ANYTHING THAT YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW ABOUT THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD

by:Zairra S. Obial

Did you ever find yourself in a deep reverie and just think of a question that will make you wonder the whole day? Then, contemplating how big is the world, and the amount of knowledge you have compared to what the world can offer.

Worry no more, have a good read for the random things you might not know. Like- Do you know that a single living person can accumulate enough energy to build a nuclear bomb? Or, do you know that there were human alarm clocks during 1970’s?

In primary years in school children were taught that a human has 5 senses namely, sense of touch, sense of smell, sense of hearing, sense of seeing and sense of taste but do you know a human has more than 5 senses? These are NOCICEPTION (sense of pain), CHRONOCEPTION (sense of the passage of time), PROPRIOCEPTION (sense of where your arms and legs are in relation to the rest of your body), among other 16 secondary senses.

Going to school and work is very tiring but do you have problem of getting out of bed? If you are, you have DYSANIA, the state of finding it hard to get out bed in the morning. Though this is not a medically diagnosed disease it can be an indication that your body suffers from extreme fatigue.

If you have trouble waking up, before the invention of Alarms, there are actually people whose jobs were to tap on their clients windows with long sticks until they wake up. They were called the knocker-ups. Knocker-ups or Knocker-upper were famous in Industrial Britain until 1970’s. The knocker-ups were paid one shilling per week per client, $2 dollars but it also depends on the time and distance of residency of the clients. Early hours around 4 A.M were more expensive than later hours.

Imagine farting consistently for 6 years and 9 months, you have produced enough gas to create the energy of an atomic bomb. A human fart consists of Methane and hydrogen that are flammable.

Before ‘GOOGLE ’operated on larger scale, the first servers were operated in Stanford. For the things that you don’t know, ‘GOOGLE’ is always at your service but do you know before the search engine got its current name it was named as ‘BackRub’. According to the founders of Google, Page and Brin 1996 they are fond of nerdy words. It is called ‘Backrub’ because the web will analyze the “back links”. A graduate student, Sean Anderson from Stanford suggested the word “googolplex” as a replacement for ‘BackRub’. After some brainstorming, it was then shorten to “googol”. Anderson searched if the domain was taken but accidentally typed “google.com”. Page has taken a liking to the new name then registered the domain name on September 15, 1997.

Do you want to live forever? Nothing lasts forever but Jellyfish can---the Turritopsis Dohrnii species of jellyfishes are actually immortal. This specie is “biologically immortal. It is because Turritopsis Dohrnii can reverse its lifespan and its age. Turritopsis Dohrnii has 5 stages of life cycle.

1. Fertilized egg: An adult jellyfish (known as a medusa) will spawn eggs and sperm into the water, which will combine to form a fertilised egg.

2. Planula: From a fertilized egg develops into a tiny larva called planula. It is like a tiny worm which may freely swim around.

3. Polyp: The planula will swim around to find a solid surface (such as sea bed) and develop a digestive system to feed itself. The polyp will reproduce asexually, cloning itself one after another to form a tiny colony.

4.Ephyra: A part of polyp or the clone polyp can become can ephyra. An organism that can swim, feed and grow on its own after generating a new set of nerves and muscle.

5. Medusa: a fully-formed adult jellyfish. Medusa is capable of reproduction with another jellyfish.

If a predator is on site, Turritopsis Dohrnii jellyfish can go back to its life cycle, over and over again. If starved and injured Turritopsis Dohrnii lowers to the ocean bed and transforms into a little blob of tissue (known as cyst) and back into a polyp again.

The world is a bottomless pit of wonders!

“I know that I know nothing.” Socrates indeed is right, compared to how vast what has been hidden we still know nothing.