This article was originally published on ScientistPlus
What Happens If You Swim In -40 Degree Temperatures?
You may have seen photos of Japanese macaque monkeys––sometimes called snow monkeys––warming in hot springs while snow and ice cover their little monkey faces. Well, these two girls wanted to repeat this swimming feat by taking a dip in a heated pool at Takhini Hot Pools in The Yukon while it was -40 degrees outside. And it turns out the result of their experiment was hilarious. Just look at their frozen-over hair!
Just like their furry friends, when these two fun-seekers took the plunge, their wet hair and eyelashes froze instantly. Frozen tears followed soon after when they realized they now had brittle hair and split ends.
So, What Happens When A Bear Breaks Into Your Vehicle?
What happens when a bear breaks into your car? One word: carnage! This photo shows a highly extreme example of when things go south, but vehicular bear break-ins occur more often than you might think. One thousand North American vehicles are broken into every year, causing a million dollars worth of damage. But don't take our word for it; that statistic comes straight from the mouth of legendary BBC Earth wildlife expert Sir David Attenborough.
Occasionally, bear burglars even go car-jacking. For example, one bear from Colorado, USA, broke into a car, sat in the seat, knocked the gearstick into neutral, and took the vehicle for an unexpected ride!
What Happens If You Cry After Having A Spray Tan?
Everybody knows the best way to banish the blues is with a little bit of retail therapy or a day at the spa. But not too long after getting out of the spa, this young woman was crying in her car, completely ruining her spray tan. We just hope she wasn't crying after receiving the bill. And we double hope that she wasn't headed out on a date that evening.
All we know is if we cried after getting a spray tan, seeing these results would only make us cry more. Poor woman!
What Happens If You Blink While Having Your Photo Taken?
Notice anything weird about this photo? Initially, it might be challenging to catch the difference between the boy and his reflection in what appears to be a television. But upon further inspection, you'll notice his eyes are closed on the left, but they're open on the right. This rare pic exists because the TV is closer to the camera, so the light had less distance to travel to the camera.
Most people blink 15-20 times every minute, or 900–1,200 times an hour. So that's up to 19,200 times a day, 134,400 times a week, or 7 million times a year. Each blink lasts between 0.1 and 0.4 seconds; you spend about 10% of your woken day blinking!
What Happens If Your Phone Vibrates While Taking A Photo?
Before you ask, no, the person who took this photo isn't experiencing the shakes. Nor has a wormhole opened up above Chicago's beautiful city skyline. Instead, this photo results from the shutter opening and closing at the exact moment the phone rang and vibrated. So, folks, now we know what happens if your cell happens to vibrate the moment you're snapping a shot. It's pretty cool if you ask us.
If you look closely at Chicago's underappreciated skyline, you can see the famous Sears Tower skyscraper on the right. Although nowadays, it's called the Willis Tower.
What Happens When Lightning Strikes A Golf Flag?
This photo shows what happens to the surrounding grass when lightning strikes a metal flag on a golf course. Of course, there is the old adage that you have more chance of being struck by lightning than winning the lottery. But since some golfers have been struck by lightning, we ask: Does being struck by lightning improve their chances of winning the lottery? Jokes aside, this image is unlike anything we've seen before.
You can see where the lightning struck and where the electricity that came with it spread all around. It looks wild!
What Happens When the Storm Crosses the Road?
This photo reminds us of those old cartoons where someone is always being chased and has to create optical illusions, like fake roads or fake tunnels, to trick the person chasing them, except that this is not a cartoon, and it's very much real. What we have here is the aftermath of a storm so violent that it picked the road up and slapped it out off course with a mere flick of its windy wrist.
Technically, it's only a few inches of the asphalt surface that was moved, but the photo still shows off the incredible destructive power of nature.
What Happens When You Freeze A Coconut?
Something really cool happens when you put a coconut in the freezer. Coconuts, you see, are full of coconut water, and when that water freezes, it turns into delicious coconut water ice. But the best thing about opening up a frozen coconut is the delightful frozen coconut water that sits there like an opaque frozen egg, just waiting for you to take a bite. Not only is it delicious, but it's also beautiful to look at.
Did you know that falling coconuts kill around 150 people a year? By comparison, sharks only kill approximately five people per year. For this reason, coconuts are known as 'The silent killer of the Pacific.'
What Happens if You Mix Water and Oil Fire?
