1. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second.2. It takes 8 minutes 17 seconds for light to travel from the Sun’s surface to the Earth.3. In October 1999 the 6 billionth person was born.4. 10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.5. The Earth spins at 1,000 mph but it travels through space at an incredible 67,000 mph.6. Every year over one million earthquakes shake the Earth.7. The largest ever hailstone weighed over 1 kg and fell in Bangladesh in 1986.8. Every second around 100 lightning bolts strike the Earth.9. Every year lightning kills 1000 people.

10. In October 1999 an Iceberg the size of London broke free from the Antarctic ice shelf.11. If you could drive your car straight up you would arrive in space in just over an hour.12. All the hydrogen atoms in our bodies were created 12 billion years ago in the Big Bang.13. The Earth is 4.56 billion years old…the same age as the Moon and the Sun.14. The dinosaurs became extinct before the Rockies or the Alps were formed.15. Female black widow spiders eat their males after mating.16. When a flea jumps, the rate of acceleration is 20 times that of the space shuttle during launch.17. The earliest wine makers lived in Egypt around 2300 BC.18. If our Sun were just inch in diameter, the nearest star would be 445 miles away.19. The Australian billy goat plum contains 100 times more vitamin C than an orange.20. Astronauts cannot belch - there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their stomachs.21. The air at the summit of Mount Everest, 29,029 feet is only a third as thick as the air at sea level.22. One million, million, million, million, millionth of a second after the Big Bang the Universe was the size of a …pea.23. DNA was first discovered in 1869 by Swiss Friedrich Mieschler.

24. The molecular structure of DNA was first determined by Watson and Crick in 1953.25. The thermometer was invented in 1607 by Galileo.26. Englishman Roger Bacon invented the magnifying glass in 1250.27. Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1866.28. Wilhelm Rontgen won the first Nobel Prize for physics for discovering X-rays in 1895.29. The tallest tree ever was an Australian eucalyptus - In 1872 it was measured at 435 feet tall.30. Christian Barnard performed the first heart transplant in 1967 - the patient lived for 18 days.31. The wingspan of a Boeing 747 is longer than the Wright brother’s first flight.32. An electric eel can produce a shock of up to 650 volts.33. Human tapeworms can grow up to 22.9m.34. Chimps can understand 300 different signs.35. The Ebola virus kills 4 out of every 5 humans it infects.36. In 5 billion years the Sun will run out of fuel and turn into a Red Giant.37. Without its lining of mucus your stomach would digest itself.38. Humans have 46 chromosomes, peas have 14 and crayfish have 200.39. There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.40. An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.41. On the day that Alexander Graham Bell was buried the entire US telephone system was shut down for 1 minute in tribute.

42. The low frequency call of the humpback whale is the loudest noise made by a living creature.43. The call of the humpback whale is louder than Concorde and can be heard from 500 miles away.44. A quarter of the world’s plants are threatened with extinction by the year 2010.45. Each person sheds 40lbs of skin in his or her lifetime.46. At 15 inches the eyes of giant squids are the largest on the planet.47. The largest galaxies contain a million, million stars.

