The world is a mysterious place. The cosmos, nature, and life itself are just 3 of the countless mysteries millions of people spent entire lives trying to solve. The sole fact that there is existence, that there is something rather than nothing, is a mystery.
There are many facts scientists have proven which paradoxically, instead of solving the mystery, they make everything just stranger.
Maybe it’s our capacity to grasp things, maybe it’s a fallacy of our logic, but realizing some of the magnificent facts about The Universe is MIND BLOWING! Here are 7 of the most INCREDIBLY mind blowing facts that will stretch your mind to a whole new dimension:
You are the same age as The Universe because matter can never be created or destroyed.
Everything we eat is processed sunshine.
You have never been in the same physical place twice since the earth, solar system, and galaxy are all moving through space.
Everything you see is delayed.
If you properly shuffle a deck of cards, chances are that exact order has never been seen before in the whole history of The Universe.
If someone on a planet 65 million light years away look at earth, they see dinosaurs.
Not all starlight is the same age, some of it is millions or even billions of years apart even though it hits your eye at the same time. So the night sky isn’t a single moment in The Universe but rather a patchwork of time billions of years in breadth.
Sometimes it’s too hard to forgive. Too hard! All that we want is vengeance. But facing hate with hate just creates more hate, it creates more of what you want to destroy, and it will appear in countless different forms.
The most powerful thing is not vengeance, but LOVE! Transmuting hate into love is one of the most heroic acts anyone can ever do. One simple act that alchemizes hate into love echoes through eternity! A couple of them can literally change the world! Love is what can restore humanity even in the most monstrous of us.
This is a story of a murderer who killed his wife and child. He discovered real love in the most unusual place and from the last person anyone would expect!
Can you imagine how long is 1 million years? How small a molecule actually is? How far is our neighbor galaxy from us? These are some of the things we cannot intuitively comprehend. We can put the answers in numbers on a piece of paper, but we cannot really comprehend the majesty these facts are telling.
If the existence of The Universe is scaled down to 1 year and if you put the existence of humanity on that scale equivalent to the time from The Big Bang until now, we have existed only the last 10 seconds of that year.
These MIND BLOWING facts are hard to comprehend. Listen to Neil deGrasse Tyson explaining what is THE GREATEST misconception we have about The Universe and you will never see the world around you the same.
Have you ever asked yourself “Where does the fat go when we lose weight”? If you are like me, you’ve thought that it becomes sweat. This is true, but only 16% true. Sweat is just a tiny 16% of your fat’s journey. Where are the other 84%?
Many people believe it’s converted into energy. However, if this was true, we would not need nuclear weapons just people who want to lose some weight.
The answer to “Where does most of the fat go when we lose weight” is not sweat, nor energy. Surprisingly, the rest 84% of the fat becomes air. Yes, air. More accurately CO2 or carbon dioxide. If you are surprised by this, don’t worry. Most of the doctors, nutritionists and weight loss trainers have no idea.
“There is surprising ignorance and confusion about the metabolic process of weight loss,” says Professor Andrew Brown, head of the UNSW School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences.
“The correct answer is that most of the mass is breathed out as carbon dioxide. It goes into thin air,” says the study’s lead author, Ruben Meerman, a physicist and Australian TV science presenter.
If you are like most people who would want to find a loophole and cheat the system, you would think “what if I breathe faster, will I lose more fat?” If you simply breathe faster without any activity, your body will not produce enough heat to break the CHO (fat) molecules from your body. The only thing you’ll lose is your consciousness as you’ll give yourself hyperventilation.
“Losing weight requires unlocking the carbon stored in fat cells, thus reinforcing that often heard refrain of “eat less, move more.” We recommend these concepts be included in secondary school science curriculums and university biochemistry courses to correct widespread misconceptions about weight loss.” (source)
The most astonishing fact about this, however, is how the CHO molecule forms in the first place. The ONLY way CHO can form naturally is through photosynthesis and the plants are the only ones “trained” to do this.
First let’s break it down. What is CHO? C means Carbon, H is for Hydrogen and O stands for Oxygen. Plants take these 3 elements and bind them together through sunlight in a process called photosynthesis.
All the food that we eat comes from this. Fruits, Vegetables, Meat, everything that we eat consumed the CHO molecules that the plants created. The energy that we consume through food is actually sunlight. The same sunlight that plants used to forge these elements together. We eat sunlight for energy! Isn’t this ASTOUNISHING?!
So, in a way, eating meat is like eating second-hand energy that the animals took from eating plants. Or, if we eat predators, we take the energy that the hunted animals consumed from the grass they ate, before they were eaten by the predators, or third-hand energy in this case. This makes you think why natural, organic food is much healthier than eating a lot of meat and processed food.
Eating food closer to that sunshine is all we need. Eat more sunshine!
In order to thrive as humans we must learn from each other.
We don’t have all the time in the world to make all the mistakes. That’s why we need to “eat” from the “fruit” other people give to the world, produced through their lifetime of trail and error, experimenting and learning.
This “fruit” is called wisdom and it applies to most of us. We each can learn from the wisdom of others because it holds universal truth about life. No matter how your path differs from theirs, you can apply their wisdom to walk your path without making the same mistakes. That’s how we thrive as humanity. Here are 7 powerful lessons from 7 of the most brilliant people in human history:
“Don’t limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.”― Rabindranath Tagore
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” ― Confucius
“When words are both true and kind, they can change our world.” ― Gautama Buddha
“The greatest wealth is to live content with little.” ― Plato
“We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far. ” ― Swami Vivekananda
“The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.” ― Aristotle
“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself!” ― Chanakya
Researchers at MIT have developed a programming language that will allow the toolmakers of the future to “program” living cells—outfitting them with DNA-encoded circuits that confer a host of new functions on the “hacked” organism.
