and swam around eating seagrass like manatees do today.

One that actually just got brought up in casual conversation earlier:

Your hair and nails don't actually continue to grow after you die. They just appear to be growing due to the skin receding (...yeah, kinda gross)

The alien sounds Elites originally made in Halo were just voice recordings played backwards.

There is an instrument you play by using the force twitching your hands in the air without touching anything, its called a Theremin and was invented almost 100 years ago.

Pelicans will gladly eat other birds, and some species will even cannibalize.

when fancy rats are happy or content, they will chatter and grind (or brux) their teeth. when rats brux, their eyes will jiggle and pop out of their eye sockets, which looks kinda terrifiyng the first time you see it. there’s a muscle that extends from the jaw beyond the rats eye sockets, so their eyes do that when rats brux vigorously. you can see it here!

they will also do that when they are super stressed and it is kinda like cats purring which can mean both happiness and pain! you just gotta pay attention to their environment and body language

These might not be uncommon facts, but some common misconceptions about aviation that drive me bat crazy:


- A “stall” is not an engine dying. Can see why people think that; that is what it is driving stick in a car. But in aviation, we’re talking an aerodynamic stall. The angle the wing is meeting the relative wind at is too high, leading to a breakup of airflow and loss of lift

- Turbulence isn’t pockets of no air. Think of it more like eddies in a river—it’s disturbed air currents by wind moving across terrain (mechanical turbulence), against opposing winds and air masses (windshear, frontal turbulence), or rising/descending thermals (convective turbulence)

- Most turbulence is also a non-event, unless you get motion sick ig. Not like in the movies where “hey we’re going to hit turbulence” and then the plane acts as if a giant hand is shaking it around like a four-year-old with a toy and everyone gets oxygen masks. Turbulence like that exists (rated as severe), and it can trigger mask systems, but it’s most assuredly not as common as fiction makes it out to be. Pilots specifically plan to avoid the worst stuff where they can because it’s pretty terrible

- And the most infuriating Hollywood offender? Losing an engine will NOT bring down a commercial airliner. Just. No. Even a light twin aircraft with only two engines can at least hold level at certain altitudes on one engine. A lot of airliners have more engines than that. Pilots of both are trained extensively in such situations, in every phase of flight from enroute to takeoff and landing. Even if it’s like the movies where one engine spontaneously flames out, there are procedures for that and you still have another engine

I can’t watch movies with airplanes anymore, lol. Too many unrealistic scenarios and downright irresponsible pilots disobeying federal aviation regulations

And a super fun fact for all the non-pilots to make up for my Hollywood-fueled rant! Airspeed and groundspeed are two different things. Airspeed is the speed of the air over your wings, keeping you in the air, while groundspeed is your speed over the ground. Wind counts towards both: we take off into the wind for more airspeed and lift, but a tailwind enroute gives you a faster groundspeed. So—if you fly directly into a strong enough headwind and match your groundspeed to its speed against you—it will provide airspeed to keep you aloft but make your groundspeed zero. Like boating directly upriver but keeping your power too low to move forward. You can “hover” a small plane! Here’s a video if you don’t believe me :)
https://youtu.be/2Pj06838PkM

A rather funny fact I just learned today: The Icelandic translation of Dracula is basically just a fanfic rewrite of what the translator wanted the story to be.