48. The Universe contains over 100 billion galaxies.49. Wounds infested with maggots heal quickly and without spread of gangrene or other infection.50. More germs are transferred shaking hands than kissing.51. The longest glacier in Antarctica, the Almbert glacier, is 250 miles long and 40 miles wide.52. The fastest speed a falling raindrop can hit you is 18mph.53. A salmon-rich, low cholesterol diet means that Inuits rarely suffer from heart disease.54. Inbreeding causes 3 out of every 10 Dalmation dogs to suffer from hearing disability.55. The world’s smallest winged insect, the Tanzanian parasitic wasp, is smaller than the eye of a housefly.56. If the Sun were the size of a beach ball then Jupiter would be the size of a golf ball and the Earth would be as small as a pea.57. It would take over an hour for a heavy object to sink 6.7 miles down to the deepest part of the ocean.58. There are more living organisms on the skin of each human than there are humans on the surface of the earth.59. The grey whale migrates 12,500 miles from the Artic to Mexico and back every year.60. Quasars emit more energy than 100 giant galaxies.61. Quasars are the most distant objects in the Universe.62. The Saturn V rocket which carried man to the Moon develops power equivalent to fifty 747 jumbo jets.63. Koalas sleep an average of 22 hours a day, two hours more than the sloth.64. Light would take .13 seconds to travel around the Earth.65. Neutron stars are so dense that a teaspoonful would weigh more than all the people on Earth.66. One in every 2000 babies is born with a tooth.67. Every hour the Universe expands by a billion miles in all directions.68. Somewhere in the flicker of a badly tuned TV set is the background radiation from the Big Bang.69. The temperature in Antarctica plummets as low as -35 degrees Celsius.70. Space debris travels through space at over 18,000 mph.71. The International Space Station weighs about 500 tons and is the same size as a football field.72. Astronauts brought back about 800 pounds of lunar rock to Earth. Most of it has not been analyzed.

73. Tuberculosis is the biggest global killer of women.74. Hummingbirds consume half of their body weight in food every day.75. Some species of bamboo grow at a rate of 3ft per day.76. Saturn would float if you could find an ocean big enough.77. The highest recorded train speed is 320.2 mph by the TGV train in France.78. The highest speed ever achieved on a bicycle is 166.94 mph by Fred Rompelburg.79. The research spacecraft Helios B came within a record 27 million miles of the Sun.80. 65 million years ago the impact of an asteroid is estimated to have had the power of 10 million H-Bombs.81. The temperature at the centre of the Earth is estimated to be 5500 degrees Celsius.82. Argentia in Newfoundland has an average 206 days of fog each year.83. Mount Waiale’ale in Hawaii is the rainiest place in the world and has 335 rainy days a year.84. 68% of all UFO sightings are by men.85. 15% of the world’s fresh water flows down the Amazon.86. A cat has 32 sets of muscles in each ear.87. Over two-thirds of people admit to urinating while in public swimming pools.88. More people die of heart attacks on Monday than on any other day of the week.89. Beetles are the strongest animals on Earth relative to their size. A rhinoceros beetle can carry 850 times its own weight in its back.90. In 1961 the Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in Space.91. In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.92. In 1885 Karl Benz built the first car powered by an internal combustion engine.93. Scotsman John Baird invented the Baird televisor (now the television) in 1925.94. Io, one of Jupiter’s moons, is the most volcanically active place in the Solar System.95. The Walkman was launched in Japan by Sony in 1979.

96. Traffic lights with red and green gas lights were first introduced in London in 1868. Unfortunately, they exploded and killed a policeman. The first successful system was installed in Cleveland, Ohio in 1914.97. Ticks are second only to the mosquito as the most dangerous parasites to humans.98. 3 billion of the world’s 6 billion population are under the age of 25.

99. Infant mortality in 1900 was 142 in 1000 births. By 2000 it had reduced to just 6 in every 1000.

100% Pure Honey Facts!Honey is one of the oldest food sources we know. This fascinating fluid is created by honey bees from the nectar of flowers. Let’s see what sciensational stuff we have for honey and the great honey bees.

Thanks to sciensational reader Ashalaya from Racine in Wisconsin, USA, we found out a really interesting chemistry fact:Honey does not spoil.

This is perhaps one of the greatest properties of honey. You could place it anywhere for thousands of years and it will not spoil. In fact, edible honey was found in ancient Egyptian Pharaoh King Tut’s tomb!Honey contains large amounts of fructose and glucose. Naturally this makes it an ideal sweetener – much sweeter – almost 20 to 60 per cent more – than sugar itself!You would think that such a sweet thing would be so bad for your health. Not so at all! Honey does not have any fats or cholesterol. It does not contain any sodium either. You could actually live off a just-honey diet because it is considered to be the only kind of food that has all necessary substances to sustain a normal human life, though it would be quite boring to have nothing but honey, eh?Let’s take a look at the wonderful source of honey – the fantastic creature called the Honey Bee. Sciensational reader Jieian tells us an amazing biology fact:Honeybees have remained unchanged in form or structure for 20 million years.

