‘What scientific discovery sounds fake but is 100% real and still freaks you out?’ – 19 facts to bring out your inner sceptic

In the words of Bill the Quill, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”, and that doesn’t only refer to people from the 16th or 17th centturies. There are plenty of things that the modern human finds difficult to wrap their heads around, and plenty we haven’t even discovered.

Over on r/AskReddit, bruteresolver teased out some of those baffling things with this question –

“What scientific discovery sounds fake but is 100% real and still freaks you out?”

There were plenty of suggestions, including these that really stood out.

1.

There’s a species of salamander that stabs its ribs through the sides of its body to ward off predators.
Melenduwir

2.

Genghis Khan’s conquests resulted in so many deaths carbon emissions significantly dropped over a century or so.
vreas

3.

There are more cells in what you consider your body that are not you (bacteria) than cells that are you.
ProfZussywussBrown

4.

MRI, magnetic resonance imaging. Let’s take a big magnet, throw in some intermittent radio waves, measure which atoms are flipping upside-down, and then make a 3D image.
HotShowersPA

5.

Ants measure distance by counting their steps. Scientists proved this by taking some ants out of a line and putting tiny stilts on them. Those ants then over shot the food source they were going to.
cmayfi

6.

In the Sagittarius B2 cloud, there’s a nebula that has the equivalent of 400 trillion pints of beer’s worth of alcohol in it.
chrisriley_42

7.

“Boquila trifoliolata, a South American chameleon vine, has been documented to mimic the shape, size, and color of artificial plastic plants, even when no chemical or genetic cues exist for it to copy.”
silverwarbler

8.

Planet 9. A theorized planet that could be 10x bigger than Earth out beyond the current outer planets. We have not found it but we can see evidence of its impact on the Kuyper belt.
willing-cucumber-595

9.

Sharks have been around longer than trees and Saturn’s rings.
dinosauriame

10.

Doctors were able to restore a blind man’s sight by implanting one of his teeth into his eyeball.
DrJoels