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  • 17 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
Cake day: June 6th, 2025
  • Ada@piefed.blahaj.zonetoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What's a scientific fact that sounds made up but is 100% real?English
    27·
    3 days ago

    It depends what you mean. Testosterone makes a difference. It improves blood oxygen levels and cardio capacity, and it increases strength (it’s a steroid).

    And depending on the context, the difference is larger. Men tend to have stronger hand grip than women for example, to the extent, there is very little overlap. But if you look at leg strength, the distributions are different, but they overlap significantly. And when you start to look at things like long distance endurance events, the distributions are even closer.

    However, none of those things align with “men” or “women”. They align with “the dominant sex hormone in your body”, and your capacity shifts as your sex hormones shift.

  • Ada@piefed.blahaj.zonetoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What's a scientific fact that sounds made up but is 100% real?English
    52·
    3 days ago

    That’s not an answer, because if life is common, then the chance of us being the first is minuscule.

    Lets say that life can only form around main sequence G type stars (ie, like our sun). There is no reason to believe this is true, but lets say it is for this example. The universe is 14 billion years old, and the sun is 4.5 billion years old. Lets round it to 4 billion years old when life first formed.

    Now, the earliest G type stars formed approximately 1 billion years after the universe formed. Lets say that life can only develop when those stars were at least 4 billion years old. That puts the earliest possible scenario where life formed at 5 billion years after the universe formed, and that was 9 billion years ago. Low balling it, there are approximately 7 billion g type main sequence stars current in our galaxy.

    All together, that means the chance of us simply being the first is very low, and if we are the first, then life isn’t common, and if life isn’t common, the underlying reason for that is the answer to the fermi paradox.