Staying awake for 17 hours is the same for your body drinking 2 glasses of wine!

It can be tempting to cut back on the hours you sleep at night to finish a paper or get some extra work done, but staying awake for 17 hours actually has the same effects on your body as drinking two glasses of wine.

It messes with the brain’s ability to function, making it harder to concentrate and affecting judgment. It’s not entirely clear to scientists why we need to sleep because the energy saved by sleeping is fairly low, about 50 kCal. Sleep simply affects the brain’s ability to function.

People throughout history, including the famed scientist Thomas Edison, have claimed sleeping is a waste of time, but reality says differently. Any college student would tell you differently after pulling an all-nighter: sleep is completely necessary.

Different people need different amounts of sleep, the normal ranges are from five to eleven hours of sleep. In the animal kingdom amounts differ even more. A boa constrictor sleeps eighteen hours while a giraffe sleeps just under two. Who would you rather be: the long-sleeping boa constrictor or the giraffe who could get by on almost no sleep?

The United Nations declared the Internet a basic human right in 2011!

The United Nations reported that disconnecting people from the internet is a violation of human rights and against international law. They strongly oppose countries from blocking information to quell political unrest.

It opposed France and Great Britain’s decision to block certain things from citizens due to copyright laws, too. However, many nations such as Syria and North Korea strongly censor information via internet. It is unclear how the UN will address countries who violate the new international law.

Fetal skin heals without scarring!

Scars heal through repair mechanisms in the body not regenerative mechanisms. However, in the early stages of fetal growth, wounds heal through regenerative mechanisms. It is time limited, though. There is a certain point in the embryonic growth where a type of switch is flipped and scars begin to heal through repair mechanisms.

In humans, this occurs in the last trimester. Interestingly, fetal wounds heal with little to no inflammation. Scientists do not completely understand this phenomenon. They continue to research it and hope to use the information to aid injured people.

When frogs throw up, they throw up their entire stomach

Frogs were once thought to not be able to throw up. Believe it or not, it was discovered on a space mission that they in fact can throw up. They actually vomit out their stomach and it dangles from their mouth. The frog then uses its forearms to clean out the contents of the stomach.

Then it swallows the stomach back into its body. When they hibernate, they need so little oxygen that they breathe through their skin. They also absorb water through their skin. So, they never actually drink water.

Daydreaming is good for you!

Although it has been derided in the past as infantile, neurotic or failing to be mentally disciplined, neurologists have discovered that daydreaming - and more specifically, wandering mind - is vital for certain brain functions. They've found that a wandering mind can be protective and even help you stay on course for longer term goals.

A wandering mind helps the brain unfocus from repetitive, menial tasks. For example, driving down an empty highway, or jobs where the only requirement is to push a button at a certain time. There's also an 'incubation effect,' that happens when the mind wanders. If you're doing your homework and you can't think of how to answer a question; your get distracted and your mind wanders, your brain still processes the information and may come up with the answer later.

It's not all good, of course. If your mind wanders while you're reading a book, you'll probably not get any information from it. If you let yourself daydream too much on a highway, you'll get into an accident. However, their studies found that for creative tasks, people need their mind to wander; however, they also need to have enough awareness to catch the creative ideas before they leave the mind.

A woman survived a fall from a plane!

This is one must be one of the craziest stories on our site. Shayna Richardson had turned 21 in May of 2005 and began skydiving fairly often afterwards. On her tenth, and first solo jump, however, everything went terribly wrong. Shayna’s chute failed to deploy shortly after she jumped, at which time she says she panicked. Falling at over 50 mph, Shayna struggled to release her back up parachute, but without any luck. She says that moments before she hit the ground she simply gave up, praying and putting her life in God’s hands asking that He simply, “not let it hurt.”
Shayna struck the ground face first in a parking lot and says she doesn’t remember it at all. Rescuers hurried over to her, expecting her to be dead, but were amazed to see that she wasn’t. Shayna sat up and attempted to move around, until she collapsed. The first thing she remembered was being in the ambulance minutes later. After surviving the fall Shayna had fifteen plates put into her face for multiple fractures, had to undergo four operations, two breaks in her pelvis, and a broken right fibula. Shayna surviving is amazing in itself, but this story gets even more unreal.
In the emergency room after the fall, doctors discovered that she was two weeks pregnant and the baby was unscathed! Experienced divers believe that the fall was more Shayna’s fault than an equipment malfunction, yet the story is still amazing. Today Shayna and her son are both perfectly healthy.

The Earth weighs around 6,588,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons.