Science is hands down one of the coolest subjects in the world. It is always striving to learn, so it’s mutable and adaptive. Some people think it’s a weakness of science when what we believe is true is proven wrong, but that’s what makes science so valuable. It’s never arrogant enough to say “This is an absolute truth.” Instead, it simply seeks to explain something as well as it can, given the evidence.
With that in mind, science cannot explain some things yet and sometimes those things are the most mundane things you can think of.
10. We’re Not Entirely Clear On How Anesthesia Works
If you’re headed to the hospital for a major surgery, then you’re going to need anesthesia. It just makes it easier for doctors to fiddle with your innards if you aren’t watching and screaming.
There are many kinds of anesthesia used for a variety of purposes, some of which are local, some general, some inhaled, and some injected. Whatever anesthesia you’re getting, it’s designed to prevent you from feeling pain. Sometimes that means you’re unconscious.
Given what anesthesia does, it needs to be administered carefully. Too little and you’ll feel surgeons cutting into you. You may even be unable to react to show you’re conscious, but you’ll feel everything. Too much anesthesia and you could die. It’s serious business.
Knowing what we know about anesthesia, it’s harrowing to also know that we don’t know how it works. The process by which it can knock you out and make you unable to feel pain is a literal mystery. There are theories it may dissolve some fats in your brain and otherwise interfere with how your brain transmits information.
In 2020, a study revealed that one kind of anesthesia, of the many kinds, weakens high-frequency electrical signals between neurons. The experiment was done in mice and could account for the pain-negating effect while simultaneously allowing lower frequency signals, the things that govern your ability to breathe and keep your heart beating, to continue.
Again, that study was in 2020 and it was done on mice. It was the first time scientists could see something they thought might explain the workings of a medical procedure we’ve been doing since the 1840s.
9. Itacolumite is a Bendable Rock and We’re Not Sure How it Works
If someone asked you to describe the characteristics of rocks, you might say things like hard, heavy, rigid, or solid. Some pretty basic and boring adjectives. But if you were tasked with describing the rock known as itacolumite you could also add bendable to the list.
Itacolumite is a kind of sandstone and it’s most prevalent in the Brazilian mountains from where it gets its name. The stone can bend in your hands, even under its own weight, the way you might expect a piece of rubber to bend. It’s no Stretch Armstrong but, compared to the rocks that you find most everywhere else in the world, it’s impressive.
The reason flexible sandstone works is a mystery. The structure of the stone is made of grains of quartz that are more widely separated than they would be in a more rigid stone. The spaces between these grains are irregular as well, which seems to allow for flexibility. But how and why this happens is still not known.
8. We Understand the Purpose Behind Different Tastes Except for Sour
Humans can detect five principle kinds of taste. We categorize them as sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami. Science has even managed to come up with a reason for each.
Biologically speaking, sweet lets you know something has sugars in it, which means carbohydrates, which means energy. Umami is triggered by things meaty and that means protein. Bitter is often associated with things we don’t want to eat and dangerous plants, especially poisonous ones, are bitter and we learned to avoid those because of bitterness. Salty deals with electrolytes and fluid balances and general body health. And then there’s sour.
Whether you love sour food or hate it, science has not been able to explain the biological purpose behind our ability to taste it. It’s a simple way to tell if food is acidic, but that doesn’t benefit us in any significant way. A sour food could be poisonous, or it could benefit fluid balance, or it could have carbohydrates. Or not. The sourness isn’t relevant to those or a reliable way to judge their worthiness in fulfilling those needs.
It’s been speculated ancient fish could “taste” sour through their flesh and that could alert them to acidic and therefore dangerous waters. Also, being that humans can’t produce their own vitamin C, the ability to taste sour might help us identify it naturally in our food. Or it might help us identify rotten fruit that is producing acids from bacteria. But, again, that’s a maybe.
7. Everyone Has Face Mites But It’s Not Clear Exactly Why
If you were to look at your face under a powerful microscope you’d discover an entire world of tiny little creatures living in your pores, enjoying your oils, reproducing, and pooping on you with abandon. These little mites, called Demodex, are arachnids and live on all mammals. They have developed alongside us. We have no idea what they’re there for.
The mites don’t cause you any harm and you also can’t really get rid of them. In 2,000 random people tested, every single person had them. The little fellas live in the pores on the oiliest parts of your face nestled against hair follicles. They feast on the sebum, the oily substance your skin makes to protect itself, and then late at night they crawl out to breed on your face before digging back into your pores again.
While evidence suggests we’ve always had these mites, as in since our species started, the reason is still unclear. They’re usually not dangerous, though some people can have a reaction to them or suffer from too many. But mostly they eat dead skin and keep your face running smoothly.
6. Flying Squirrels Glow Pink in UV Light For Some Reason
Flying squirrels are absolutely adorable, and why wouldn’t they be? They’re squirrels that glide through the trees like Batman. Science has also discovered that these little mammals are also the ultimate rave animals as they glow bright pink under ultraviolet light.
