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Science has answered many fundamental questions, but some areas of the surrounding reality still remain “blank spots” even for scientists themselves.
Why does gravity act on us? How can pet fish predict earthquakes? Why do people yawn? Here is a selection of interesting questions, the answers to which modern scientific knowledge does not yet provide.
1. Why do we yawn?
There are many theories on this subject, including the most ridiculous ones. Two deserve attention as the most likely.
The first says that yawning helps relieve tension in the brain and improve its functioning. This is why, say psychologists from the University at Albany in New York, we usually yawn before going to bed - by that time, brain performance decreases, the same is observed with lack of sleep.
But if yawning just helps to “stimulate” our brain, why is it so contagious? Adherents of the theory answer that this comes from our distant ancestors: when the leader of the pack yawns, thereby indicating that he is not in the best shape at the moment, the whole pack begins to do the same in order, so to speak, to increase collective vigilance earlier identify potential threats.
The second theory is that yawning unites and, as it were, makes people sympathize with each other - the person who yawns after someone subconsciously wants to say: “Yes, buddy, I understand you.”
2. Why do people sometimes spontaneously combust?
All that science knows for sure about this is that sometimes people really do catch fire like matches. One of the first officially recorded victims of spontaneous combustion was an Italian knight from the mid-17th century: this lord was engulfed in fire after drinking wine excessively.
Over the centuries, about 120 known cases have occurred, but many, scientists are sure, cannot be attributed to spontaneous combustion. Among the victims were many smokers, and one interesting theory is that smoking can burn the deep layers of the skin and cause the subcutaneous layer of fat to ignite - all together this is similar to the principle of a candle and a wick.
An alternative theory says that the cause of the terrible outbreaks is methane accumulating in the intestines, and the “spark” is provided by a certain interaction of enzymes. These two explanations have one problem - scientists cannot test them, so there is no answer to the question of why this happens.
3. How does the placebo effect work?
When a new drug undergoes clinical trials, there is always a so-called control group among volunteers, whose performance serves as a reference point for scientists. Its participants are told that they are being given the drug being tested, however, in reality they are receiving only slightly tinted “pacifiers” - a placebo (Latin placebo - “I’ll like you”).
Some of the volunteers “feel” the effect of the drug they are supposedly being given; moreover, there are objectively recorded placebo effects that correspond to the effect of the real drug.
Many people believe that sometimes people claim to feel better, but they are only trying to convince themselves. Conflicting evidence gives rise to numerous theories: Pavlov's followers, for example, say that the patient at the physiological level creates the conditions for recovery, because treatment should help.
Some talk about the therapeutic effect of communicating with the doctor, others talk about an unconscious reluctance to spoil the statistics of the experiment. Be that as it may, pharmaceutical giants dream of revealing the secret of the placebo effect in order to deprive scammers selling dummies from making money, because the development of real drugs is expensive and takes a long time, but due to people’s self-hypnosis, they sometimes cannot compete with “hoaxes”.
4. Who was the last common ancestor?
A whale and a bacterium, an octopus and an orchid - it would seem that there is nothing in common between them, but if you dig deeper, it turns out that there are still similarities. Almost all living things contain proteins and nucleic acids: all living organisms contain a genetic code, and the human genome sequence resembles a family tree - this suggests that all the diversity of life can be reduced to one universal ancestor. Theoretically, calculating common ancestry will provide deeper insight into the origins of life.
Scientists say that the last universal common ancestor (L.U.C.A.) approximately 2.9 billion years ago gave rise to two branches of development - bacteria and eukaryotes (the latter later developed into plants, animals and beyond).
Unfortunately, the genetic material of that era is quite scarce, as it was repeatedly shuffled and changed during the process of evolution. But some preserved genetic properties of proteins and nucleic acids suggest who L.U.C.A. was similar: - to the cell that makes up all living organisms.
5. How does memory work?
For a long time, scientists assumed that memory mechanisms were located in the hippocampus, the cerebral cortex, or scattered in an unspecified group of neurons. Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the first time managed to control the memory of mice by influencing certain neural connections. This is, of course, a step forward, but how does the brain determine which connection needs to be used?
This “trick” is not yet fully understood: research shows that when a memory occurs, the same brain cells that are involved in the actual experience are activated, in other words, memory does not simply accumulate impressions and then “take them out” - it’s more like construction of “that same” situation.
