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In 1967, psychologist Albert Mehrabian and his colleagues claimed that nonverbal expression or body language makes up 55% of communication, while tone of voice accounts for 38%, and actual spoken words only 7%. Though his studies were limited, Mehrabian’s 55-38-7 rule is often used — and misused — as proof of the huge impact of body language in society. Today, body language is used to decode celebrity interviews on YouTube, determine truthfulness in the criminal justice system, and predict presidential election winners. Here are some facts, and a few myths, about body language.

Charles Darwin Thought Body Language Was a Result of Evolution

Darwin’s 1872 book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, attempted to untangle the relationship between emotions and the involuntary actions associated with them. He examined classic examples of emotional expression, such as a person’s eyes widening in surprise, or someone blushing when embarrassed or flattered. Darwin proposed that these “serviceable habits” evolved in humans over time; later, anthropologist Margaret Mead counter-argued that body language was culturally determined. It wasn’t until the second half of the 20th century that psychologists, including Mehrabian, began to define and quantify the functions of nonverbal expression, a field of study known today as kinesics. (The extent to which nonverbal expressions are learned or evolved is a subject of ongoing debate.)

Body Language Expressions Can Be Incredibly Quick

Body language is generally defined as nonverbal communication through conscious or unconscious movements. Conscious movements, like smiling, emphasize the emotion you feel (happiness or delight, say). Unconscious movements, in contrast, may be so quick or subtle that other people may not consciously notice them, but will recognize that something about your expression has changed. Body language expert David Matsumoto has said these “microexpressions” can be as fast as one-fifteenth of a second.

Body Language Can Unveil Your True Feelings

Body language can reveal emotions you may be trying to hide or that contradict your words. You might tell your spouse that you’re not upset that they forgot to take out the trash (again!), but your crossed arms and tensed shoulders imply otherwise. Unconscious gestures or facial movements can be even more revealing, since you’re not aware that they’re giving you away. In a classic example, it’s often believed that unconsciously avoiding eye contact when you’re speaking to someone indicates that you’re lying. The belief may be mistaken; some researchers suggest that it’s not the lack of eye contact, but a microexpression of guilt (which may vary from person to person), that reveals someone’s lie.

Facial Expressions Are Universal

According to Matsumoto, all humans demonstrate the same expressions for emotions the world over, because we have the same facial muscles and structure, regardless of age, sex, ethnicity, or culture. (However, culture helps determine what emotions are expressed when, and how those expressions are perceived.) Gestures, however, are defined by culture and other factors, and fall into two categories. “Speech illustrators” are hand movements that enhance what the speaker is saying, and can be more or less subtle according to cultural norms. “Emblems” are culturally specific gestures, like a thumbs-up to mean “OK” or “good.” Every culture has its own specific emblems, yet Matsumoto argues that some are becoming near-universal — for example, an up-and-down head nod for “yes.”

Body Language Is Not an Exact Science

Body language can mean different things depending on the context, but law enforcement and business entities often view it as more foolproof than it really is. Police officers may look for body language cues to determine if suspects are lying during interrogations, though some research has found that these cues are not correlated with deceit. Stereotypes about body language (like the aforementioned aversion to eye contact) can also affect court proceedings and verdicts. In companies, hiring managers may look for body language cues to choose job candidates based on their perceived honesty or attitude. These scenarios can end up with a person being unfairly judged based on an imperfect reading of body language.

Body Language Has Torpedoed Presidential Candidates

One of the most popular uses of body language is to decode the performances of presidential candidates, especially during debates — and it doesn’t always work out well for the candidates. In 1960, Richard Nixon’s presidential hopes went up in flames when he sweated and fidgeted next to the cool and confident John F. Kennedy during the first televised presidential debate. The debate showed how important body language would become in voters’ perceptions of candidates; every prior debate had been broadcast only on radio.

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Few inventions are as indispensable to modern life as the World Wide Web. Created by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, this now-ubiquitous application consists of interconnected hyperlinks that connect information located on servers around the world. After sending a request to a server for a particular webpage, a web browser interprets that information and displays it on computers, tablets, phones, or even watches. Today, there are nearly three times as many connected devices as there are people living on Earth, and the web forms the backbone of human communication and commerce around the globe. These eight fascinating World Wide Web facts show how one of modern life’s most pivotal inventions came to be — and what its future might look like.

The Web and the Internet Are Two Different Things

Every time someone uses the words “internet” and “web” interchangeably, a computer scientist sheds a tear. All jokes aside, the internet, first conceived in 1969, refers to the system of networked computers which makes things like web browsers, web pages, and other applications possible. In other words, the internet is the mostly invisible infrastructure that supports all the wonders of the World Wide Web.

A popular analogy to describe the difference between the two is to picture the internet as a system of highways and the web as the objects you see on those highways, such as buildings, gas stations, or billboards. All the vehicles that travel those highways, stop at stores, and drive to other locations are the data packets zooming around the network and, by extension, the entire world. So while you are technically using the web when you’re watching YouTube, for example, it’s really the internet that makes it possible.

