Science
1254 verified facts in this category, showing 401–500.
- Massive volcanism 252 million years ago caused rapid environmental change that eliminated most animal species on Earth.
- For nearly the first half of Earth's history, the planet's air and oceans were essentially oxygen-free.
- Cyanobacteria ingest carbon dioxide and release oxygen, and billions of years ago they began producing more oxygen than Earth's natural processes consumed, causing oxygen to build up in the atmosphere.
- Unrefined sugars such as honey, maple syrup, and coconut sugar are still classified as added sugar and count toward recommended daily added sugar limits, despite containing small amounts of vitamins and minerals.
- Comet 3I/ATLAS, discovered on July 1, 2025, is only the third known interstellar visitor to the solar system, following 1I/'Oumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2019.
- The masseter jaw muscle can close the teeth with a force of up to 200 pounds on the molars.
- The human small intestine is over 20 feet long, while the large intestine is about 5 feet long.
- The human intestines average 25 feet in total length.
- An adult's stomach generally stays the same size unless surgery intentionally makes it smaller; eating less does not shrink the stomach.
- Most digestion occurs in the small intestine rather than the stomach.
- Norovirus typically has an incubation period of 24–48 hours, but can remain detectable in stool for weeks, with a median time to loss of detectable virus of about one month.
- Catherine Madaffari, M.D., a never-smoker and Mayo Clinic physician with no family history or other risk factors, was diagnosed with lung adenocarcinoma in 2015 after experiencing a lingering cough.
- In the United States, someone is diagnosed with lung cancer every 2½ minutes.
- Research indicates the Tasmanian tiger (thylacine) had powerful snapping bites suited to catching small and medium-sized prey like bandicoots, rather than large animals such as sheep and cattle.
- NASA's Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space in 2012.
- In 2022, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved nuclear-fusion net energy gain, and repeated the result in 2023, though the experimental apparatus consumed far more power than the fusion fuel produced.
- A study published in the Journal of Sleep Research (Vol. 10, No. 2) in June 2001 found that sleep-deprived participants showed poorer performance, reduced activation in the left temporal region, and increased activation in prefrontal and parietal regions during a task combining arithmetic and verbal learning.
- In the Nature verbal-learning study, activity in the left temporal lobe (a classic language-processing area) decreased after sleep deprivation, even though better performance was associated with increased parietal-lobe activity.
- A verbal-learning study published in Nature (Vol. 403) in February 2000 found that prefrontal brain areas remained active after sleep deprivation while parietal-lobe activity increased.
- In the UCSD sleep deprivation study, fMRI showed less activity in the prefrontal cortex during a sleep-deprived arithmetic task, a region associated with working-memory functioning.
- A 2023 PLOS ONE meta-analysis found that aerobic exercise interventions—including dance, swimming, cycling, walking, running, and other sports—were effective for treating and preventing postpartum depression, except for yoga, which showed no significant improvement compared with a control group.
- People with cluster headache were found to have higher cortisol and lower melatonin levels compared to individuals without headache disorders.
- Both cluster headaches and migraine have been associated with circadian genes and altered levels of circadian-related hormones, including cortisol and melatonin.
- Cluster headaches were found to be more likely to occur in spring and fall, with attacks generally happening between late night and early morning.
- A meta-analysis found that symptoms followed a circadian pattern in 71% of cluster headache patients.
- A large Japanese study of men and women linked eating three or more bowls of miso soup a day to about 60% higher stomach-cancer risk, while two Japanese studies hinted at lower liver-cancer risk: one result was not statistically significant, and the other was seen only in women with no history of liver disease.
- A meta-analysis found that soy products, especially tofu and natto, were associated with lower risks of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular events, but this risk reduction did not apply to miso, partly due to its higher sodium content.
- In mouse studies, the prebiotic Aspergillus oryzae found in miso soup reduced the risk of colitis.
- The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies radiation from cell phones as 'possibly' a cancer-causing substance.
- In the INTERPHONE study, the 10% of people who used their cell phones the most had a small increase in the risk of a certain type of brain tumor.
- A 2024 World Health Organization meta-analysis of more than 60 studies published from 1994 through 2022, involving participants from 22 countries, found no link between cell-phone use and brain cancer.
- A 2020 case report in Oxford Medical Case Reports identified 'the balloon impasse sign' during percutaneous transvenous mitral valvuloplasty.