While many of today's entries are fun, this one contains a valuable life lesson. Just as you shouldn't throw water on an electrical fire, this is what happens when you throw water directly onto an oil fire. So, if a pan of hot oil ever catches fire, the one thing not to do is throw water on it. Instead, the correct thing to do is place a wet dishtowel on the fiery pan.
We're not sure the events that led up to this photo, but it looks like a high-school science teacher found a memorable way to wake up their sleeping chemistry class students!
What Happens If You Leave A Black T-Shirt In Your Car?
While finally clearing out the landfill site that is the back of your car, you happen upon a tie-dye T-shirt. The thing is, you've never owned such an item, so where did it come from? Puzzled, you ask yourself if someone left it there after a long-forgotten night of passion. But you're sure that's not where the tie-dye T-shirt came from. And then it hits you, and you remember where that shirt came from.
It's that old black t-shirt you used to wear all of the time. After all of that time in the car, the sun merely bleached it, turning it into a tie-dyed T-shirt.
What Happens When An Astronaut Floats Away?
Floating away from your orbiter into the dark, icy vacuum of space must be every astronaut's worst nightmare. But that's what happened to NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless II as he floated 320 feet away from his orbiter during his 1984 Space Shuttle mission. Luckily, he had a Manned Maneuvering Unit, also known as a nitrogen-propelled jet pack, allowing him to complete the universe's first spacewalk that we know of.
The ship Bruce McCandless flew was the Space Shuttle Challenger. Two years later, on January 28th, 1986, the world watched on in horror as the Challenger exploded 73 seconds after lift-off, killing all seven astronauts.
What Happens If You Freeze-Dry Gummy Worms?
The world needs mad scientists, so we ordinary people don't have to do insane things like freeze-drying perfectly delicious gummy worms. That said, the world needs mad professors because freeze-drying gummy worms wouldn't even cross our tiny little minds. You can tell this person is a proper scientist because they've included something for scale, in this case, a dollar bill. It looks like we'll be dry-freezing our gummy worms from now on.
Do you think this mad scientist cackled with satisfaction as they planned their next experiment––turning gummy bears into menacing giants? Or were they left cursing and crying: "What monster has been created?"
What Happens When Dish Soap Is Added To A Fountain?
While we'd all love this to be the fallout from a fantastic Floridian foam party, this picture shows what happens when someone accidentally spills dish soap into a public fountain. How do we know it was an accident? Because what kind of responsible young person in their right mind would want to purposefully commit the age-old prank of emptying entire bottles of dish soap into a public fountain? Okay, it's us, we want to.
This incident occurred in Boca Raton, Florida. In one subsequent newspaper headline, police warned kids that 'Pouring dish soap into $30K fountain isn't a prank; it's a felony.' So, for any kids out there reading this: don't do the crime if you can't do the time!
What Happens When You Microwave A Highlighter?
All you need for this recipe is a highlighter pen––any color will do, but we think pink is best––a microwave and a death wish. What could possibly go wrong? You might think that this dramatic photo shows the exact moment when a highlighter explodes and ink spurts out of the top of the pen like a pink volcano, but what we see here is actually the aftermath of that explosion.
Open the microwave door, and voila: you'll be greeted by an explosion of pink cotton candy as if it's been frozen in time. Needless to say, don't try this with your mom's microwave.
Guess What Happens To Vinyl When Left In A Hot Car
This isn't the result of a housefire; someone left this old vinyl record in a car during a heatwave! The album in question is the 1956 rhythm and blues classic from saxophonist Earl Bostic. It's called Bostic For You, and it features the song Smoke Gets In Your Eyes. (No, really, it does!) We just hope that the owner didn't try to play that record after the sun did its damage!
Do you know those Parental Advisory Explicit Content stickers that come on CDs? Back in the old days, when the world was black and white, all albums featured a sticker reading "Remember: Vinyl records die in hot cars."
What Happens To Truck Driver's Faces In The Sun?
Everyone knows the joke about truck drivers having one tanned arm, but did you know that the sun badly damages their skin over the years? To highlight the effects of sun damage on the skin, the New England Journal of Medicine published this photo of a 69-year-old trucker who spent nearly three decades on the road and now lives with unilateral dermatoheliosis, which literally means skin sun in Greek.
But what does dermatoheliosis do? Well, the sun's UV rays destroy the skin's elastic fibers, causing these deep wrinkles. The moral of the story? Keep on trucking, but invest in Factor 50 sunblock.
