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1,964 facts in Science. Click any fact to see its full page.
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Lightning creates nitrogen compounds when it strikes — it fertilizes soil with about 5–8% of global nitrogen fixation.
Tectonic plates move at about the same speed as fingernails grow — 2–15 cm per year.
The Earth generates its own magnetic field from convection currents in the liquid iron outer core.
Epistemology — the study of knowledge — asks what we can know, how we know it, and how certain we can be.
Applied ethics examines specific moral problems — bioethics, environmental ethics, business ethics — using philosophical frameworks.
Contractarianism holds that moral rules are those that rational agents would agree to from an original position.
The 'repugnant conclusion' in population ethics suggests maximizing total happiness could justify a vast population with barely worth-living lives.
Derek Parfit's 'Reasons and Persons' challenged conventional thinking about personal identity and future generations.
The sorites paradox ('heap problem') asks when a heap of sand becomes a pile — revealing vagueness in language.
The 'is-ought' problem, identified by David Hume, shows you can't derive values from facts alone.
Effective altruism applies cost-benefit analysis to charitable giving — prioritizing the most lives saved per dollar.
Virtue ethics, traced to Aristotle, focuses on character rather than rules or outcomes.
The global cancer burden is projected to grow 50% by 2040 — driven by aging populations and lifestyle factors.
Air pollution kills 7 million people annually — more than AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined.
Obesity rates have tripled globally since 1975 — affecting over 650 million adults.
Mass drug administration for neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) has nearly eliminated river blindness and lymphatic filariasis.
The Healthy Life Years (HALE) metric measures years lived in good health — not just total lifespan.
Handwashing with soap reduces diarrheal disease by 40% — one of the most cost-effective health interventions.
Non-communicable diseases (heart disease, cancer, diabetes) account for 71% of all deaths globally.
Childhood malnutrition causes permanent cognitive impairment — affecting 150 million children under 5 globally.
Lead exposure, even at low levels, causes permanent IQ loss in children — it was in gasoline until the 1990s.
Antimicrobial resistance is projected to kill 10 million people per year by 2050 — exceeding cancer deaths.
Social determinants of health — income, education, housing, environment — account for 80% of health outcomes.
Markov chains describe systems that transition between states based only on the current state — not history.
Set theory, developed by Cantor, revealed that some infinities are larger than others.
Differential equations model continuous change — from planetary motion to nerve impulses to economic cycles.
Chaos theory shows that simple deterministic equations can produce unpredictable long-term behavior.
The birthday problem in statistics shows that probability intuitions are systematically wrong for multi-outcome scenarios.
Network theory shows that most real-world networks have a 'small-world' property — short path lengths and high clustering.
The Fourier transform breaks any signal into its frequency components — essential for audio, image, and signal processing.
Boolean algebra — using 1s and 0s — was developed by George Boole in 1854 and became the basis of digital computing.
Numerical analysis solves mathematical problems using approximation — it underpins weather forecasting, structural engineering, and AI.
Information theory, developed by Claude Shannon in 1948, defined the 'bit' and laid the foundation for digital communication.
Pascal's triangle contains the binomial coefficients, powers of 2, and the Fibonacci sequence within its structure.
The Pythagorean theorem has over 370 known proofs — including one by US President James Garfield.
The prime number theorem describes how primes become less frequent — the number of primes below n is approximately n/ln(n).
Topology studies properties that don't change under continuous deformation — a sphere and a cube are topologically equivalent.
Voronoi diagrams divide space into regions based on distance to points — used in biology, geography, and architecture.
The Collatz conjecture says every positive integer eventually reaches 1 through a simple sequence — proven for trillions of numbers but not proved in general.
Ramanujan's taxicab numbers (like 1729) fascinated Hardy — it's the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.
The P vs NP problem — whether solutions that can be verified quickly can also be found quickly — is the most important unsolved problem in computer science.
Euler's number (e ≈ 2.718) describes continuous growth — from compound interest to population dynamics.
The law of large numbers guarantees that sample averages converge to the true mean with enough data.
Statistics has been described as 'the science of learning from data under uncertainty.'
Graph theory, founded by Euler's solution to the Königsberg bridge problem, underlies social network analysis and internet routing.
The butterfly effect — sensitive dependence on initial conditions — was discovered when a tiny rounding difference in a weather simulation produced completely different results.
Fractals are self-similar at all scales — the Mandelbrot set is infinitely complex despite a simple equation.
The mathematics of voting systems shows that no perfect voting system exists — Arrow's Impossibility Theorem.
Cryptography relies on the mathematical difficulty of factoring very large prime numbers.
The Nash Equilibrium describes stable outcomes in game theory — John Nash won the Nobel Prize for it in 1994.