- A randomized clinical trial published in CMAJ on April 3, 2018, evaluated smartphone-based photoplethysmography to assess ulnar artery patency, with Pietro Di Santo as an author.
- A case report published in European Heart Journal—Case Reports on December 28, 2023, described percutaneous repair of a sinotubular junction aortic pseudoaneurysm using an atrial septal defect occluder.
- The Page-Ladson site was discovered accidentally in the early 1980s when former Navy SEAL Buddy Page found prehistoric elephant bones while scuba diving in the Aucilla River.
- Sediment layers containing pre-Clovis artifacts at Page-Ladson also contained remains of an extinct prehistoric camelid, bison, and mastodon.
- Ancient bison bones discovered at Ayer Pond on Orcas Island, Washington, were radiocarbon-dated to about 13,800 years ago.
- In a 2002 study, researchers Donald Grayson and David Meltzer found evidence of big-animal hunting at only 14 Clovis sites after examining data from scores of sites.
- The first hand and foot bones clearly linked to the extinct human relative Paranthropus boisei have been discovered.
- A Science study found that dinosaurs in New Mexico lived within 400,000 years of the asteroid impact 66 million years ago, contradicting claims that those dinosaurs were millions of years older than the extinction event.
- Some individual footprints from the Poland tetrapod tracksite were as wide as 10 inches (26 centimeters).
- Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki of Warsaw University co-authored a study on 395-million-year-old tetrapod footprints found in Poland.
- The Mongolian fossils of Zavacephale rinpoche are at least 14 million years older than the previously oldest known pachycephalosaur, Sinocephale from China.
- The Zavacephale rinpoche fossil contains the first hand digit (finger) bones ever reported for any pachycephalosaur.
- Zavacephale rinpoche is the oldest known pachycephalosaur, dating to roughly 108 million years ago.
- The Dueling Dinosaurs fossil was discovered in 2006 and remained inaccessible to scientists during a prolonged ownership dispute until the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences acquired it in 2020.
- In a food-sharing experiment, chimpanzee sharing behavior declined from an average of 7.12 out of 9 trials among juveniles to 4.43 among adults.
- In a food-sharing experiment, bonobo sharing behavior remained similar from juveniles (6.83 out of 9 trials) to adults (6.33 out of 9 trials), unlike chimpanzees.
- Before the rotavirus vaccine was added to the routine U.S. childhood vaccine schedule in 2006, nearly every child in the United States was infected with rotavirus before age 5, causing 55,000–70,000 hospitalizations and 20–60 deaths annually.
- A rare congenital heart valve condition called a quadricuspid valve occurs when a person is born with four cusps on the aortic valve instead of the usual three.
- A rare congenital heart valve condition called a unicuspid valve occurs when a person is born with only one cusp on the aortic valve instead of the usual three.
- System-wide measurements of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) extend back only about 20 years.
- The Iceland Faroe Slope Jet is a deep, dense-water current that flows south and east through the Faroe Bank Channel and feeds into the lower limb of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC).
- El Niño Modoki is a variant of El Niño that involves unusual warming in the central tropical Pacific alongside cooling in the eastern and western tropical Pacific.
- The European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) Dome C ice core record reconstructs atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for the last 800,000 years.
- A dangerous strain of salmonella has spread through the U.S. chicken industry and sickened thousands of people, according to a 2021 ProPublica investigation.
- The Martian rock features found by NASA's Perseverance rover also include small black dots that scientists nicknamed 'poppy seeds'.
- The deep-sea neutrino telescope that detected this record particle is called KM3NeT.
- Topological insulators were first observed experimentally in 2007; the first three-dimensional topological insulator was confirmed in 2008.
- Hermansky-Pudlak syndrome can cause blood clotting problems and can be potentially fatal.
- A 2013 study published in Science Translational Medicine reported that neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) are a source of citrullinated autoantigens and stimulate inflammatory responses in rheumatoid arthritis.
- A 1998 study published in Nature Medicine found that mice lacking neutrophil elastase show impaired host defense against gram-negative bacterial sepsis.
- Researchers from Mayo Clinic's Center for Individualized Medicine found that epithelioid trophoblastic tumor recurrently exhibits an abnormal fusion of two genes.
- James Clerk Maxwell is credited with creating the first color photograph in 1861, having Thomas Sutton photograph a tartan ribbon through red, green, and blue filters and projecting the three images simultaneously.