What Happens If The Sun Weathers Signs?
You'd be forgiven for thinking this sign is written in a heavy-metal font. But it's not the 'No Parking' sign from outside Metallica's very metal dungeon or some other rockstars' home; it's just what happens when a plastic sign has spent a really, really long time in the sun. By elongating and sharpening the words, the sun damage has given all the letters 1980's hair metal vibe. And we're very into it.
We can't help but wonder if this phenomenon is what inspired the font behind so many rock bands in the first place. Could it be?
What Happens If You Swing Glow Sticks?
This man is swinging a set of glowsticks above his head, but not just any old glowsticks. These ones come with burning steel wool at the end. Take a long-exposure photo of his swinging, and you get this gorgeous, psychedelic, mind-bending shot. It really does look like he's opened up another universe above his head, and he's about to be swallowed up by the cosmos — what a stunning sight.
It took a New York minute to realize he's standing in water, so the reflection makes it seems like there's a second universe opening up beneath him.
What Happens If You Don't Change Your Oil For 84,000 Miles?
No one would be stupid enough to drive almost 100,000 miles without an oil change, right? Wrong! Considering you should change the oil in older cars every 3,000 miles (for more modern vehicles, it's every 5-7K miles), this person drove their vehicle the equivalent of New York to Los Angeles thirty times without an oil change. So, it's little wonder what happened to their poor car's engine. But it's a lesson for us all.
It really is a surprise that the car made it a quarter of that distance without seizing up. Someone tell us what car this is, please.
What Happens When Water Freezes On A Spinning Wheel?
Unless you regularly drive in the sub-zero temperature of The Yukon, Siberia, or a rover on the moon, you may not know what happens to icy water on the wheel of a vehicle. Surprising and freaky as it is, this photo shows what happens when water freezes on a spinning car wheel. As the wheel revolves at however many times per minute a car wheel revolves, dozens of mini icicles are formed.
Do you think anyone's ever confused these icicles for cola-flavored ice pops and tried licking them? Is it weird that we even thought of that?
What Happens When a Little Boy Puts His Hand in a Petri Dish?
As cute as little kids are, we all know they're far from the cleanest humans in the room. But what exactly are these little ones made of? Well, you've possibly heard parents describe their young children as a petri dish of germs, and it turns out it's true! Lab technician and mom Tasha Sturm, from Cabrillo College in California, dipped her 8-year-old son's hand into an agar-filled petri dish after he played outside.
Unfortunately for all parents out there, the results show a whole host of microbial bacteria, yeast, and fungi. It looks pretty, but it's definitely not.
What Happens When You Polish A Coconut?
Unfortunately, this is not an Easter egg or misshapen bowling ball. This marvelous machination of humankind and nature acting as one in perfect harmony is a polished coconut. It must take an eon to polish a hairy coconut husk into a perfectly smooth and shiny oval, so the owner of this thing of beauty must have spent the whole of lockdown polishing their nuts. And he wasn't the only one.
People all around the Pacific Ring have been polishing their nuts for thousands of years. Sometimes they even shape their polished coconuts into bowls.
Look What Happens When Lightning Strikes A Beach!
What happens when an electrical storm comes knocking at your door? Well, that's what happened when lightning struck Dornoch Beach, leaving this mini crater. Some of the surrounding sand even turned black from the high temperatures, but did you know that lightning is so hot it can turn sand into glass? Lightning is one of the hottest things in the universe, reaching temperatures of up to 30,000 kelvins, or 53,540 degrees Fahrenheit!
To put that into perspective, the sun's surface is 6,000 kelvins (10,340 degrees Fahrenheit), while the hottest thing in the universe is an exploding star. Supernovae can reach up to 1,8000,000,00 degrees Fahrenheit.
What Happens When A Hair Gets Caught In A Zipper?
People with long hair know what happens when a hair gets caught in a zipper: it hurts like hell. Not as much as the "We got a bleeder!" scene from There's Something About Mary, but it still hurts. Yet have you ever asked what happens to the hair? This photograph answers the question on everybody's lips. And the result is almost beautiful in a mathematical, golden ratio kinda way.
We started this entry by mentioning long hair getting caught in zippers, but this hair seems to be of the short and curly variety. So you can scratch what we said about the beautiful golden ratio.
What Would Happen If A Hot Air Balloon Turned Upside Down?
