43 Wild Scientific Facts You Didn’t Learn in High School

Rich students who have poor classmates become more prosocial, generous, and egalitarian; and less likely to discriminate against poor students, and more willing to socialize with them. These effects are driven by personal interactions between rich and poor students.

2. Bees don't buzz during an eclipse - Using tiny microphones suspended among flowers, researchers recorded the buzzing of bees during the 2017 North American eclipse. The bees were active and noisy right up to the last moments before totality. As totality hit, the bees all went silent in unison.

3. Losing just a couple hours of sleep at night makes you angrier, especially in frustrating situations. A study done by Iowa State University is one of the first to provide evidence that sleep loss causes anger.

4. Human-raised wolves are just as successful as trained dogs at working with humans to solve cooperative tasks, suggesting that dogs' ability to cooperate with humans came from wolves, not from domestication.

5. People diagnosed with depression are more inclined than healthy people to choose to listen sad music. A new study suggests that depressed people are not seeking to maintain their negative feelings, but rather that they find sad music calming and even uplifting.

Insomniacs tend to have a hard time getting past embarrassing mistakes, even when the stressful event occurred decades ago. One study suggests that insomnia could primarily be caused by a failing neutralization of emotional distress.

7. Bones of an ancient teenage girl reveal a Neanderthal mother and Denisovan father, providing a genetic proof that ancient hominins mated across species.

8. Police departments that collect more in fees and fines are less effective at solving crimes.

9. The ‘clean plate’ mentality drives us to overeat: New research explores our tendency to overeat when we only have a little bit of food left over. Many of us were raised with a ‘clean your plate’ mentality, stemming from a desire to not be wasteful but this can also lead to overconsumption.

10. Low-quality sleep can lead to procrastination, especially among people who naturally struggle with self-regulation.

Overparenting or helicopter parenting is a narcissistic parenting style that may impede the development of young adult independence, and be linked to the development of narcissistic traits, which may be how narcissism can be passed on from generation to generation.

12. Older adults who frequently do puzzles like crosswords or Sudoku had the short-term memory capacity of someone eight years their junior and the grammatical reasoning of someone ten years younger in a new study.

13. Angry people, who have a quick temper, are more likely to overestimate their intelligence.

14. Children who grow up with greener surroundings have up to 55% less risk of developing various mental disorders later in life, emphasizing the need for designing green and healthy cities for the future.

15. Researchers have created a powerful new molecule named Triazoles for the extraction of salt from any liquid. This has the potential to help increase the amount of drinkable water on Earth. The new molecule is about 10 billion times improved compared to a similar structure created over a decade ago.

Air pollution causes a ‘huge’ reduction in intelligence. Impact of high levels of toxic air ‘is equivalent to having lost a year of education.’

17. A 15-minute jog is better for the mind than 15 minutes of calm relaxation, as a brief jog sharpens the mind, boosting attentional control and perceptual speed, in part through a subjective sense of having more energy (in contrast to the relaxation group who felt less energetic).

18. Brains of doers differ from those of procrastinators - Procrastinators have a larger amygdala and poorer connections between it and part of the cortex that blocks emotions, so they may be more anxious about the negative consequences of an action and tend to hesitate and put off things.

19. Dubstep music by Skrillex was found to protect against mosquito bites, with its mix of very high and very low frequencies. Such music, which appears to delay host attack, reduce blood feeding, and disrupt mating. This may help provide new avenues for music-based personal protective measures.

20. In a new study involving people over 70 years of age, who have exercised regularly for years, scientists discovered that the participants’ hearts, lungs, and muscles were in equivalent shape to those of people in their 40s.

People who regularly read with their toddlers are less likely to engage in harsh parenting and the children are less likely to be hyperactive or disruptive.

22. Parents who force unremorseful kids to apologize to others before they are truly sorry may do more harm than good. That’s because the point main point of an apology is lost as children may dislike the apologizer even more after the insincere apology than before.

23. In 1980, a monk found a jawbone high up in a Tibetan cave. Now, a re-analysis shows the remains belonged to a Denisovan who died there 160,000 years ago. It's just the second known site where the extinct humans lived, and it shows they colonized extreme elevations long before our own ancestors did.

24. Honey bees exposed to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, lose some of the beneficial bacteria in their guts and are more susceptible to infection and death from harmful bacteria. Glyphosate might be contributing to the decline of honey bees and native bees around the world.

25. Being mistreated by a customer can negatively impact your sleep quality and morning recovery state, according to research on call center workers.