Ordinary things that are amazing.

later12

The fact that human beings have created a series of shapes in the form of symbols which, using the right combination, unlock and delineate our thoughts and emotions. We unenthusiastically call these "words".

Laughter. A sort of whinnying noise our body makes when it loudly exhales in response to a stimulus which is funny. The average baby does this 300 times per day.

What other ordinary things are there that often go unremarked, but are quite marvelous, unusual and/or impressive when you think about them

steddyeddy

A queen bee is genetically identical to a worker bee. The difference in size and shape happens when certain larvae are selected randomly and fed royal jelly which causes them to turn into queens.

SafeSurfer

steddyeddy wrote: »

A queen bee is genetically identical to a worker bee. The difference in size and shape happens when certain larvae are selected randomly and fed royal jelly which causes them to turn into queens.

While KY jelly can turn humans into queens.

actuallylike

I love stuff like this!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dPlkFPowCc

Pedant

Semen: the best lubricant ever.

bijapos

Spiders silk and Spiders webs.


Or indeed anything in nature.

Knex*

Like the OP said, I've always found languages and their creation to be fascinating.

Also, space. I never fail to be amazed whenever I take the time to sit and gaze upwards at the sky at night. Its something I feel I, and many others, take for granted and yet the more you think about it the more incredible it becomes.

who what when

Pretty much everything in nature is mind blowing when you really think about it!

muppetkiller

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18449711


That 40,000 years ago people were vandalizing other peoples property lol

ScumLord

The human hand is amazing. They're so good I got two of them.

hardCopy

Smart Phones. I still think they're bloody amazing.

later12

muppetkiller wrote: »

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18449711


That 40,000 years ago people were vandalizing other peoples property lol

That panel of hands is amazing
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/60924000/jpg/_60924098_60910452.jpg

What made these people want to do that? There had to be some sort of confoundment of their own, or some need to understand the physical world for them to have painted the impression of their hands so that they might stand back and look at it. That's an ordinary curiosity that is amazing. Where did we get that need not only to understand, but to communicate and share the resulting information? Why did it develop?

Kylo Ren

When looking up at stars you are literally looking at the past. The light from the stars take time to get to our eyes. When looking at some stars you are looking at light that left thousands of years ago.

Amazing.

southcentralts

Electricity - once thought to have no more potential than for cheap parlor tricks, now dominate our lives.

Einhard

That the house martins that have made their home in my shed each summer over the past four years will fly tens of thousands of miles to sub Saharan Africa come the Autumn, over-winter there, and manage to pinpoint the same shed from millions of others ten months later. Fuppin amazing. :cool:

When I hit the return key to visit a website it can be loaded in less than a blink. Even aside from the biomechanics beforehand, the signal from the button goes to the CPU, interacts with programs on the computer, a signal is sent over the air to my modem which send a signal racing to Dublin and maybe to Britain or the US where more this new signal interacts with files and protocols in a massive server farm and the entire thing then reverses flow and send everything back to Dublin then to my modem and there's a new signal sent over the air to the laptop when more interactions happen, writing to the hard drive and RAM, then somehow the screen is told what colour to make a few hundred thousand pixels for me to look at.

In the blink of a eye, amazing.

Einhard

Keno 92 wrote: »

When looking up at stars you are literally looking at the past. The light from the stars take time to get to our eyes. When looking at some stars you are looking at light that left thousands of years ago.

Amazing.

That is pretty cool. If we could construct a telescope powerful enough to clearly see extra-solar planets, the life we might see there might well have been wiped out in the thousands of years it would take for that image (light) to reach our eyes.

I like this thread.

Eathrin

The human brain.

OMARS_COMING_

Rainbows,even after all this time scientists still do not know how they are formed.

Gummy Panda

Cuddles - Amazing stress buster

Eathrin

When male semen and a female egg combine and given time, something microscopic becomes an intelligent being. That is amazing.

Wompa1

Computers. Little silicon chips with circuits that operate using their own language based from 1's and 0's which are then built upon and masked from people using the computers and represented in glorious icons, pictures etc.

The internet is pretty f'kin amazing too

af_thefragile

The cheese with bits of cranberries in them...


And Pineapples!!

Pushtrak

The lyre bird...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSB71jNq-yQ

Watch from 1:30 or so...

1ZRed

Eathrin wrote: »

When male seven and a female egg combine and given time, something microscopic becomes an intelligent being. That is amazing.

So how did the leaving cert biology go the last day?:p

ChunkyLover54

this thread should be in sunshine lollipops etc.

Eathrin

1ZRed wrote: »

So how did the leaving cert biology go the last day?:p

Clearly that subject would have the better of me, I'm better off without it.:pac:

You wouldn't think sperm would get autocorrected!

ft9

Has the cool side of the pillow reply been done yet?

mackg

ChunkyLover54 wrote: »

this thread should be in sunshine lollipops etc.

No harm in having something positive in AH from time to time.:)

Capt'n Midnight

water bears

The King of Moo

Seeing babies and toddlers' intelligence develop. It makes you realise how amazingly complex some of the things we take for granted are, and just how intelligent even the most stupid person is, objectively.

I was thinking yesterday how fascinating it is that my two-year old nephew instantly knows that Adam West, Michael Keaton, Christian Bale, various comic-artists' interpretations, three different cartoon versions of Batman and my crude biro-drawings on post-its are all still Batman, despite the fact that there are actually lots of differences between each iteration.

It's just fascinating that the brain can recognise the basic patterns common to each version instantly and identify them as Batman.

Our brains are incredible machines.

Also, Batman himself is fascinating, but he's not ordinary.