History's Weirdest Science Findings

by Brian Dunning
August 26, 2025

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Telling fact from fiction is an immortal arms race. The purveyors of pseudoscience and pseudohistory are bound by no constrictions, so they can say whatever they want; while those of us who do legit diligent research can only provide evidence for one thing at a time. And now we've got AI to contend with, with all of its hallucinations and invented false history — and a worldwide social media network revved up and prepped to share it farther and wider than has ever been possible before. And so, increasingly, you have to rely on Skeptoid — a source that you know will do the real work to separate the real from the unreal. We're here for you.

So when many among you asked for my thoughts on scientific findings that seemed to swim against the current, I was reminded of a common trope among pseudoscientists who are frustrated that their cherished personal beliefs don't ever seem to make it into the scientific journals. They persuade themselves that scientists are paid to learn nothing: to go through the motions of scientific testing, but actually to never open their minds to anything other than the status quo: that holy knowledge that Big Science has decreed must never be challenged.

Well, do any of you actually personally know any real working scientists? I do. The pretense that they are secretly paid to learn nothing and to promote some scriptural "scientism" truth is completely antithetical to the career of any research scientist. Each has one hope to succeed: to prove their predecessors wrong, and to present the scientific breakthrough of the century. It is this constant scrutiny and searching for holes in the net, and having them verified by the best in the business, that makes the scientific method our very best defense against people who just make up junk.

So now let us take a look at fourteen of the science findings that I personally feel are pretty fun — especially given that they seem to go straight up against that scriptural scientism. Let's begin with something I first saw watching Lawrence of Arabia as a boy.

Bedouins who wear black robes can be cooler than those wearing white.

Research performed in 1980 and published in Nature found that this is actually true — but only if the robes are loose and flowing, allowing air to circulate. While it's true that black robes absorb more heat from the sun than white robes, they also absorb more radiated body heat while white robes reflect the body heat back at the person. So long as there is sufficient airflow to carry that heat away, the black robes will indeed keep you cooler.

Woolly mammoths were still alive when the pyramids were built.

The last surviving population of woolly mammoths, which held out thousands of years longer than most of the rest, was on Wrangel Island, a Russian island northwest of the Bering Strait. By carbon dating the bones and tusks, we've found individuals who died no more than 4,000 years ago — when the Great Pyramid of Giza was already 600 years old.

It rains diamonds on Uranus and Neptune.

Although we can't prove it without going there, theory and laboratory simulations since 2017 both indicate that at depths more than 10,000 km into their atmospheres, pressures are high enough to break apart methane molecules. The carbon atoms, thus liberated, are then compressed together in the extreme heat and form actual diamonds. These diamonds then sink to the planetary core over thousands of years, causing friction which heats the planets even more. It's worth pointing out that while this is not universally accepted, my read is that it's a consensus view.

Your brain uses generative AI to fill in your blind spot.

Apologies for using clickbait terminology like "generative AI" which isn't true, but it is a reasonable simile for what happens. Your brain, like an AI, has been trained on what it has observed about the world. We all have a blind spot in our vision from the place where the retinal nerves pass through the back of the eye, a little region about 7.5° × 5.5° of arc in our visual field. No visual data comes in from that little area, so our brains use predictive mechanisms to create seamless vision, based on what it already knows from the surrounding context. Your blind spot is literally filled in with a brain-generated hallucination.

Slime molds don't have brains, but can navigate a maze to get to food; even merge with another slime mold and combine their knowledge.

Wildly and bizarrely true, but it doesn't have anything to do with knowledge the way we think of it. It was found in 2000 that a slime mold placed into a complex maze will fill the entire maze with tube-like extensions. If one touches food, the organism retracts from dead ends and reinforces the successful pathways. After only four hours, the slime mold would have found the most efficient possible route through the maze. But it's because the successful paths have more nutrients and trigger positive feedback, not because they're smart.

Both the hottest and coldest temperatures ever recorded in the universe were here on Earth.

In 2012, physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory used the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider to smash gold ions together at nearly the speed of light. This produced a quark-gluon plasma with a temperature of 4 trillion degrees Celsius (7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit). This is the hottest temperature ever observed in the universe.

And while the average temperature in interstellar space is only about 2.7 Kelvin — just 2.7 degrees above absolute zero — a team in Germany pushed a cloud of rubidium atoms even colder in 2021. They got it down to 38 trillionths of a degree above absolute zero, and this is the coldest temperature ever observed in the universe.

Pluto was only a planet for less than a year.

This is true — but only in Pluto years. Pluto was classified as a planet in 1930, and was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006. That's 76 years (Earth years). It takes Pluto 248 Earth years to complete one orbit of its own; meaning that poor Pluto was a planet for less than a third of one year (Pluto years). And, as an interesting additional tidbit, the United States has existed for just about exactly one Pluto year.

