environment

Colorful Lego bricks

Humans manufacture 300 million tons of plastic every year. 8 million tons are estimated to end up in oceans every year. If it all washed up on the coast at once, it’s enough to cover every coastline on the globe with a significant layer of trash. You can imagine it as a neverending stack of garbage about 50 cm tall, and 50 cm wide (that’s about 1.6 ft). Marine plastics

A pound coin floating in mercury

Mercury is a chemical element. It is a metal, but has peculiar physical properties. It’s one of few metals that is liquid in standard temperature and pressure (imagine normal room temperature conditions). Mercury is commonly known as quicksilver. Other than its cool sounding name (almost like a superhero, Captain Quicksilver), and interesting physical properties, mercury and most of its compounds are toxic. Mercury poisoning can be a result of vapors

PewDiePie

As of 2019, data centers consume about 2% of global electricity. According to Swedish KTH Royal Institute of Technology, the internet uses 10% of the total electricity consumption worldwide. How much of that is consumed by Youtube? After Netflix and embedded videos, Youtube is the third biggest global internet bandwidth eater.

Server room

You know how smartphones sometimes get really warm after an hour of web browsing, right? And how laptop’s fan is howling on a warm day, spouting hot air from the vents. In a powerful gaming PC heat is an issue. Computers produce heat, but can a computer heat up a room? A Reddit user did some serious maths