5 of Science's Weirdest Paradoxes

With #4, that's why Hydrofluoric acid WOULD NOT dissolve a body the way it's shown in Breaking Bad. There are substances that can do that, but if you need that info, you can find it yourself, and I don't want to know why you need it.

As a molecular biologist, I enjoy Levinthal's Paradox; yes it is one of the solved ones, but it perfectly illustrates how at the molecular level a few simple rules can make life possible.

the paradox of enrichment is an effect seen in population ecology whenever there’s a large surplus of resources. you would think that a species in an area where there’s suddenly tons of food would have a population boom and level off at a new higher carrying capacity, but what actually happens is the population grows so fast that the entire system is destabilized to the point that the entire population eventually dies out…all because there was extra food

I’ve noticed the tea leaf paradox when making my smoothies in the morning. I can see the spinach taking these exact paths. Who knew I was doing Physics every morning lol

Clarification: Ammonia breaks down "quickly" in UV not just any star light. That's why some believe smaller stars that produce far less UV could have planets with ammonia filled atmospheres or seas for really interesting alien life.

One paradox I study is Peto's paradox... The observation that cancer rates do not scale with body size, and thus the total number of cells. For example, elephants have many more cells than us and live almost as long, yet have very low rates of cancer.

Levinthal's Paradox was a standout from my biochem undergrad! Once a protein is manufactured by a cell's ribosomes, it has to fold into its correct 3D conformation to become functional. If the protein were to take the "chimps writing Shakespeare" approach of exhausting every conformation possible until finding the correct one, it would take longer than the age of the universe to fold properly. And yet proteins fold correctly almost immediately after leaving the ribosome printer, which reveals that evolution, to some extent, has to compromise between form and function, creating proteins that not only perform their desired function, but that also contain energetic "funnels" that quickly guide the folding process to its correct endpoint.

My sister did a paper on the Braess's paradox and now it fascinates me. The easiest way to explain it uses traffic patterns. If you add a road in a system of roads the amount of traffic increases not decreases.

My own paradox is that action potentials in neurons only exist for 4% of the time but you feel conscious 96% of the time.

12:04 Wasn't the Earth a very hot rock back then? I mean, couldn't the Earth's own geothermal energy contribute to keeping water liquid? I guess it must have been considered and discarded already, but that possible explanation immediately came to my mind.

The only way to create a truly accurate map of a coastline is if the map were the actual size of the coastline. Maps are always approximations.

Fermi Paradox

Bless the SciShow

2:13 This is why the best experiments randomly assign subjects and treatments.