There are more ways to shuffle a deck of cards than there are atoms in the galaxy.

With a deck of 52 cards, you have 52 possibilities for the top card; 51 possibilities left for the next one; 50 for the next one; and so on. This means the formula for the number of possible ways a deck of cards can be arranged is 52! (factorial), which comes out to around 8 × 10⁶⁷. The estimated number of atoms in the Milky Way, however, is estimated at just about a third of that: 2.4 × 10⁶⁷.

Agriculture is older than blue eyes.

It may be hard to believe, but the first blue eyes appeared as a mutation in a single individual only some six to ten thousand years ago. In 2008, the results of 12 years of genetics research was published, finding that 97% of blue-eyed people share an identical H-1 haplotype with a mutation on the HERC2 gene. This indicates that all blue eyed people everywhere are probably descended from a single individual.

Agriculture, however, is much older; with evidence of cultivation in the Fertile Crescent more than 20,000 years ago.

If you shrank to a tiny size, you could still jump just as high.

Thanks to the square-cube law, the smaller some science fiction machine could shrink you, the stronger you'd get. Basically, if you shrank to 1/10 your current physical dimensions, your body mass would be 1/10³, or 1/1000; while the cross-section of your muscles would be 1/10², or 1/100. Your strength-to-weight ratio would improve by a factor of 10. Because of how math works, whatever factor you shrank (or grew) your body proportions to, your relative strength would increase (or decrease) by the same factor. Mathematically, anyway, your ability to jump to a certain height would remain unchanged.

It takes more energy to drop something into the sun than it takes to fling it out of the solar system.

Orbital mechanics are weird — never illustrated better than here. It would be pretty hard to, say, end a spacecraft's mission by dropping it into the sun. We are moving sideways relative to the sun at 108,000 km/h. If you wanted to fall straight in, you would have to rocket yourself away from the Earth — in the direction the Earth came from — to that same speed. Miss it by the tiniest amount, even a single km/h, and you'll fall next to the sun and into some big weird eccentric orbit. In short, you need to accelerate to 100% of Earth's orbital velocity.

Correction: The 1 km/h is way off — the sun is a pretty big target. You actually have about 10,320 km/h of leeway there, about 5,160 km/h too fast or too slow. —BD

By contrast, to escape the solar system entirely, you can use the existing motion of the Earth to your advantage and accelerate in the direction we're already going; and to do that, you need only accelerate 41% faster than the Earth's orbital velocity. So in short, it takes 2.5× as much energy to stop and fall into the sun than it does to achieve escape velocity from the solar system.

Electrons flow the opposite direction from electrical current.

This all goes back to the great polymath Benjamin Franklin — the Founding Father who was smart enough to never run for President. During his experiments with electricity in 1746 (long before technology permitted the discovery of the electron) he understood the positive and negative charges, but had to take a 50/50 shot at which way it flowed. He went with positive flows toward negative, which remains today's descriptive standard, even though it means electrons are moving in the opposite direction. More than anything else, it's a linguistic matter. Today our whole body of knowledge on electricity uses Franklin's standard, and since it works fine, we've simply decided to just roll with it. Current flows from the positive to the negative; by virtue of the fact that when a negative moves in the opposite direction, we can say that two negatives make a positive.

Lobsters don't age.

Like a few other creatures, lobsters have the blissful advantage of being immune to cellular senescence; their cells can divide indefinitely with no DNA damage and they could theoretically live forever, having no degenerative conditions. They have a different problem: they never stop growing. This would be fine, they could grow and grow forever, becoming the Lovecraftian denizens of the deep, except for one problem: as arthropods, they have to shed their exoskeleton as they grow. And the bigger you get, the greater the energy requirement is of doing so. By the time a lobster gets really big, each molt requires exponentially more energy than the previous one; and that's when most lobsters die: perfectly healthy, but dead from exhaustion of trying to shed a bigger and bigger shell.

Avoiding the most-favored road can make traffic better for everyone.

You might recognize this as a Nash equilibrium, the concept by Nobel Prize winner John Nash. People tend to act in their own self interest, for example by drivers going straight for the most-favored road; but when everyone does that, they all get bogged down. But what if everyone picks their own route that they feel will avoid the most crowded roads and give them a better path on roads others most likely would not choose? Eventually, drivers settle into a traffic pattern where each person is taking their best possible route given everyone else's choices. Traffic spreads across different roads, but in a specific stable way. Even though the overall system might still be inefficient, no individual driver can switch routes and get a better commute time. That stable pattern where everyone is doing their personal best, given what others are doing, is the Nash equilibrium.

And there we have it — fourteen fun science findings. If you've got another favorite that didn't make it in today, send it to me at brian@skeptoid.com, and maybe we can do a followup episode with more of the best.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning