9 Weirdest Things Science Has Recently Discovered

3. It Is Impossible To Cry A River, But Not An Olympic Swimming Pool

As well as being an absolute banger, "Cry Me A River" is also a common way of telling someone they ain't sh*t, but is it physically possible?

Again, because science students apparently have a lot of time on their hands (we can't all cure cancer I guess), set about calculating whether it would be possible for all the humans on Earth to cry enough tears to form a river. They calculated the volume of the smallest river on Earth, the Roe River, at 709,190,040 litres per day and found that, with the average human tear containing 6.2 micro litres of water, it would take more than the world's population to make it flow without shrivelling up like raisins.

So that's off the cards, but the did figure out that the world could produce enough tears to fill an Olympic swimming pool if each person contributed just 55 tears. Thank god for science, right?

Whilst the study seems like a colossal waste of time, stupid thought experiments like this are a great way to get students thinking creatively about the massive amounts of data that they will have to process in their careers.