6. Is it true that animals predict earthquakes?
This idea is good, but scientists need proof. Cases of strange behavior of pets before any cataclysm have been known since the times of Ancient Greece, but all these stories are in the nature of an anecdote, and in general, what animal behavior can be considered strange enough to talk about “prediction”?
In addition, this is usually talked about after the fact. It is an undeniable fact that animals subtly sense changes in natural conditions - from seismic waves to disturbances in the electromagnetic field, but it is unclear whether such changes precede earthquakes. And if we ourselves cannot predict an earthquake, then when should we start recording the “strange” behavior of pets?
It is even more difficult to carry out an experiment, because for this it is necessary to arrange a cataclysm. Several “lucky” coincidences occurred in Neftegorsk, when an earthquake began during experiments on animals, but the data obtained from this were quite contradictory.
7. How do body parts “know” to stop growing?
Each animal, consisting of trillions of cells, at the beginning of its development was only one single cell: the growth process, as a rule, is tightly controlled, but sometimes failures occur, and it turns out, for example, that a person has one leg slightly shorter than the other.
What influences this? These are the main four proteins of what will become the Salvadoran warty hippopotamus, through special “communication channels” they send a signal that it is time to stop the development of organs. The signal stops the production of protein, which serves as a building material, and this is where scientists’ specific ideas end for now.
What generates the signal? What growth mechanisms, besides protein production, does it affect? Scientists also continue to study these “communication channels,” suggesting that through them it will be possible to “turn off” the mechanism of cancer cell division
8. Are there human pheromones?
Do you recognize the smell of someone's fear? Can you, for example, sense a rat from a distance? Animals have been successfully communicating at the level of chemical signals for a long time, but is a person capable of this?
Some talk about an undoubted change in behavior and the reaction of human physiology itself to chemosignals, but it is still impossible to say exactly what is the initiator of these changes. Let the inscriptions on perfumes and shower gels say that it is this product “with pheromones” that will make you irresistible; scientists do not yet know of any pheromones that can affect humans.
Even if certain “chemical signals” exist in humans, it is not entirely clear how the receiving party “decodes” this signal. In mammals and reptiles, this purpose is served by the vomeronasal organ, which is also present in you and me, but has olfactory functions, and its sensory cells are not connected to the central nervous system.
9. How does gravity work?
There are four main forces that prevent the Universe from “falling apart”: electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear interactions and gravity.
Of these four, gravity is the least noticeable, which is why its properties are not easy to study using small objects in laboratory conditions, but, for example, the strong nuclear interaction is 1026 times greater than the weak one.
Despite all the efforts of physicists to explain the phenomenon of attraction of objects to each other, using the principles of quantum mechanics, or the General Theory of Relativity, the essence of this interaction will not be clear until the development of the Unified Theory of Everything.
It is also unclear what the gravitational interaction between objects is connected with: the matter can only be helped by the construction of many super-colliders to detect a hypothetical graviton - an elementary massless particle that carries gravitational interaction.
Some scientists are trying to find evidence of its existence, while others are sure that this will only confuse everything.
10. How many species are there on Earth?
Scientists have been compiling a general classification and description of various animal species known to science for about 200 years, and this grandiose work will apparently not be completed soon. Over the last decade alone, the discovery of more than 16 thousand new animal species has been announced, and about 1.2 million have been classified so far. How many more unknown living organisms exist?
Based on this, it can be calculated that about 300 thousand people must devote their lives to cataloging all living things - this is an extremely long and labor-intensive process, because many habitats of many unstudied species are located in developing countries, where research is quite problematic, and 80% of living things and even lives in the depths of the ocean.
With this in mind, several groups of scientists have given differing estimates of the number of species that remain to be discovered—numbers ranging from 19,264 to approximately 15 million.
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Have you ever asked yourself questions for which you had to look for answers in scientific publications and on the Internet? It turns out that science could not answer many questions due to insufficient knowledge and facts.
And, despite the fact that every day scientists ask questions, build hypotheses and try to find evidence, this does not give absolute confidence exactly their answers. Perhaps there is not enough research data, or maybe humanity is not yet ready for new discoveries. We have collected for you 25 questions that baffle the smartest scientists. Maybe you can find a rational answer!?
