10 most interesting facts from around the globe.

Can you find the 23rd root of a 201-digit number? The late Shakuntala Devi, India's arithmetic prodigy, calculated the answer in just 50 seconds (beating a computer).

Maybe you've underestimated the sheer number of people working on NASA projects and monumental scope of problems they're constantly working to solve. One in every 1,000 patents issued by the United States Patent and Trade Organization has gone to scientists or engineers working on NASA projects, and "tens of thousands of scientific studies from the agency's missions have been published in leading journals worldwide," according to NASA.

Everyone has heard of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity. Just imagine the universal explosion of praise that happened when he published this momentous work of science! Then stop imagining. Whatever you're thinking, it probably went nothing like that.

When water is a solid, it's ice. When it's a gas, it's steam. When it's a liquid, it's, well, water. What if we told you that a substance can be all three of those states of matter at once? Yup. This freaky intersection is called the triple point.

If it were real, the words you're reading would already exist in the Library of Babel, the fictional archive imagined by Jorge Louis Borges in his story of the same name. Luckily, we have the internet. The words you're reading do exist on libraryofbabel.info, the digital version of Borges' library created by Brooklyn-based writer Jonathan Basile. (We're not joking: this paragraph appears on this page of the library.)

Of the more than 4,000 people in the U.S. waiting for a heart transplant, only about 2,500 will get one this year. Even among those lucky few, however, many of the patients' bodies will attack the foreign cells within them and reject the transplant. It's clear that we need a better way, and medical researchers have been hard at work trying to find one. The dream is to figure out a way to grow whole, beating human hearts from a patient's own cells, and in 2016, scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School got the closest we've ever come to that goal.

In October 2016, scientists accidentally turned carbon dioxide (CO2) into ethanol, a fuel. Whoops! This unexpected result could be huge in combatting climate change caused by CO2 in the atmosphere.

More people have been on the moon than have visited the region of ocean depth known as the "twilight zone." And maybe that's understandable: a dive down there requires specialized equipment, including bulky, redundant sets of gear in case anything goes wrong. But trips to the twilight zone are inevitably rewarding, with new species always swimming into view.

If you were to list out every species that has ever existed on Earth—from the tiniest mold spore to the largest mammal—biologists estimate that somewhere around 99 percent of those species would currently be extinct.

Are you decent? You may want to cover up. Research suggests that plants may have had the ability to see all along. (Don't worry, they can't actually see you.)