Would you ever dare to fly in a hot air balloon? Now How about if that hot air balloon is upside down? Yeah, we thought not! But don't worry; you will be glad to hear that this photo is not of an upside-down hot air balloon. How do we know? First, if it were upside down, its fare-paying passengers would be plummeting to their deaths, screaming sky-blue murder. That would be a series of unfortunate events.
Second, if you look closely, you'll see the real explanation. The passengers are actually in the gondola at the bottom of the balloon. Luckily, this has been built to be an ariel optical illusion.
What Happens To Maple Syrup In Your Refrigerator?
Did you know that if you leave maple syrup at the back of your refrigerator for a couple of years, it turns into diamonds? Sadly, that's not true, or all Canadians would be millionaires. But the truth is that long-forgotten maple syrup does turn into pretty sugar crystals. The delicious breakfast syrup is basically a highly saturated sugar (sucrose, glucose, and fructose) solution, meaning it will morph into crystals given enough time.
You can speed up the process by heating maple syrup, pouring it onto a chilled plate or into a dish, and then placing it in the refrigerator.
What Happens To Leaves In Swimming Pools?
Where do leaves go to die? One moment this leaf was a bright green little thing, full of chlorophyll, dreams, and ambitions. The next thing it knew, it was turning brown in old age. Then, after fulfilling its lifelong dream of getting blown off (by the wind), it fell to its death on a lawn or sidewalk only to be raked up and cremated in a bonfire. But some leaves aren't cremated; for some leaves, there is a fate worse than death.
The chlorine in this pool has stripped this poor leaf of all its pigment, leaving it as translucent as a vampire. Now go to your room and think about what those chemicals do to your skin.
What Happens To Tires In A Heatwave?
This photo comes all the way from Australia, where you better stay inside when the sun has got his hat on. In January 2022, the remote coastal town of Onslow, Western Australia, reported temperatures of 123.26 Fahrenheit (50.7 Celcius). That's the hottest Australian day on record since January 1960. And when heatwaves reach anywhere near those kinds of temperatures, this is what happens to tires. But it gets worse.
Asphalt turns to sticky tar, leading to thousands of Australians losing their thongs when they cross the street. In that part of the world, they call flip-flops 'thongs' whereas they call thongs 'undies,' or the rhyming slang 'Reg Grundies' after a famous Aussie TV producer.
What Do 30-Year-Old Teddy Bears Look Like?
Mixing up your traditional before-and-after stereotypes, the bear on the right is brand new while the bear on the left is 30 years old. Hard to believe, right? Of course, he's received a lot of love over those three decades. But in all that time, he's given one adoring owner so much love and so many cuddles that he probably deserves the teddy bear equivalent of a knighthood or a purple heart.
As for his name, we're gonna take a wild guess and plump for him being called Fred Bear because the poor thing is so threadbare.
What Happens When The Sun Hits Street Lights?
If you were born before kids had Nintendo Switches, Internets, and Tik Toks, you had to make the best of sticks and mud and yo-yos. One trick Generation X and earlier kids learned was to scorch their dad's pristine lawn using magnifying glasses. Those were the good old days. You could even write rude messages with a bit of time and energy. But what happens when streetlights catch the sun?
Street lights with bulbs like this one have been known to act as giant magnifying glasses. As the sun moves across the sky, they scorch lines into the grass. So now you know!
What Happens to a Door That Hits a Bell for Decades?
Many old-timey stores have a bell at the entrance to let staff know a customer has just walked in the door. Over the decades, this bell has probably been rung hundreds of thousands of times, and all that wear and tear has left a rather significant dent in the door. In fact, this bell has hit the door so many times that it's worn a hole through a couple of inches of wood.
And on the subject of bells, do you know why cows sometimes wear bells? It's because their horns don't work!
What Happens In A Mini-Meteor Strike?
To study the effects of space debris impact, those clever boffins at the European Space Agency conducted some research experiments. They smashed a one-centimeter aluminum ball bearing into a block of aluminum while it was traveling at meteoric speeds. If you're not a scientist, let us tell you that meteoroids can travel up to 44 miles (71 km) per second. The scientists couldn't quite match that speed. But that wasn't the end of it.
They did fire the tiny ball bearing at 15,000 mph, and look what happened to the block of aluminum! Now imagine a six-mile-wide (10km) asteroid like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago!
How Do You Stop Your Fingers Going Wrinkly In The Bath?