1. Can a person stop aging?
In fact, it is still unclear what exactly in the human body ages, causing the biological clock to tick. It is known that the body accumulates molecular damage that leads to aging, but the mechanism is not fully understood. Therefore, it is difficult to talk about stopping the process if the reason is not completely clear!
2. Is biology a universal science?
Despite the fact that biology is on a par with physics and chemistry, it is unclear whether biological facts can be extended to living organisms from other planets. For example, will the same life forms have similar DNA structure and molecular structure? Or maybe everything is completely different?
3. Does the Universe have a purpose?
4. Will humanity be able to maintain a decent standard of living on Earth in the 21st century?
Since ancient times, people have been interested in the possibilities that would allow humanity to live and develop on the planet. But everyone understood that natural resource reserves might not be enough. At least this was the case before the industrial revolution. Although even after it, politicians and analysts believed that such a thing could not live on the planet a large number of of people. Of course, railroads, construction, electricity and other industries proved otherwise. Today this question has returned again.
5. What is music and why do people have it?
Why is it so pleasant for a person to listen to various combinations of musical vibrations at different frequencies? Why do people know how to do this? And what is the goal? One of the hypotheses put forward is that music helps to reproduce, acting like a peacock's tail. But this is only a hypothesis that has no confirmation.
6. Will there be artificially farmed fish?
Yes, such a discovery could significantly solve the problem of starving people in the world. But today, artificial fishing is more of a fiction than a future event.
7. Will humans ever be able to predict the future of economic and social systems?
In other words, can economists accurately predict financial crises? No matter how sad it may sound, it is unlikely. At least in the near future.
8. What influences a person more: environment or upbringing?
As they say, the question of education is always open. And no one can say with certainty that a person who grew up in a good family with an exemplary upbringing will become a normal member of society.
9. What is life?
From a subjective point of view, each person can define the concept of “life”. But even scientists do not have an exact answer to this question. For example, can we say that machines are alive? Or are viruses living beings?
10. Will a person ever be able to successfully transplant a brain?
A person has learned to perform various operations to transplant skin, organs and limbs. But the brain remains an unknown area that cannot yet be explained.
11. Can a person feel as free as possible?
Are you sure that you are an absolutely free person who is guided only by his own will and desires? Or maybe all your actions were planned in advance by the movement of atoms in your body? Or is it still not? There are a lot of assumptions, but there is no concrete answer.
12. What is art?
Despite the fact that many writers, musicians, and artists have answered this question, science still cannot clearly say why a person is so attracted to beautiful patterns, colors and designs. What purpose does art serve and what is beauty? These are questions that cannot be answered.
13. Did man discover mathematics, or did he invent it?
In our world, much is subject to a mathematical structure. But are we so sure that we invented mathematics ourselves? What if the Universe decided that human life should depend on numbers?
14. What is gravity?
We know that gravity causes objects to attract each other, but why? Scientists tried to explain this through the presence of gravitons - particles that carry gravitational influence without a charge. But even this hypothesis has not been proven.
15. Why are we here?
Everyone knows that we ended up on the planet because of the Big Bang, but why did this happen?
16. What is consciousness?
Surprisingly, the difference between consciousness and unconsciousness is very difficult to see. From a macroscopic perspective, everything seems easy: some are awake, some are not. But at the microscopic level, scientists are still trying to find an explanation.
17. Why do we sleep?
We are used to thinking that our body should rest and sleep. But it turns out our brains are just as active at night as they are during the day. Moreover, the human body does not need sleep at all to restore its strength. All that remains is to find a logical explanation for the dream.
18. Is there alien life in the Universe?
For many decades, people have wondered about the existence of other life in the Universe. But so far there has been no evidence of this.
19. Where is everything in the Universe?
If you put all the stars and galaxies together, they make up only 5% of the total energy mass of the Universe. Dark matter and energy make up 95% of the Universe. This means that we do not see even a ninth part of what is hidden in the Universe.
20. Will we ever be able to predict the weather?
The weather is notoriously difficult to predict. It all depends on the terrain, pressure, humidity. Several weather front changes can occur in the same place during the day. You may ask, how do meteorologists predict the weather? Weather services predict climate change, but not accurate weather. That is, they express the average value and no more.