The Very First Website Belongs to CERN (Yes, That CERN)

Today, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, is best known for its Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator which is currently exploring the frontiers of physics. But few know that it’s also where the World Wide Web got its start.

Much like in 1969 — when the first internet connection was established between Stanford University and the University of California, Los Angeles — the web was created for the primary purpose of sharing information between scientists working at universities and institutes around the world. As a computer scientist at CERN, Berners-Lee submitted an early proposal for information management outlining what would eventually become the web, but after reading the paper, his supervisor wrote in the margins “vague, but exciting.” Berners-Lee continued working on the project until finally launching the world’s first website on August 6, 1991. Less than two years later, CERN released the software into the public domain, and the World Wide Web took off. In 2013, CERN launched a program dedicated to preserving the world’s very first website: info.cern.ch.

The Web Was Almost Called the “Mesh”

Although the name “web” is a surprisingly accurate descriptor for how the technology works, it wasn’t the original moniker. Berners-Lee threw around a few ideas, such as the “Information Mine” or the slight variation “Mine of Information,” but in its early stages, he referred to his creation simply as “mesh.” It wasn’t until sometime in 1990, when Berners-Lee was writing the code, that he opted for the name “World Wide Web,” since “mesh” sounded too similar to “mess.” Today, the word “mesh” commonly describes a local network of nodes, usually in reference to a Wi-Fi network, in which each node connects seamlessly with a central node instead of using various extenders to repeat a signal.

The First Web Server Was a Steve Jobs Creation

In the history of computing, Steve Jobs tends to show up in the most unlikely of places. When Jobs left Apple in 1985, the famous tech guru formed NeXT, Inc., the company responsible for building the NeXTcube. CERN approved the purchase of a NeXTcube so Berners-Lee could flesh out his idea for the web. When the web finally launched, the NeXTcube became the world’s first web server. Strangely, it also meant that if the computer were turned off — the entire web went down with it. Maybe that’s why the original NeXTcube, now housed in the London’s Science Museum, has a handwritten note warning: “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER DOWN!!”

The Dreaded “404 Error” Is Immensely Important

Most people groan when met with a pesky “404 not found” error message on a website, but the web itself couldn’t exist without it. The web’s major innovation was its ability to connect various information with hyperlinks — and also its ability not to. In the proto-web days, hyperlinks were added to a central database to make sure they always supplied the correct information; if the link changed in any way, it was updated in the database. This worked for small computer networks, but as the internet grew, it became nearly impossible to keep an accurate register of all hyperlinks simultaneously.

Berners-Lee came up with a simple yet groundbreaking solution: just don’t keep track of them. Similar to how the concept of zero revolutionized mathematics, so too did the idea that a hypertext link could just lead to an error message. Although this led to an increased rate of “link rot” (half of all online links cease to work in five to 10 years), it untethered the web from the restrictions of a centralized register.

A New York Librarian Coined the Phrase “Surfing the Net”

In 1981, Jean Armour Polly convinced the Liverpool Public Library near Syracuse, New York, to purchase an Apple II Plus for public use. At the time, the small library was one of only two libraries in the U.S. with a computer. While her colleagues argued that computers weren’t a “core mission” of the library, Polly forged ahead and became one of the internet’s earliest pioneers.

In 1992, Polly used her newfound knowledge to write a guide about how to use the internet called Surfing the Internet: An Introduction. Although gaining little attention at the time, Polly shared the article again when working at nonprofit research group NYSERnet, one of New York’s first internet providers. This time, it went “viral” so to speak — Polly’s “surfing” terminology stuck, and in 2019, the small-town New York librarian, known to history as the “net-mom,” was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.

Today, There Are Nearly 2 Billion Websites

It all started with just one small website in 1991, but in the decades since, the web has blossomed into nearly 2 billion websites, as of 2022. The number of registered websites hit the 1 billion mark in 2014, as commemorated by Berners-Lee himself, but the amount nearly doubled in only eight years.

Estimated projections show that in 2050, the World Wide Web will contain 37 petabytes (a petabyte is a massive unit of data equal to 1 million gigabytes). To put that in perspective, the Wayback Machine — a digital collection of past web pages maintained by the Internet Archive — contains over 700 billion pages and only clocks in at about 70 petabytes (as of 2020). And when it comes to global traffic, the numbers are even more astounding. According to the networking company Cisco, web traffic will reach 1 zettabyte in 2022 — that’s 1 trillion gigabytes if you’re keeping count.

The Web’s Creator Has Mixed Feelings About It

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, his vision was purely utopian — to create a place where anyone could access the best and most reliable information in the world at any time. Of course, over the past three decades, the web has evolved in other directions since then, from scammers and hackers to the spread of misinformation. Although disappointed, Berners-Lee hasn’t given up on that original utopian dream. For the web’s 30th anniversary in 2019, Sir Tim (he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004) called for companies and governments to safeguard the web, saying, “It’s no longer a simple, star-spangled, unicorn-sky world…[but] it’ll be worth the effort to make sure the web is a nice and constructive place, because it’ll be so wonderful to be in.”

