6 Those stringy things between the banana and its peel are called “phloem bundles.” They are just like the vascular system of a plant, and their function is to help nutrients travel along the fruit. 

You might have found yourself cursing the stringy bits that dangle from the banana and stick to your hand or chin while enjoying the fruit. They are, however, not as useless to the banana as they are to us. You probably heard the word “phloem” in conjunction with the word “xylem” in biology class back in school. The phloem bundles are complex tissues that provide food, nutrients, minerals, and water to a plant, in this case, the bananas, to help them grow. (source)

7 Opossums eat ticks the way we eat potato chips. They are known to chomp down on up to 5,000 ticks in a season and are immune to Lyme disease. 

Opossums, also sometimes just known as “possums,” are North America’s only marsupial animals that successfully migrated to and survived in the North around 3 million years ago during the Great American Interchange via Central America. For an animal so small, opossums show remarkable abilities, such as their resistance to Lyme disease and snake venom, including venom from copperheads and rattlesnakes.

Opossums are extraordinarily good groomers, munching ticks on them as well as on the forest floor left and right. They eat so many of them that they are considered little vacuum cleaners when it comes to ticks and are often welcomed by gardeners as wildlife friends into their yards. The little creatures also have a voracious appetite for cockroaches, rats, mice, snails, slugs, carrion, and even snakes. (source)

8 The heart, if pumped with a solution containing oxygen and nutrients, can beat for hours outside of the body. 

Traditionally, heart donations for transplant are done when the donor’s brain stops functioning but while their heart is still working. After the heart is removed, there is only a four-to-six-hour window to transplant it in the recipient before it becomes non-viable. Because of this, many hearts go unused every year, especially if the recipient’s location is far away from that of the donor. Over the past few years, scientists have been developing a new technology known informally as a “Heart in a Box” which could give the surgeons around 12 hours to get the heart to the recipient.

Instead of putting the heart in a cooler, it is put in a box that pumps it full of warm blood with oxygen and nutrients to keep it beating until it reaches the recipient. The advantage of this method is that the heart can be used even when the blood circulation stops in the donor. According to Dr. Jacob Schroder at the Duke University Hospital, this is believed to increase the donor pool by 30%. So far, over 100 Heart in a Box transplants were successfully performed in the UK and Australia out of which 70 were done after blood circulation stopped. This year on December 1, this surgery was performed for the first time in the US. (1, 2)

9 Sloths can hold their breath for up to 40 minutes underwater while dolphins can only hold their breath for just eight to 10 minutes.

Aptly named “sloths,” these arboreal mammals from the tropical rain forests of South and Central America are known for their slow, deliberate movements and are almost always found hanging upside down in the trees. Their superpower, if it can be called that, is their slow metabolism which they are capable of slowing down further as well as their heart rate to less than a third of its normal rate.

This lets them hold their breath underwater for up to 40 minutes. Dolphins, on the other hand, can only stay submerged no more than 15 minutes before they need to surface and breathe through the blowhole on top of their heads.

Sloths might be painfully slow on land, but they are surprisingly strong swimmers. While their speed on land is just three to four meters per minute, their speed in water is 13.5 meters per minute and they easily cross rivers and swim between islands. (1, 2)

10 The longest word in English is “pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.”

The word was coined by Everett M. Smith, the president of the National Puzzlers’ League, in the organization’s 103rd semi-annual meeting, as a synonym for silicosis. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it means “a lung disease caused by inhaling very fine ash and sand dust.” It was featured in the New York Herald Tribune in February 1935 and succeeded “electrophotomicrographically” as the longest word in English as recognized by the League.

The title for the longest word in English that doesn’t repeat a letter goes to two, 15-letter words – “uncopyrightable,” something that cannot be copyrighted, and “dermatoglyphics,” the study of skin markings. (1, 2)