21. What are ethical standards?
How do you understand that some actions are correct and others are wrong? And why is murder viewed so negatively? What about theft? And why does survival of the fittest cause such conflicting emotions among people? All this is determined by ethics and moral standards - but why?
22. Where does language come from?
When a baby is born, he apparently already has “room” for a new language. That is, the child is already initially programmed for language cognition. Why this is so is unknown.
23. Who are you?
Imagine having a brain transplant? Will you remain yourself or become a completely different person? Or will it be your twin? There are so many unanswered questions that science has not yet been able to understand.
24. What is death?
There is clinical death - a condition after which the victim can be brought back to life. There is also biological death, which is closely related to clinical death. No one knows where the line between them ends. This is a question that is closely related to the question “What is life?”
25. What happens after death?
Although this question relates more to theology and philosophy, science is constantly looking for evidence of life after death. But, unfortunately, so far nothing worthwhile has been found.
A selection of strange questions that are difficult to answer without thinking carefully! The only thing they have in common is that you have to make a choice everywhere.
Which would you prefer:
1. Lose your genitals for life or gain weight by 90 kilograms forever?
2. Have sex with a distant relative in secret or not, but everyone would still always think that you had sex?
3. If your head was like a tennis ball or like a watermelon?
4. Buy the best house in a terrible area or the worst house in the best area?
5. Have no penis or five penises?
Die and save the lives of 10,000 people who will never know you saved them, or live among 10,000 people who know you refused to save their lives?
7. Freeze from the cold or burn from the heat?
8. In a time machine, would you always go only to the past or only to the future?
9. Would your superpower be the ability to fly or be invisible?
10. Eternal love or unlimited bank account?
11. Unlimited power or eternal respect of others?
12. To be an ugly genius or a beautiful dummy?
13. Could your thoughts be read by others at any moment when you think, or never wear clothes, but keep your thoughts to yourself?
14. Acne all over the body, but in those places that are covered by clothes, or acne on the face?
Rich and depressed or poor but happy?
16. Find yourself in real world « Walking Dead" or "Jurassic Park"?
17. Should I die happy in five years or unhappy in sixty?
Main image: playbuzz.com
Despite the fact that children have been taught the alphabet since kindergarten, we still have not answered the question of why the order of the letters in it is exactly the way it is. We even create children's songs to make it easier to learn, but so far no one has been able to answer why the alphabet is in this particular order.
The only thing we are sure of is that the history of the alphabet began a long time ago in Ancient Egypt, more than a thousand years before the advent of writing. It was there that it appeared, and then spread and evolved. According to the most popular opinion, we owe the creation of the first alphabet of planet Earth to the Canaanites, a people who lived in the territory between Ancient Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt and modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan.
Their language was later adapted into the Phoenician alphabet, which in turn was adapted into Greek and then Latin. Since then, every time I appeared new language, in general, the order of the letters in it, one way or another, was preserved in the same sequence. In some languages, letters were added or removed, but the order remained generally the same.
Why do lightning strikes?
Just because your 8th grade physics teacher pretends to know the answer to this question does not mean that he actually knows it. And if he doesn’t know, then what can we say about those who spend their entire lives researching them? People have been studying lightning for centuries. They launch various weather balloons into the sky. But lightning still remains a complete mystery to us. At the moment, we can say with certainty only one thing - they should not exist at all.
No, we, of course, understand many of the processes that are involved in their creation. We know that warm air rises and forms clouds. We know that when these clouds get larger, they can turn into thunderclouds. We also know that these clouds can accumulate positive and negative charges and then create electrical discharges of up to a billion volts that, when they crash onto the ground, produce heat at levels four times higher than the surface temperature of the Sun.
Have you noticed one small but very important missing detail in this chain? How the hell do these little clouds create a charge that turns into a literal death ray, raining hellfire from the sky?
Based on what we know about electricity, this shouldn't be possible at all. The power of the electric field inside a thunderstorm is about ten times lower than what is needed to create a lightning discharge, so it is not entirely clear where they even come from.
There are, of course, theories. Lots of theories. According to some, electrical discharges are created by colliding ice particles located inside such clouds and having different charges. Others believe that they are taking part in the matter Sun rays. And some are still convinced that lightning is created by Zeus the Thunderer as part of another family scandal with Hera. And in the interests of science, we should not rule out any of these theories until we are sure.
