If you separate the halves of your brain, they can operate relatively fine independently of each other, each controlling roughly half of the body. When one half does something, and the other half is asked why they did it, the other half will make up a plausible reason why they just did that action. There's a theory that this is basically how your brain works all the time, just guessing why it did things, and potentially with multiple processes happening in relative isolation that aren't consciously aware of each other.

There are about the same number of bacteria cells in your body as human cells, and some of the bacteria in your intestines, 'gut biome', can affect your preferences for certain foods effectively controlling your mind.

A 'reference man' (one who is 70 kilograms, 20–30 years old and 1.7 metres tall) contains on average about 30 trillion human cells and 39 trillion bacteria,

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2016.19136

Is eating behavior manipulated by the gastrointestinal microbiota? Evolutionary pressures and potential mechanisms:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bies.201400071

That probably freaks me out just as much as time passing not being fundamental under B time indicated by general relativity or free will being illusory and the universe is more likely deterministic.

Each year, is about a 1/2 of 1 percent the sun will give out a flare so big, it will not only destroy all power distribution to the half of the earth exposed, and destroy the internet there, but cut off food distribution, starving most of the population in any county . Last time it happened was in the 1800s but no stuff to destroy then. And food was local.

It would be years before things were normal . Our current setup is literally doomed to failure for a random half of the earth

Every study performed on insect counts has concluded that overall insect populations are declining, though there is not complete global coverage of data. One study in Germany found that the flying insect population had decreased by 75% from 1990 to 2015.

A 2019 survey of 24 entomologists working on six continents found that on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being the worst, all the scientists rated the severity of the insect decline crisis as being between 8–10.

Nothing scares me quite as much as the thought that I might live to see global ecological collapse.

There is a possibility that the Higgs field isn't at it's lowest energy state, and that a random quantum tunneling event could drag the Higgs field to that lower state. In this unsettling scenario, a bubble pops into existence somewhere in the universe. Inside the bubble, the laws of physics are wildly different than they are outside the bubble. The bubble expands at the speed of light, eventually taking over the entire universe. Galaxies drift apart, atoms can’t hold themselves together, and the ways that particles interact are fundamentally changed. Whatever form the universe takes after this event certainly wouldn’t be hospitable for humans.

Gamma ray bursts from celestial events such as a supernova. One of these - GRB 221009 released 1,000 times more energy in 5 minutes than our Sun has emitted throughout its 4.5 billion year life. GRBs from different galaxies have set off detectors on earth designed to detect nuclear explosions. One of these in our galaxy, pointed directly at earth could end all life on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst

Microbiology can be so much fun!

Streptococcus pyogenes causes a flesh-eating disease (necrotizing fasciitis). This species of bacteria releases toxins that kill living tissue, so you better make sure that paper cut doesn’t get infected.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is famous for a bunch of different pandemics over the centuries. If you thought covid was fun, imagine coughing up blood.

Clostridium botulinum is special, because it produces a very spicy toxin, so you don’t even have to ingest any living cells or spores of C. botulinum to get killed by it. If you do, you can even have your very own toxin factory inside you.

Vibrio cholerae is another classic responsible for numerous pandemics. This one is a bit different, because it involves lethal amounts of diarrhea.

Oh, and the scary bit? There are people who don’t believe bacteria or viruses exist. They actively oppose taking measures against these things. Humans can be truly horrifying at times.

Some species of snails are infected with a parasitic flatworm called Leucochloridium paradoxum, which has a life cycle that involves manipulating the snail's behavior and appearance to increase its own chances of survival. The parasite causes the snail's eyes to turn into worm-like protrusions, which are actually just the parasite's own larvae.

To birds, these worm-like eyes look like tasty little morsels, and they'll often peck at them to eat them. But in doing so, they're actually ingesting the parasite's larvae, which then complete their life cycle inside the bird's digestive system.