Set an alarm on your phone and plan to take a personal day, because in about 10 billion years, the Sun is going to turn into a crystal big enough to make a strip mall new age spiritualist think "maybe that's a little much."
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A platypus seems more like a Tim Burton creation than a real species. In fact, National Geographic says the scientists that first examined platypi specimens thought they were a hoax. After all, they've got a duck bill, webbed feet, a beaver tail and the body of an otter.
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Huge insects are terrifying. No one wants to be assailed by horse flies or mosquitoes the size of your fist. But in a way, tiny insects are even more terrifying. A mosquito the size of your fist ... well, at least you can see it coming. Midges, chiggers and flies? Ugh.
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If you loved Sesame Street as a child, then you should hate that woolly mammoths went extinct. After all, wasn't Snuffleupagus a tusk-less woolly mammoth? One possibility is that mammoths took a wrong turn on the way to Sesame Street and ended up on Cemetery Street. But scientists have other ideas.
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Earth isn't dirt all the way through — the dirt and rock that make up Earth's crust only go down about 19 miles. Under the crust, there are four additional layers — the upper mantle, the lower mantle, the outer core, and the inner core, and those parts of the planet are pretty inhospitably hot.
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Though there are many contenders for the title of World's Smallest Dog Breed, with adorable bundles of love like the Yorkshire terrier and the miniature greyhound seeming like definite possibilities, there can, as with Highlanders, be only one, and it weighs only a little more than a pound.
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Let's start by saying that narrowing down "the rarest" type of just about any animal is kind of a tall order. So let's just settle for what we believe to be "quite possibly the rarest cat breed in the world" and be happy with that.
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Old MacDonald had a farm, and on that farm he probably had a barn. Even though the song never mentions a barn, you can probably picture it. In fact, even if you got the animal sounds mixed up as as a kid, you could still say with utter certainty that Old MacDonald had a red barn on his farm.
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When Westley battled a rodent of unusual size (R.O.U.S) in The Princess Bride, he probably had no idea that there once existed a rodent whose usual size was even bigger: the giant beaver.
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What would happen if you got lost in space -- the infinite abyss of total unknown, devoid of the very resources human beings require to survive? There would be no galactic K-Mart managers to save you, and most likely your soul would be headed for the clearance rack.
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The competition for "most poisonous caterpillar in the world" is neck and neck, which is also a pretty great physical description of the caterpillars themselves. Though low on the list of animals that you might consider lethal, Mother Nature never stops coming up with ways to kill you.
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On top of the over-the-top fees, underhanded luggage handlers, and handsy TSA agents, there's a less obvious threat you have to worry about at airports: USB ports. It turns out that the seemingly harmless activity of charging your smartphone at a public kiosk can leave you vulnerable to cyber crime.
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You might think that "how many dog breeds are there?" would be a question with a black and white answer. After all, we know how many different kinds of bears there are, and how many different elephants. And dog breeds are controlled by human beings, so how hard could it be to keep track of them?
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Just about everyone who's ever owned kittens at one point or another has said the words, "I wish they'd stay little forever!" Well guess what, if only you'd bought yourself a Singapura (Get it? Singa-PURR-a?), then your cat would literally have stayed little forever.
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The Apollo program kept the American public captivated. It gave us some great film and some timeless soundbites. It also cost $28 billion. In today's dollars, that's around $288 billion. Now, NASA is finally planning to go back. How much would it cost to send humans to the moon in the 2020s?
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Despite its status as a gassy old fart, the fifth planet from the sun seems like a lot of fun. Fun fact: as of 2018, Jupiter boasts 79 moons, the most of any planet in the solar system. So you could say that Jupiter moons the universe more than any of its planetary siblings.
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Who's got the fastest punch in the world? The Guinness Book of World Records seems to think it's Keith Liddell, whose fists were clocked at 45 miles per hour. But those are all wrong, because the world's fastest punch does not belong to a human being, it belongs to the mantis shrimp.
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Science has finally cracked one of life's great mysteries. No, it's not the meaning of life (sorry). It's that profound question we've all spent time pondering: Why do zebras have those crazy stripes?
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Imagine if you had to worry about giant fanged cats while you were camping. Forget putting your food in a bear locker--you'd have to put your whole tent in one. Saber-toothed tigers were cool, but their extinction pretty much made the whole outdoor industry possible. So why did they go extinct?
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The opposite of gorgeous isn't hideous; it's hagfish. "Widely the most disgusting animals in the ocean, if not on earth," per Smithsonian, these appallingly jawless sea atrocities have tentacles surrounding their mouths and tooth-like keratin structures on whatever it is you call their non-jaws.
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Have you ever sneaked in a little device time while on an international flight? It's hard not to. But beware. According to BBC, phones use radio waves that are at frequencies similar to the ones used by the plane's avionics, which can interfere with the plane's navigation equipment.
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The world's largest snake was a bus-sized boa that inhabited South America 60 million years ago, dubbed the Titanoboa. Don't worry, all you snake un-enthusiasts -- the Titanboa can only stalk you in your nightmares because it's extinct. Let's give you some details to scream about in your dreams.
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Cats: they're furry, occasionally cuddly, and not unlike your last few significant others, they show their affection by leaving dead animals on your porch. With the help of modern science and a heaping scoop of "why not" attitude, you can have your fur ball cloned in a lab like a stormtrooper.
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The trippy niftiness of a lava lamp is almost beyond description. In 2016, Gizmodo wrote, "You'd assume that dropping a GoPro inside a working lava lamp would be like diving into an active volcano." That was obviously a joke, but could you imagine if that's how "lava-themed" things worked?
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What do the Bible and Harry Potter have in common? A bearded guy capable of amazing feats? A story centered around "a Chosen One?" Perhaps. But the answer no one can deny is that neither story seems to think highly of snakes. So why all the snake hate? It's almost as if it's hardwired into us.
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Benjamin Franklin said, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." As such, doomsday preppers are packing on the prevention pounds with strange supplies in advance of the end of the world. But if you're looking to get the best bang for your survival buck, condoms are hard to beat.
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We already know you can clone a sheep. So can cloning be used to duplicate your iddle biddle puppy dog? The answer is yes. But with any time that scientific morality gets thrown to the wind, there's really only one question left: how much is this technological affront to God going to cost you?
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