Why are we sleeping?
Now you are probably saying to yourself: what kind of crazy question is this? Almost all animals on our planet require sleep. Anyone who has ever stayed up all night knows how blurred the mind can become due to lack of sleep. We become irritable and abrupt, and with prolonged deficiency we may even begin to hallucinate. In fact, according to laboratory experiments on rodents—if you're willing to trust people who dissect live rats to see what happens to them—we can even die from lack of sleep.
But everything is not as simple as it may seem. The main issue here is that we do not understand why this is so.
“It’s certainly not a pleasant thing to say, but we don’t know why we need sleep at all,” says neuroscientist Michael Halassa.
Scientists understand that sleep does something to our brain and whatever it is, it has a positive effect on our well-being. However, science still does not know what this “something” is. Does sleep help restore brain energy? Maybe it cleanses it of harmful substances accumulated during the day? Or maybe it restores weakened nerve circuits?
Today, the most compelling answers to these questions always begin with the word “maybe.” It sounds very strange: so many living organisms need sleep, and we even know what can happen if there is an acute shortage of it, but no one can explain with one hundred percent certainty how exactly sleep helps us all.
How many muscles are there in the human body?
The body of a healthy adult contains 206 bones (excluding repeating ones) and 78 organs (one more can be added, according to the recent discovery of Irish surgeons) and a whole bunch of different muscles, which, as you might have guessed, scientists also need to somehow count. Believe it or not, there is no person in the world who can clearly answer the question of how many muscles the human body has. Usually the average is 700, but the actual amount of muscle in the body is somewhere between 640 and 850.
The main problem in counting them is that in our body there are some muscles of such a complex structure that it is actually impossible to say with certainty whether they are one muscle or whether scientists see several at once. Different medical experts have different answers to this question. But even if they came to a general agreement, this still would not solve the problem. The fact is that scientists are still finding people whose muscle set does not fit into any framework. Some have additional muscles, while others have rather strange and unexpected variations. How can you calculate this?
Therefore, the only correct answer at the moment is: a lot. To put it in a more scientific vein: “about 700, including about 400 that no one cares about except narrow specialists.”
Why do placebos work?
As long as people believe in what they accept effective medicine, - it works. This is one of the amazing facts about how the human brain works. The positive effect of a placebo (or dummy drug) on our health is observed so often that it is time to check the real effectiveness of all new drugs against its background. But the most interesting thing is that we still do not know why placebo drugs, most often represented by ordinary lactose, work.
Scientists are sure that this has something to do with the functioning of our brain. Interesting statistic: Doctors note that red placebo pills work better than white ones. Large tablets work better than small ones. Another fun statistic is that the effectiveness of the pills is “increased” when they are given by doctors rather than aides (nurses). There are also cases where the placebo effect was extremely pronounced. For example, in some of them the effect of the pacifier was so strong that it could be compared to the use of morphine.
But this is far from the strangest thing. For example, one study found that placebos can work even when people taking them know they are taking a placebo. Doctors told patients they were taking regular sugar pills that did absolutely nothing, yet the pills were “having an astronomical impact on the treatment” of these people.
But we still don't understand why placebos are so effective or how they even work. Somehow, through the use of placebos, we can actually trick our brains into “turning off the pain.”
Why can't we walk straight with our eyes closed?
Try this. Go to the nearest park, blindfold your eyes with an opaque blindfold and try to walk in a straight line. When you remove the bandage, in addition to the missing money from your back pocket, you will find something really interesting. No matter how carefully you try to walk in a straight line and what level of orientation you have, you will find yourself turning a little to the side, and if you keep walking, you will eventually start walking in circles. Why? No one can still give an exact answer to this question.
Scientists have conducted many experiments to study this effect, both indoors and outdoors. Some even used GPS trackers. As a result, it turned out that the darker the environment, the more people begin to walk in circles. However, researchers have not been able to establish the real reason for this.
No, of course, there are several theories about this. For example, from a medical point of view, this may be due to the fact that our bodies are asymmetrical and our lower limbs may be different lengths(This, however, happens, and quite often). As a result, if we do not see a landmark in front of us, we begin to be led to the side. Another hypothesis is that this effect is due to the dominance of one part of the brain over another. However, the only thing that has actually been proven through various experiments is that each of these theories is definitely wrong.
