In the 4.5 billion years that we believe earth has existed, many have tried to comprehend it and its workings, but in vain. No matter the amount of research and light years of contemplation that has been put into understanding the wonders of the world, it still remains a mystery to us, mere mortals.
When Mark Twain said, "truth is stranger than fiction," he clarified that it was because truth isn't obligated to stick to possibilities. These crazy facts definitely go beyond science and sense that most common men strive to comprehend in their entire lifetime.
Want a temporary tattoo? Get struck by lightning
Known as a "Lichtenberg figure," this is a dangerous way to get the feathery looking, branching, fern-like pattern on your body. These dramatic "keraunographic" marks sometimes also referred to as "lightning flowers" or "lightning trees", are created by the passage of high voltage electrical discharges along the surface, or through, electrical insulating materials (dielectrics). German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg made this observation in 1777, demonstrating the phenomenon to his physics students and peers.
They tend to occur on the arms, back, neck, chest, or shoulders of lightning struck victims.
Lightning scars I swear I thought this was a tatto but look it up #Real pic.twitter.com/K5GYrr5I64
— AKA Hunt (@hunterholub6) July 19, 2013
This particular Lichtenberg figure belongs to Winston Kemp, who was struck by lightning in 2012, but apparently didn't realize it until the marks appeared on his arm an hour later, and he didn't seek medical attention, reported NBC.
A Banyan tree in India is larger than an average Wal-Mart
It may be too hard to imagine but the world's widest tree, located near Kolkata, is bigger than the average Wal-Mart . The tree made it into "The Guinness Book of World Records" as the world's widest tree, and has even been featured on stamps in India, Times of India reported in 2011. Although it looks like a forest from afar, the 200 to 250 year old "The Great Banyan" is actually comprised of a myriad of aerial roots that cover 3.5 square acres of land, which equals roughly 156,000 square feet, or 14,400 square meters and resides inside the 'Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden' in Howrah.
Oral sex led to pregnancy of a teenager
In a strange tale of procreation, a 15 year old girl from the small southern African nation of Lesotho was found to be showing signs of pregnancy, without having vaginal sex. She in fact, could not have had vaginal sex, because she didn't have one, owing to a birth defect known as Mullerian agenesis or Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome , reported abc.
The authors of her case report from 1988 stated that "A plausible explanation for this pregnancy is that spermatozoa gained access to the reproductive organs via the injured gastrointestinal tract," the authors wrote. Regardless, her pregnancy is not just a testament to Murphy's Law that states "anything that can go wrong will go wrong", but also the world's most impressive swimmers in the world: sperms!
Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex are farther apart in time than Tyrannosaurus Rex and us
Some cartoons, movies, and books would have us believe age of the dinosaurs as one, big happy reptile party; but not all dinosaurs lived together. In fact, dinosaur communities were separated by both time and geography. For example, the Jurassic dinosaur Stegosaurus already had been extinct for approximately 80 million years before the appearance of the Cretaceous dinosaur Tyrannosaurus. You get the idea: the difference in time between when Tyrannosaurus Rex and Stegosaurus lived is greater than the difference in time between Tyrannosaurus Rex and us!
And "us" doesn't mean the human race, but you, reading this article right now at your computer.
Earth rocks can walk.. errr.. slide!
For years, scientists have been puzzled by the mysterious "sailing stones" of Death Valley National Park, where rocks weighing several hundreds of pounds slide across the Racetrack Playa (a playa is a dry lake bed) leaving trails in their wake. These heavy stones appear to move across the dried lake bed, leaving a trail behind them in the cracked mud.
The rocks' apparent movement has been blamed on everything from space aliens and magnetic fields to pranksters. But no one has actually seen the rocks move, which only adds to the mystery.
