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#sciencefacts

24 posts4 participants1 post today

Despite their towering height and tree-like appearance, palm trees are actually more closely related to grasses, lilies, and bamboo than to traditional trees. They belong to the monocot group of plants, which means they have no rings, no true bark, and no real branches. Instead, their trunks are more like giant, reinforced stems.

Thanks for sharing, David Z.! 🤘

Lake Vostok, a subglacial lake buried under 2.5 miles (4 km) of Antarctic ice, has been completely cut off from sunlight, the atmosphere, and the rest of Earth for millions of years - and is teeming with life. Scientists drilled down and found thousands of microscopic organisms, including bacteria, fungi, and even signs of complex life.

WASP-76b, an ultra-hot Jupiter exoplanet about 640 light-years away. On the day side, temperatures soar past 2,400°C (4,350°F) - hot enough to vaporize iron into gas. WASP-76b is also tidally locked. The hot side vaporizes iron, and violent winds whip that iron vapor to the cooler night side, where it condenses into liquid metal droplets and falls as molten iron rain.

A massive cloud of gas located near the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which contains a significant amount of ethanol (ethyl alcohol), alongside other complex molecules, is essentially a giant cloud of "space alcohol." This cloud is often described as smelling like "raspberry rum" due to the presence of certain esters.

There’s a theoretical limit to how tall a tree can grow, and it’s about 426 feet (130 meters).

Why? Because trees rely on capillary action and water tension to pull water up from their roots to their leaves. At a certain height, gravity overcomes the tree’s ability to transport water effectively, causing water columns to break and leading to air bubbles (embolism) in their vascular system. The tallest known tree, Hyperion, is a redwood in California, is 379.7 feet (115.9 meters).

On September 3, 2002, astronomers discovered an asteroid with an unusual orbit around Earth. Further analysis of its trajectory and spectrographic evidence—specifically, the presence of titanium dioxide used in Apollo missions—revealed that it was actually the third stage of the Apollo 12 rocket, launched in 1969.