Why does anesthesia work?
No matter how confident your anesthesiologist is in his words, he himself is well aware that he has no idea why the drugs he uses for anesthesia actually work. No, we know that general anesthesia can render you unconscious, which is why it is often used for complex surgeries (where full anesthesia is possible), but science still hasn't figured out exactly how it does this.
And the correct answer to this question will not be found until we understand what consciousness itself is. Agree, it is strange to try to answer the question of how consciousness turns off if we have no idea what it is.
Of course, there are theories. According to some, anesthetics disrupt the synchronization of the cerebral cortex. Others suggest that these substances create quantum vibration in the microchannels of the brain. And at the same time, a huge group of scientists is convinced that if you look convincing at this moment, then people will assume that you really understand what you are talking about.
Why are some people born right-handed and others left-handed?
Approximately 15 percent of the entire world population is left-handed. People who are such most often use their left hand instead of their right hand in their work. But this does not mean that all of them use their left hand in absolutely all cases. There are many left-handers who, for example, write right hand, using the left hand to perform most other tasks. This is one of those things that still remains unclear to science.
Moreover, what is of interest is not so much the fact that there is such a category of people, but precisely the fact that people are generally born, so to speak, with a preference for using one or another hand, and not the so-called ambidextrous. Most animals demonstrate this ability, so what's wrong with us?
According to one theory, this feature may somehow be related to the functioning of our language functions. For our brains, language and motor functions are the most energy-intensive activities. Neurophysiologists note that the brain puts these functions on a par. Observations of brain activity show that in right-handed people the left hemisphere is most often activated, and in left-handed people the right hemisphere is most often activated, since the neural pathways in the brain are criss-crossed. In addition, it is noted that the language function of the brain also often gravitates towards one hemisphere or another - the corresponding neural networks are activated in different people predominantly either on the left or on the right. Most people have left-hemisphere language activity, which coincides with right-handedness. Does this mean that left-handers will have language abilities concentrated in the right hemisphere? No. show that the vast majority of left-handers have left-hemisphere linguistic ability, that is, like right-handed people, and only a very small percentage of left-handers have linguistic centers that are more active in the right hemisphere cortex. Moreover, this does not explain in any way why some people are left-handed and others are not.
Another study suggested that the vast majority of gorillas and chimpanzees are right-handed. Darwinists believe that at some point in evolution we began to use one of our hands more often than the other, considering it more useful, and at some point we simply “got used to it” so much that it began to be inherited.
How does a bicycle work?
A bicycle is a very strange thing. It came into our lives back in the 19th century, and since then its design has remained virtually unchanged. It would seem that there are two wheels, a frame connecting them and a steering wheel to control it. What's so complicated about that? However, scientists still don't understand why a bicycle doesn't fall when you ride it, and what makes it roll?
For a very long time it was believed that the gyroscopic effect allows a bicycle to stay on two wheels: when the bicycle begins to lean to the side, its front wheel automatically turns.
One group of scientists, who in 2011 finally decided to figure out what was going on here, ended up making the issue even more confusing. The researchers created their own model of a bicycle. It looked more like a scooter and, by its design, canceled the action of the mechanisms that prevented falling, that is, it was deprived of the gyroscopic effect. As a result of the inspection, it turned out that this was of little use. The vehicle continued to roll, maintaining its balance perfectly. Not only did the study still not answer the question of how a bicycle works, it also did not explain how to make it stop working.
Why do we yawn?
Everyone yawns. This feature is not unique to humans - most animals yawn too. However, no matter how universal yawning is, we still cannot explain why we yawn.
People have been trying to figure out why we yawn since, it seems, the fourth century BC. Hippocrates once suggested that in this way we get rid of “bad air” and inhale “good”. Today, most explain this by the body’s need to reduce concentration. carbon dioxide in the blood and saturating it with oxygen, which is essentially the same thing, although it sounds smarter.
However, the problem with this explanation is that it doesn't actually explain why we yawn when we're tired. The logical explanation is that the brain needs oxygen, but research shows that yawning does not change oxygen levels in the brain.
So why are we doing this? And why don't we yawn when we really need extra oxygen? Why, for example, do we not yawn when we study? exercise?
