Did you know… A look back

A little while back I had the idea to give you fellow bloggies some short posts on useless facts. I love useless facts and it’s interesting what you find when you actually go and look for them. One of the things that has come from these posts are a few questions… So in the interest of being nice and useful to my followers I thought I would look back over the Did you know… posts so far and give some of the answers.

(I will be updating the posts with these answers as well)

Strawberries

In my post on Did you Know… Strawberries are derived from… a plant / fruit derived from a number of plants (a hybrid) and originating from Chile which is the garden strawberry we now enjoy. The wild or the woodland strawberry is naturally occurring bu the Chilean hybrid is larger and sweeter.
Unfortunately the the details of the hybrid composition and process is unknown. Which is a bit naff, sorry about that.

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Carrot Concrete

This was in interesting one, carrots making concrete stronger raised some eyebrows with visions of finding slices of the vegetable in the building material. The carrots need a bit more cutting up to be effective though as researchers found that tiny nano particles of carrot (or beetroot in fact) increases the calcium silicate in the concrete making it stronger.

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The water you drink is really old

This one was an eye opener, it’s one of the of those facts that’s always been staring you in the face. The water we drink is really old and when I say really old I mean really old, like older than the Earth, older than the solar system. Water being made of hydrogen and oxygen means that the oxygen created to make came from a star that is now long dead. The ingredients to make our water (along with many other materials) would have condensed when the solar system formed, making comets and asteroids which then would have come to Earth bringing the water with them.

It’s been found out that most of our water actually comes from asteroids rather than comets – this can be worked out from the different types of deuterium (a type of hydrogen) found on each of these objects. In essence though – the same water molecules are present on Earth now as it was millions of years ago, it’s come from space, been through dinosaurs and whatever else and is still here today.

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That’s it for now…

Those are the 3 I picked to look at as they seemed to cause the most questions – if there were any others that shocked you or left you wondering let me know! I might well do this again.

Simon’s Space

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