To be clear, no other squirrel glows under black light, just flying squirrels. Researchers studied the fur of squirrels using a mass spectrometer to find out what compounds might make it glow and found nothing, putting a bit of a speed bump in the road to understanding.
The phenomena wasn’t captured on camera until 2021 and experts were left with little but speculation. The squirrels could glow in a way visible to other squirrels as part of a mating ritual, as a communication method, or even to ward off predators. It’s hard to say right now since it’s unique to just these animals.
5. Bats Hate Solar Farms But We Don’t Know Why
Bats are some of the most helpful animals in nature, cleaning up the skies of terrible pests like mosquitoes every night as well as inspiring some of our best superheroes. They also tend to prefer dark places to live like caves, attics, under bridges, and so on. One thing they seem to hate? Solar farms.
Bats avoiding solar farms may not seem like a big deal, but it could be. If bats don’t want to be around them, then that can alter the entire ecosystem. The insects they prey on can thrive in those areas. Solar farms actually do provide great breeding grounds for insects. As solar farms spread, so too could the insects and potential diseases carried by them.
So far no one knows why the bats hate the farms. It now becomes a balancing act as to whether anything can or should be done. Fossil fuels arguably kill more bats than solar farms could, so maybe nothing is to be done about bats not wanting to be there, especially since we don’t even know why.
4. Dogs Brains are Getting Larger for Some Reason
There are two kinds of pet owners; those who think their pets are geniuses and those who think their pets are idiots. If you’re in the genius camp and you own a dog, you may be on to something. Dog brains are actually getting bigger, but the reason behind it remains something of a mystery.
Compared to their ancient ancestors, many modern dog breeds have larger brains than they did in the past. In general, dog brains are smaller than wolf brains but the more removed a dog breed is from wolves in the modern world, the larger their brain seems to be.
Domestication shrunk the size of dog brains, but as we have bred new dogs and tasked them with jobs like hunting or herding, their brains have begun to increase again. Domestic dogs may have developed these larger brains not just because they have jobs – wolves had to do as much or more – but because they live in a more complicated and social world. The expectations and burdens of living with humans are forcing their brains to expand to handle it all.
3. Tornadoes are Getting Bigger, Faster, and More Plentiful
If you’ve been feeling like bad weather has been getting worse, you’re not alone. Tornadoes are, in fact, bigger, faster, and more frequent today than they have been in the past. And while that’s concerning, maybe more concerning is that we can’t explain why.
Over the past 50 years the part of the US known as Tornado Alley has expanded. The deadly storms are more frequent and more powerful. Climate change is something people can point to but saying that and explaining it are two different things. If climate change is to blame, how is it to blame? That’s what we don’t exactly know yet. Warmer winters are definitely contributing to the problem, allowing tornadoes to form both sooner in the year and further north, but that does little to help explain them or predict them.
Predicting and warning about tornadoes is something that suffers with the new patterns. In 2011 the average lead time for a tornado was 13 minutes. That was how much warning people in the path of a storm would have to prepare. By 2020 it was down to 8.4 minutes. That’s better than 1990 when it was only 5 minutes, but the fact it’s heading back down instead of going up is not a good sign.
2. Crows Will Sometimes Act Very Unexpectedly Towards Their Own Dead
Crows are some of the most intelligent animals in the world. They are capable of conscious thought and possess self-awareness, something that humans long thought only primates could manage. In fact, crows and gorillas may be intellectually on the same level. That’s both stunning and impressive and should make us look at these birds in a whole new light.
Knowing how intelligent crows are, it’s even more baffling to see some of their behavior. Some crows have been observed engaging in illicit behavior with the corpses of other crows. The least offensive way to say it is necrophilia.
Crows generally avoid their own dead or use them as a chance to warn others of danger. About 24% of the time crows will approach a corpse to poke at it in some way. But in 4% of cases the birds would try to copulate and the reason is just not clear at all. One idea was that the behavior was observed during mating season and hormone levels in the living birds could have impaired their cognitive function, but there’s no concrete evidence.
1. The Science of Whether or Not Water is Wet is Not Settled
Is water wet? That sounds like one of the dumbest questions you could ever ask but, scientifically, it’s not dumb at all. And it doesn’t have a definite answer, either. Part of the problem here is rooted in what “wet” means. That sounds semantic but there’s more to it than that.
Science defines wetness by a liquid’s ability to maintain contact with a substance thereby making it “wet” as we understand the water. And by that definition water isn’t actually wet, it’s just what makes something else wet. That said, if you think wet means something liquid then water is wet.
To think of it another way, wet is the way something feels when the liquid is on it. So if you dunk your hand in water, your hand is now wet because water is on it. But since wet is just a sensation, the water itself isn’t technically wet because it’s not on anything and has made nothing wet yet. The water is never wet, it’s just your hand that gets that way because of the water. If that sounds vaguely confusing, that’s the point and that’s why science is still not 100% clear on whether water is wet.