- Researchers used a machine-learning neural network trained on earthquake data labeled by human experts to detect the tiny earthquakes of the Cahuilla swarm in seismic records.
- The Cahuilla earthquake swarm produced earthquakes from early 2016 through 2019 and caused no significant damage despite lasting four years.
- The largest earthquake in the Cahuilla swarm occurred in August 2018, nearly three years after the swarm began, and measured magnitude 4.4.
- In a three-month study, people following a fasting-mimicking diet consumed approximately 750–1,100 calories per day for five days each month and lost weight without losing muscle mass.
- One male rhesus monkey in a calorie restriction study reached 43 years old, reported as a record for the species.
- In a Nature Communications study, six of 20 rhesus monkeys on a diet restricted by 30% lived beyond 40 years.
- The Open Science Collaboration's article on psychological-science reproducibility was authored by a group of 270 coauthors.
- The National Institutes of Health Women's Health Initiative reported that menopausal hormone therapy started in women age 65 or older increased the risk of dementia.
- Mayo Clinic radiologist Kejal Kantarci, M.D., was the lead author of a study that was the first to show reduced brain amyloid deposition in newly postmenopausal women receiving 17beta-estradiol through a skin patch.
- Researchers described the period 5-36 months past menopause as the 'critical window' of rapid estrogen depletion.
- A 2014 study linked hugging with stronger protection against the common cold.
- Sediment collected from beneath Hiawatha Glacier contained shocked quartz, quartz grains with brown 'toasting,' and minerals altered by shock metamorphism into glass.
- Radar measurements indicate the Hiawatha crater's circular rim rises approximately 1,050 feet above its floor.
- At an estimated 19 miles wide, the Hiawatha impact crater would rank among the 25 largest known impact craters on Earth.
- The proposed Hiawatha impact crater is estimated to be 19 miles wide, larger than Washington, D.C.
- During the global winter caused by the asteroid impact, temperatures fell below freezing.
- Employment and wage growth from 1980 to 2012 were especially strong in jobs requiring high levels of both math skill and social skills.
- From 1980 to 2012, math-intensive but less-social jobs, including many STEM occupations, declined by 3.3 percentage points as a share of the U.S. labor force.
- The effects of age-distribution shifts on unemployment in the U.S. are larger than a mechanical shift-share model predicts, indicating amplifying indirect effects.
- A matching model calibrated on 2002–2007 CPS data explains much of the observed outward shift in the Beveridge curve between 2008 and 2013.
- A matching model calibrated with Current Population Survey panel data from 2002–2007 can account for almost all of the increase in the incidence of long-term unemployment observed after 2008.
- A study found that compositional shifts in demographics, occupation, industry, region, and reason for unemployment jointly explain very little of the sharp increase in long-term unemployment during the Great Recession.
- Although little data suggest menthol itself is addictive, its reduction of smoke's irritant effect can lead people to smoke more, inhale more deeply, and hold smoke longer, increasing nicotine exposure.
- Researchers have found no clear proof of a link between MSG and the symptoms attributed to MSG symptom complex.
- Reactions known as 'MSG symptom complex' are not allergic reactions, even though they can include headache, flushing, body tingling, nausea, muscle aches, chest pain or heaviness, and heart palpitations.
- Glutamate is not related to gluten.
- The FDA updated its criteria for using the word 'healthy' on food labels for the first time in 30 years.
- Testing a food's glycemic index can involve 10 or more healthy people eating enough of the food to provide 50 grams of carbohydrates, with blood sugar measured repeatedly over two hours.
- The 2015–2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans do not mention the cancer risks associated with processed or red meat, and state that processed meat can fit into a diet if other nutrient limits are met.
- The World Health Organization classified processed meat as a carcinogen.
- The FDA stated that data from a 2022 color additive petition showed FD&C Red No. 3 causes cancer in male laboratory rats exposed to high levels.
- More than 99% of species listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act have avoided extinction due to the law's protections.
- The USGS earthquake hazards map excludes earthquakes caused by human activities such as pumping wastewater from hydraulic fracturing or injecting carbon dioxide deep underground.
- The USGS identified 28 million people living in areas where 'pretty strong ground shaking' is expected within the next 50 years.
- More than 143 million Americans live in an earthquake zone and face at least some risk of a damaging earthquake by 2065, according to a U.S. Geological Survey analysis.
- The median number of populations required for delisting under U.S. Endangered Species Act recovery plans is 8.