Christopher Voigt, professor of biological engineering at MIT, explains: “It is literally a programming language for bacteria. You use a text-based language, just like you’re programming a computer. Then you take that text and you compile it and it turns it into a DNA sequence that you put into the cell, and the circuit runs inside the cell.” (source)
Essentially, you start with the ability you want to program into the bacterium—say, detecting the presence of certain harmful chemicals. You write up a program describing it, and a DNA sequence is created that will achieve the desired function.
So let’s say you want to get rid of a certain disease. All you have to do is program the germ to snif out and eliminate the disease, just like coding a program to execute a certain function. The best thing about this breakthrough is that it’s INCREDIBLY easy to use!
You don’t need to have any training in genetic or biological engineering. Hell, you don’t even need to know what a gene is. ANYONE can use it!
It’s genetic engineering for the masses. The designers even plan to make the language’s user interface universally available on the Internet. Who knows, maybe we’ll each have a bacteria-programming-kit at home in the future.
The ice bucket challenge was a phenomenon in the summer of 2014 in which people dunked a bucket of iced water over their heads in order to solicit donations before nominating others to do the same.
Scores of celebrities including Mark Zuckerberg, Anna Wintour, Tom Cruise, Charlie Sheen, Robert Downey Jr and hundreds more made videos, but the campaign was criticised by some.
People said it’s a scheme for money and videos going viral, seeking attention, some even saw it as offensive to people suffering from ALS. Well, all those naysayers will be really shocked when they hear that exactly the funds raised from “The Ice Bucket Challenge” helped researchers come to an ALS breakthrough just recently. They found a new gene that is present in both inherited and sporadic forms of the disease.
“It’s very exciting because it shows everyone who contributed to the ice bucket challenge that their donation had an impact on the research,” said Brian Frederick, executive vice-president of communications and development at the ALS Association. “The work that Project MinE is doing is really important, and the discovery of this new gene will help us better understand ALS.” he continued claiming that the discovery was significant.
He added that “it’s still very early in our understanding of this particular gene, and we still have a ways to go with understanding ALS generally.”
This is a proof that if we all work together towards a mutual goal (be that through game, fun or research) we can progress in solving most of the world’s problems in no time. Together we are stronger than anything we have faced. If we find a way to unite, humanity can truly make this world a paradise for one another.
This may come as a SHOCK to some people, but you are not getting fat because of the calories you eat. You are getting fat because of where those calories come from. 100 calories from spinach are not the same as 100 calories from added sugars. In fact, we shouldn’t necessarily even be focusing on counting calories; we should be focusing on the ingredients in our food.
While sugar may be advertised as “fat free” it becomes stored as fat within the system, especially if you are ingesting more than your liver can process at a time (which is very little). According to the Heart and Stroke Foundation it’s recommended no more than 10% of the calories we consume to come from added sugars, which is about 12 grams; to put this into perspective, one can of soda is about 85% of that.
Let’s clear something out: Added sugar is bad for you! You don’t need it. You never did! Only 10 days without sugar gives INCREDIBLE benefits. In a new study that was targeted towards children, researchers were able to see dramatic improvements in just 10 days. (source)
Dr. Robert Lustig and his team of researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, were able to:
Decrease triglyceride levels by 33 points on average;
The LDL (bad) cholesterol dropped 5 points;
As well as the diastolic blood pressure;
In only 10 days, all of the children who participated in the study drastically reduced their risk of type 2 diabetes. How? Simply by being sugar free for no more than 10 days. This proves how bad added sugar really is for our bodies.
That’s not all! A new study has found that consuming high levels of fructose (from added sugars) harms a whopping 940 brain genes. (source)
The researchers found that 734 hypothalamic genes were altered as well as 206 hippocampal genes. These genes govern separate but extremely important areas of the brain: cell metabolism, cell communication, inflammation, and overall brain function. In other words, these are not genes that you want to be altered in any way.
According to The Health and Sciences Academy, “…certain alterations can lead to leptin resistance, metabolic syndrome, and brain diseases such as Parkinson’s, depression, and bipolar disorder.”
The same study discovered something positive too. Omega-3 oil DHA “has the potential to normalize the genomic impact of fructose.” This means that including enough DHA in your diet can help to offset the gene alterations caused by the added sugars.
DHA can be found in fish, fish oil supplements, and some egg and dairy products like ghee. Don’t worry about eating fruit because the sugar inside fruits is naturally accompanied by fibre, which helps slow the body’s absorption of sugar. That’s why they are an IDEAL substitute for a sweet snack.
Sugar, most of the time, flies below “the radar” when products are placed on the market. However, these are some of the names through which you can recognize added sugar on products:
Glucose/Fructose;
High fructose corn syrup;
Corn syrup;
Sucrose;
Maltose;
Dextrose;
Beet sugar;
Glucose solids;
Cane sugar;
Dehydrated cane juice;
Dextrin;
Maltodextrin;
Some scientists say that sugar is as addictive as most of the illegal drugs. Some even think that sugar is, actually a drug! It triggers the same centres of your brain as drugs like cocaine or heroin do. It sort of takes over your brain. Just look at people who consume too much sugar, they cannot function without it. They are like junkies. (source)
Whether you are addicted or not, you could do A LOT BETTER with less sugar in your diet. You’ll be healthier and fitter, and you can achieve results even in just 10 days. If nothing else, this is certainly something worth to try!