Everybody knows that their fingers get wrinkled like little pink prunes if you stay in the bath, swimming pool, or ocean too long. Or hand wash too many dishes. But what can you do to stop it from happening? Yes, folks, these are the kind of questions that should keep you awake at night. Well, it turns out that if you have nerve damage in your fingers, they don't prune up!
So, to stop getting wrinkly fingers, simply sever the nerves in your dangly digits. We're only kidding; please don't try this at home.
What Happens To Marble Stairs After 850 Years?
Over the Leaning Tower of Pisa's 850-year-existence, millions of feet have worn down the marble steps to look like this. If you thought your contractors were slow, construction on the tower commenced in 1172 but was not completed until 1371. That's two hundred years! And to make matters worse, they knew the soft ground couldn't support the structure's weight, meaning it was already tilting as they were building it!
By 1990, the tower was tilting so much––5.5 degrees––that it was closed between 1993 and 2001. Yes, Italy's second-laziest construction team took eight years to reduce the tilt to 3.97 degrees.
What Happens When You Leave Fruit To Rot For 6 Months?
Someone left an apple and a banana in their workplace locker and forgot about them while they worked from home during the coronavirus pandemic. When they finally returned to work six months later, they opened up their locker to be greeted by this moldy black banana and an apple that looked more like a screwed-up piece of paper than anything that grew on a tree. What do you mean paper grows on trees?
Everything worked out in the end, though. As luck would have it, the workplace was Marvel's Sanctum Sanctorum. Doctor Strange turned up performed his nifty time-traveling fruit party trick meaning both apple and banana were instantly edible again.
Look Everyone! Microwave Birdseed Into Popcorn!
Hang on a minute, is that tiny popcorn or the hand of a giant? It is, of course, a tiny popcorn fit for a leprechaun and the best thing is you can make it quite easily at home. All you need to do is replace your regular popping corn with birdseed. Microwaved birdseed is the perfect food to snack on as you can eat two million kernels and still be hungry!
Being so tiny, it produces a higher-pitched crunch that's audible only to birds. So now you can annoy fewer people in the movie theater.
What's The Deal With Wind Turbines And Fog?
We're not sure if this is a photo of wind turbines creating fog or whether they are simply blowing natural fog away. But we bet our money on the former. These particular windmills sit behind each other in the ocean, where there's loads of wind and tons of humidity. The spinning blades seem to cause the water vapor rising from the sea to form fog in the air. Wow!
We think that's right, but it could be they're blowing natural fog away. To be honest, we're not windmill experts. Where's a Dutchman when you need one?
What Happens When You Put Lemons And Limes In Water?
Lemons and limes come from the same citrus family and have similar densities, so why do lemons float, but limes sink when put into water? Is it down to the acidity of the fruit? How about the weight of the peel? The answer, of course, is science. However, it's a pretty close call; since both fruit's densities are very close to water, you'd expect them both to float. So why don't they?
It turns out that limes are ever-so-slightly denser than lemons. The peel does play a factor because if you peel the lemon first, the segments still float just a little further down in the water. Because science!
What Happens When Years Of Posters Build Up?
We've all seen posters advertising rock bands and concerts glued to street lights on the sidewalk, but what happens when they build up over the years? This overweight pole must have seen decades upon decades worth of flyers. In fact, you could probably date this papery build-up in the same way dendrologists count tree rings or archaeologists dig down through layer upon layer of stratification. Now that sounds cool!
If they were to peel back every layer, archaeologists would probably reveal the first layer to be an advert for Earl Bostic's 1956 album, Bostic For You.
What Happens If A Beached Whale Washes Up Onshore?
Have you ever laid down in the bath and wondered what a beached whale might look like? This 81-foot-Blue Whale carcass washed up on a beach in Newfoundland, Canada. But how do you deal with such a whale of a problem? Well, in 2004, scientists moved a 60-ton dead Sperm Whale through the streets of Taiwan. All was going well until halfway through the tractor-trailer journey, when the whale exploded, showering onlookers, vehicles, and stores in purifying flesh, blubber, and guts.
But in 1970, Oregon State Police showed the world how not to deal with a beached whale when they blew one up with dynamite. Spectators a quarter of a mile away were showered with whale blubber, and falling whale meat destroyed a car! You can view the grainy TV news coverage on YouTube, and it makes for some of the best TV news you'll ever see. Enjoy!