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Sound pervades our experience — so much so that we’re never without it. Even in the quietest, most soundproofed chambers, the decibels of our heartbeat and our breath reach our ears. However, sound isn’t as simple as it may seem. It’s not as substantive as things we touch, but it can still elicit deep emotion and even physical pain. These six amazing facts will make you rethink what you know about sound and the role it plays in your life.

Sound Travels Faster in Water Than in Air

If you’ve ever heard your own echo, you know the speed of sound is pretty fast — around 761 miles per hour. But because sound is created via vibrations through a medium, that medium can influence a sound’s speed. In water, the speed of sound is much faster, clocking in at a whopping 3,355 mph. That’s because denser materials have more neighboring particles that can bump into one another and carry sound, and water has 800 times more particles than air. This is especially useful for animals like the blue whale, whose call at 180 decibels is louder than a jet plane and can travel up to 1,000 miles. However, 3,355 mph is by no means sound’s speed limit. When traveling through a diamond, the hardest material on Earth (which means lots of particles), sound travels at an incredible 40,000 miles per hour.

Technically You Can Transmit Sound in Outer Space (Just Not Very Far)

The tagline for the 1979 film Alien is pretty scientifically accurate: “In space, no one can hear you scream.” Because space is a near-perfect vacuum, very few particles fill its immense void. To put that into perspective, a coffee mug filled with “outer space” would contain only 300 particles. Fill that same mug with air from Earth, and it’d hold 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 particles. And since sound needs a medium to travel, it’s true that no one would hear you scream in space. But that doesn’t mean sound can’t travel in space at all — it just can’t travel very far. In a 2023 study at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, scientists “tunneled” sound between two crystals across an extremely short distance in a vacuum (like the length of one sound wave). So while space is certainly inhospitable to sound, it can exist in some very specific instances.

The Body’s Smallest Bones Help Transform Sound Into Electrical Signals

The human ear is a wonder of biological engineering that uses membranes, fluids, hairlike stereocilia, and very tiny bones to transform sound into electrical signals that our brain can interpret. It all starts when a sound vibrates the membrane separating the inner and outer ear, called the eardrum, which then employs your body’s smallest bones to transfer that energy into waves in fluid located in the cochlea (a spiral-shaped cavity in the inner ear). These three bones — the malleus, incus, and stapes — are known as the ossicles and are incredibly small. (The stapes, the smallest of them all, only reaches a height of 3.5 millimeters and a width of about 2.4 millimeters.) Once the ossicles create these vibrations in the cochlea, hairlike stereocilia transform these waves into electrical signals and send them along our auditory nerve. This whole process takes around 10 milliseconds to complete.

Sound in Air Technically Can’t Be Louder Than 194 Decibels

Scientists measure sound using decibels (named in honor of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell), which is the measure of sound pressure in a medium. Because the decibel system is a logarithmic scale, something that is 20 decibels (such as a ticking watch) isn’t twice as loud as something that’s 10 decibels (breathing) — it’s actually 10 times as loud. While the human ear begins experiencing auditory pain at around 125 decibels, being exposed to lower decibel levels for longer periods of time can be just as damaging. At 194 decibels, you’re hearing a truly ear-splitting noise; beyond that threshold, sound traveling through air stops technically being sound. When a sound gets too loud, the wave itself essentially creates ambient air pressure that forms a vacuum. This transforms sound into more of a shock wave and less of a sound wave. To use a dramatic example, in 1883 an Indonesian volcano called Krakatoa erupted, creating the loudest “sound” in recorded history at an estimated 310 decibels. The resulting shock wave traveled around the world four times before finally dissipating.

Whips Crack Because They’re Breaking the Sound Barrier

On October 14, 1947, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the X-1 aircraft, but humans have actually been breaking the sound barrier since Roman times — they just weren’t sitting in a cockpit. Whips have been around for thousands of years, and their telltale (and terrifying) crack is actually the sound of the whip breaking the sound barrier. When someone cracks a whip, the motion travels the length of the whip and quickly speeds it up. Scientists used to think the whip’s tip broke the sound barrier, but research in 2002 showed that it was actually a loop traveling the length of the whip that produced the deafening crack. But you don’t need to be Indiana Jones to pull off this impressive feat of acoustic physics; cotton bedsheets have also been known to produce sonic booms of their own.

Some People Can Actually “See” Sound

For most people, sound is a strictly auditory experience, but for some with a condition known as synesthesia, sounds are a much more visual thing. Broadly speaking, synesthesia (which in Greek means “perceive together”) simply means experiencing one sense alongside another. So you might see a word but taste a type of food, or hear a sound but also see a color. This is largely caused by two different parts of the brain being activated by the same stimuli. Of course, these experiences are internal to the mind and not an accurate representation of sound’s physical properties. The cause of synesthesia is genetic — in 2018, researchers from the University of Amsterdam identified specific genes that make some predisposed to this sensory mix-up by creating “hyper-connected neurons.” While some with synesthesia report having trouble focusing due to these misfiring stimuli, most live healthy and happy lives — and even say their synesthesia gives them a richer experience of the world.