Everything indicates that this makes no sense. Some associate yawning with painful conditions of the body, but so far none of the hypotheses explaining the causes of yawning have been fully proven.
About antimatter, about the origin of the Universe and a whole diagram of how single-celled organisms turned into people. We have solved riddles so complex that we are scared to even think about it. Sometimes we feel like we have the answer to every question imaginable.
But, as it turns out, we still don’t know everything. There are very simple questions that, nevertheless, no one can answer - these questions seem so simple and obvious to us that it is even stupid to ask them.
10. What is the reason for the order of letters in the English alphabet?
When we teach children the alphabet, we absolutely do not think about what the order of the letters in it is connected with. Of course, many funny songs have been written about the alphabet; we use this order of letters to index items in a list, but no one knows how this order came to be.
The only thing we know for sure is that the letters in the alphabet have been in this order for a very long time. The Latin alphabet is believed to have been created sometime between the 19th and 15th centuries BC. This means he is older than English language. And he really is much older.
It was probably first created by the Canaanites living in Egypt, and then spread further, continuing to develop. Based on the Canaanite script, the Phoenician alphabet emerged, which was transformed into the Greek alphabet, then into the Latin alphabet, and so on, until modern English appeared. Each time a new language was born, it adopted the previous alphabet, keeping the letters in the same order. Individual letters were added to it or, conversely, taken away from it, but overall its order remained almost the same.
So, the modern letter order originated about 4,000 years ago, and although we still preserve it, no one remembers who created it first.
9. Why does lightning strike?
But you may have noticed that there is one major gap in all of this: how does this little cloud get so charged that it is enough to create such super-killing rays?
Based on what we know about electricity, this shouldn't happen. The electrical field in a thunderstorm is about ten times less than what is required to create lightning, so we don't really understand how such a powerful discharge is produced. Of course, there are different theories. Some believe that the electric charge is created as a result of the collision of ice particles. Others believe that the sun's rays are involved. And there are also suggestions that Zeus throws lightning when he quarrels with Hera. In the interests of science, we should not rule out any of these theories until we know for sure.
8. Why do we sleep?
Almost all animals need sleep. Anyone who has ever spent a night without sleep knows how poorly we think when we don't get enough sleep. We become irritable and distracted, even to the point of hallucinations. And, according to people who conducted experiments with laboratory rats, without sleep we can even die.
The problem is that in reality we don't know why this happens. “We hate to admit it,” says neurologist Michael Halassa, “but we don’t understand why we need sleep at all.” Scientists know that something happens to our brain during sleep, but they still don't understand what it is. Is your brain's energy restored? Is detoxification taking place? Are weakened connections being restored?
Until now, science has only given out the loud and convincing phrase “Maybe!” in response to each of these questions. This is strange because most organisms need to sleep, and we know what can happen if they don't. But no one knows 100% what this is connected with.
7. How many muscles do we have?
Any healthy adult has 206 bones, 78 organs and a whole bunch of muscles. Most likely, you think that by now they too have already been counted. Believe it or not, no one is exactly sure about the amount of muscle we have. We know that there are somewhere around 700 skeletal muscles, but there may actually be between 640 and 850.
The problem is that there are several muscles in our bodies that are so complex that they may actually be two different muscles. When various medical experts see these complex muscles, they cannot agree on how many there are.
But even if they come to an agreement, there are people who deviate from the norm. Some people have more of them, while others have such strange variations that no one expected to see.
So, for now, the answer is that we have a whole bunch of them. Or, as one author wrote, “about 700 […], including about four hundred that no one cares about.”
6. Why does a placebo work?
When people think that they have taken the medicine, they actually feel better. This incredible fact relating to the functioning of our brain. The placebo effect has such a huge impact on our health that during research on new drugs, sugar pills are given out along with them to make sure that the medicine really works. But the weird thing we don't talk about is that we don't know why these sugar pills work.
We know for sure that it has something to do with our minds. We know that red placebos work better than white placebos; We know that placebos handed out by doctors in white coats work better than placebos handed out by their assistants. And we know that their effectiveness can be absurdly powerful. In fact, in some cases, placebos are as effective as morphine in relieving pain.
But in reality it is even more unusual. One study found that placebos work even when people know they are taking a placebo. Doctors warn that they are dispensing counterfeit glucose tablets, but nevertheless the tablets produce the same “wonderful” effect.
