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Home Series Impossible-Sounding Science
Some true things sound as if someone is pulling your leg. A teaspoon of neutron star weighs about a billion tons. Dinosaurs lived through shorter days. Sharks are older than trees. The Eiffel Tower grows every summer. This collection gathers the facts on Oddly that sound most impossible and explains, calmly, why each one is true.
They are ordered from the vast to the everyday — from dead stars and deep time down to a mint crunched in the dark and the smell of rain. Every article is fact-based, checked against its sources, and lists them at the end.
Part 1
Fact-based Weird Facts
Squeeze more than the mass of our Sun into a ball the size of a city and you get a neutron star, where a single teaspoonful of matter would weigh about a billion tons on Earth.
Part 2
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
If the cosmos is packed with billions of glittering stars, why does the night sky opt for a cozy, pitch-black blanket instead of a blinding neon glow?
Part 3
Fact-based Weird Facts
A 70-million-year-old fossil shell shows that a day then lasted about 23 and a half hours, and a year held 372 of them.
Part 4
Fact-based Weird Facts
Shark-like scales go back about 450 million years. The oldest known forest grew about 385 million years ago.
Part 5
Fact-based Weird Facts
Students were being taught in Oxford more than two hundred years before the city of Tenochtitlan was founded, and over three centuries before the Aztec Empire took shape.
Part 6
Fact-based Weird Facts
Iron expands when it warms, so the tower grows by 12 to 15 centimetres between a cold winter day and a hot summer one, and its top leans away from the sun while it does it.
Part 7
Fact-based Weird Facts
Gallium melts at about 29.8 degrees Celsius, well below body temperature, so a small piece of this silvery metal held in your palm turns into a liquid puddle with no furnace or fire required.
Part 8
Fact-based Weird Facts
Bite a hard wintergreen sweet in a pitch-dark room and your mouth will flash blue — a real, repeatable phenomenon with a properly serious name.
Part 9
Fact-based Weird Facts
The earthy smell of rain has a name, petrichor, and a key ingredient is geosmin, made by soil bacteria, which the human nose can detect at about one hundred parts per trillion.