From the automatic tasks of regulating breathing and blood pressure to the voluntary efforts needed for muscle movement, the central nervous system puts in a lot of work to maintain the complex mechanisms of the human body. Pace is crucial to keep this system running smoothly — which is why some signals from our body’s command centers can reach a speed of 268 miles per hour. 

People use only 10% of their brains.

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Although this concept is a popular “fact” thrown out in movies and TV shows, people tend to use the entirety of their brains over the course of a day.

In a nutshell, nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord send information through branching nerve fibers known as axons, which release chemicals across microscopic gaps to be picked up by other cells and synthesized by the appropriate areas of the body. The speed of this process varies according to the size and properties of the nerve fiber; bulky A-alpha axons, which can be 20 micrometers in diameter, have the bandwidth to generate the fastest impulses. Additionally, gaps along axons that are covered by a sheath of fats and protein, known as myelin, contain positive sodium ions that keep signals charged for rapid transmission.

So which bodily act necessitates the thickest channels to conduct information at speeds approaching those of the world’s fastest cars? That would be the delicate balance required for proprioception, our ability to sense the movement and positioning of body parts without looking. At the other end of the spectrum are the unmyelinated fibers that relay pain signals at a near-crawl of 1 mile per hour — evidence that our central nervous systems at least attempt to cushion the blow when serving as the bearer of bad news.

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The next time you thoroughly shuffle a deck of cards, you’ll almost certainly have landed on a combination that’s never been created before — and may never be created again. This may sound unlikely or even impossible, given that each deck contains just 52 cards, but there are actually more ways to shuffle a deck of cards than there are atoms on Earth. The exact number of possible card combinations is 8 x 10 to the 67th power, which is an 8 followed by 67 zeroes — an almost unfathomably large number. If you were to go back in time to the beginning of the universe and rearrange a deck of cards into a new permutation every second, the universe itself would come to an end before you were a billionth of a way to one of those arrangements repeating itself.

Richard Nixon funded his first campaign with poker winnings.

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Nixon was a skilled player during his time in the U.S. Navy and did indeed use his winnings to fund his successful 1946 congressional race.

As for how many atoms there are on the planet, most estimates put the number at 1.3 x 10 to the 50th power or 130,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. This is obviously a vast figure in its own right, but it’s still dwarfed by the potential groupings of a deck of cards. The good news for the math-averse among us is most of us will never have to deal with such impossibly immense figures in our day-to-day lives — or in our next poker game.

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The sun is the most reliable way to create the gorgeous light display we call a rainbow, but it’s not the only way. After all, the moon illuminates the Earth, too — and rainbows are essentially an optical illusion caused when water droplets split light into its ROY G. BIV components. But seeing a “moonbow” isn’t exactly easy.

The moon experiences “moonquakes.”

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The moon experiences four types of moonquakes: deep moonquakes (likely caused by tides), meteorite impacts, thermal expansion when the moon’s frigid crust is warmed by the sun, and shallow moonquakes. This last type of moonquake can even top 5.5 on the Richter scale.

How rare is this nighttime meteorological phenomenon? Well, Aristotle wrote around 350 BCE in his treatise Meteorologica that “it was formerly thought that [rainbows] never appeared by night as a moon rainbow. This opinion was due to the rarity of the occurrence… we have only met with two instances of a moon rainbow in more than fifty years.” So, pretty rare. That’s because for a moonbow to form, you need a variety of conditions to be Goldilocks-level perfect. First, the moon must be low in the sky, and can’t exceed 42 degrees from the horizon. The moon must be full or near full, and you can’t be hanging around any artificial light — sorry, no moonbows in cities. Finally, just like rainbows, moonbows need water droplets in the atmosphere, so waterfalls are often a good spot to go hunting for moonbows. Just don’t expect to see the dazzling array of color typical of a daytime rainbow. Because the moon isn’t as bright as the sun, less light is refracted, and a moonbow usually looks white (at least to human eyes). But if you have a camera handy, long exposure photos will reveal a moonbow in all its colorful glory. 

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Space stretches out in all directions (at least as far as we can tell) for some 46 billion light-years, but it doesn’t take all that long to get to where it begins. In fact, if you had a car that could somehow drive skyward toward the Kármán line — the barrier that marks the beginning of space — you’d arrive there in little more than an hour (and that’s while cruising at a leisurely 60 mph). The Kármán line, named after Hungarian American physicist Theodore von Kármán, was set by the Fédération aéronautique internationale (FAI), a world governing body for air sports, and exists at 62 miles above sea level.

The stratosphere is warming.

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While the slice of the atmosphere where we live and breathe, called the troposphere, is warming, the stratosphere (the layer above the troposphere) is cooling. This is due to the troposphere trapping heat and the depletion of stratospheric ozone.

But Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t just abruptly end — it slowly fades away, making the definition of “space” a bit murky. NASA, for example, classifies anything 50 miles above sea level as space, even though the outermost layer of the Earth’s atmosphere, the exosphere, stretches much farther. In fact, the International Space Station (ISS) actually travels within the Earth’s thermosphere (the layer below the exosphere), at about 250 miles above sea level. But just because these areas are part of the Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t mean they can’t be considered space. Air density in the thermosphere and exosphere is so low, most agree that these regions contain essentially the same conditions as space. If you wanted to take your hypothetical space car completely beyond Earth’s atmosphere, all the way to the region known as “outer space,” it’d be an epic road trip to the end of the exosphere, some 6,200 miles from Earth.

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