But we still don't know why they help. Somehow we manage to trick our brains into coping with the disease, but we have no idea what's going on.
5. Why can't we walk in a straight line with our eyes closed?
Try this: go out to the park, put on a blindfold and try to walk in a straight line. When you take off the blindfold, you'll notice one strange thing (besides the lack of a wallet): no matter how hard you try, without a clearly visible reference point, you will walk in circles, and no one knows why.
Scientists have conducted many experiments to investigate this effect. They monitored people's movements visually - and even using GPS. They found that the darker the sky, the more people go around in circles, but they still don't understand why this is happening.
Of course, there are different theories. Some scientists suggest that this is due to the dominance of a certain hemisphere in the brain, others believe that it is due to the difference in the length of our legs. However, the only thing that the experiments have proven is that all these theories are wrong.
4. How does anesthesia work?
No matter how confident your anesthesiologist appears when he administers an anesthetic drug to you, he has no idea how the drug affects your body. We know that anesthesia can render a person unconscious, and we take advantage of it, but we have no idea what it actually does.
We really can't understand how anesthesia makes people unconscious because we don't know what consciousness is. It's a strange concept that relates to our ability to think, but we won't be able to answer how this ability is turned off until we understand what it is we turn off.
Some theories suggest that anesthesia disrupts synchrony between different areas of the cerebral cortex. Others believe that it causes quantum vibrations in microchannels. Most scientists believe that if they nod and try to look serious, people will think they know what those words mean.
3. Why are people right-handed or left-handed?
About ten percent of people are left-handed. You can try to force them to do something with your right hand, but unless you want to use 15th century torture, they will prefer to use your left.
The strange thing is not that there are left-handed people among us - the strange thing is that we are generally born with a preference for a certain hand. In fact, scientists have no idea why people don't use both hands equally. After all, most animals don't seem to have this separation, so what happens to us?
The first theory was that it had something to do with our speech skills. For the brain, speech and motor skills are the most energy-intensive activities; neuroscientists have suggested that the same brain regions are responsible for these types of activities. In most people, the left hemisphere is responsible for speech, so it is possible that the weakening of the motor functions of one of the halves arose when people began to speak.
The problem with this theory was that it did not explain the emergence of left-handed people. For the vast majority of left-handers, the same left hemisphere is responsible for speech as for right-handers.
New research is beginning to suggest that gorillas and chimpanzees also tend to have more developed right hands. All we know for sure is that at some point in evolution we began to view one of our hands as less useful, and for some reason we got stuck with that idea.
2. How do bicycles work?
If you think about bicycles, they are quite strangely designed. They only have two wheels and they fall down when they are stationary, but for some reason they don't fall down when they are in motion. It's one of those weird mysteries that we just accept, assuming that scientists know why this happens and that we're not riding on deadly devices that could fall off at any moment.
But the thing is, they don't know this. Scientists have no idea what the principle of bicycles is based on, although this invention has existed since 1818.
A group of scientists tried to explain how bicycles work using the same principles that explain why airplanes can fly. This is quite puzzling: to understand how small children ride bicycles, we need to know how multi-ton steel birds get into the air.
Some of the ways researchers have tried to solve this problem have only added more questions. One scientist tried to construct an unusable bicycle, but each of his subsequent designs continued to work. This means that not only can we not explain why they work, but we cannot even understand how to make them stop working.
1. Why do we yawn?
Everyone yawns. And not only people, most animals also yawn. But no matter how common yawning may be, we have absolutely no idea why we do it.
People have been trying to understand why we yawn since the fourth century BC. Hippocrates suggested that this could be getting rid of "bad air" and replacing it with "good air." Today, most people think it lowers the carbon dioxide in the blood and increases the oxygen in the blood, which means the same thing but sounds a lot more fancy.
However, this explanation does not answer the question of why we yawn when we are tired. It would be logical to assume that this is related to the brain, but in reality, yawning does not change the level of oxygen in the brain.
So why do we do this? Why don't we yawn when we really need extra oxygen? Why don't we yawn during exercise?
This explanation doesn't make any sense and we don't have a clear answer yet. As it turns out, the same applies to many other things. We have different theories, but the truth is that there are still many aspects of the universe that we simply do not understand.