Yup, now there’s one specie we could trust with almost anything that it does, couldn’t we? Surely they must know what they’re doing! And they’re not looking at retirement anytime soon either,

because honey bees are not only one of the oldest species, they are also one of the most hardworking.A honey bee could visit around 2000 flowers in a day, flying around 25 kilometers per hour! That’s not all. It would take about 2 million flowers for these little creatures to visit to make just half a kilogram of honey! Not only that, just one single honey bee colony can produce between 30 to 40 kilograms of honey in a year. Can anyone beat that?So, let’s remember how much hard work goes into a single spoonful of honey that we so yummily use as part of our food.Here’s a big Cheers to our friends, the honey bees!

Solar systemWe live on a sphere of extremes and oddities. In fact it's not really a sphere, but it is a wild planet, mottled with deadly volcanoes, rattled by killer earthquakes, drenched in disastrous deluges. But do you know which were the worst?

Some of Earth's valleys dip below sea level. Mountains soar into thin air. Can you name the lowest spot? The tallest peak? Do you know how far it is to the center of the planet or what's there?

Where are the planet's hottest, coldest, driest and windiest places?

The following list of Earth's extremes and other amazing facts is presented in Q&A format, so you can cover the answers to test your knowledge of the home planet. Sources include the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with other SPACE.com reporting.

1. What is the hottest place on Earth?

Count one wrong if you guessed Death Valley in California. True enough on many days. But El Azizia in Libya recorded a temperature of 136 degrees Fahrenheit (57.8 Celsius) on Sept. 13, 1922 -- the hottest ever measured. In Death Valley, it got up to 134 Fahrenheit on July 10, 1913.

2. And the coldest place around here?

Far and away, the coldest temperature ever measured on Earth was -129 Fahrenheit (-89 Celsius) at Vostok, Antarctica, on July 21, 1983.

3. What makes thunder?

If you thought, "Lightning!" then hats off to you. But I had a more illuminating answer in mind. The air around a lightning bolt is superheated to about five times the temperature of the Sun. This sudden heating causes the air to expand faster than the speed of sound, which compresses the air and forms a shock wave; we hear it as thunder.

4. Can rocks float?

In a volcanic eruption, the violent separation of gas from lava produces a "frothy" rock called pumice, loaded with gas bubbles. Some of it can float, geologists say. I've never seen this happen, and I'm thankful for that.

5. Can rocks grow?

Yes, but observing the process is less interesting than watching paint dry. Rocks called iron-manganese crusts grow on mountains under the sea. The crusts precipitate material slowly from seawater, growing about 1 millimeter every million years. Your fingernails grow about the same amount every two weeks.

6. How much space dust falls to Earth each year?

Estimates vary, but the USGS says at least 1,000 million grams, or roughly 1,000 tons of material enters the atmosphere every year and makes its way to Earths surface. One group of scientists claims microbes rain down from space, too, and that extraterrestrial organisms are responsible for flu epidemics. There's been no proof of this, and I'm not holding my breath.

7. How far does regular dust blow in the wind?

A 1999 study showed that African dust finds its way to Florida and can help push parts of the state over the prescribed air quality limit for particulate matter set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The dust is kicked up by high winds in North Africa and carried as high as 20,000 feet (6,100 meters), where it's caught up in the trade winds and carried across the sea. Dust from China makes its way to North America, too.

8. Where is the worlds highest waterfall?

The water of Angel Falls in Venezuela drops 3,212 feet (979 meters).

9. What two great American cities are destined to merge?

The San Andreas fault, which runs north-south, is slipping at a rate of about 2 inches (5 centimeters) per year, causing Los Angeles to move towards San Francisco. Scientists forecast LA will be a suburb of the City by the Bay in about 15 million years.

10. Is Earth a sphere?

Because the planet rotates and is more flexible than you might imagine, it bulges at the midsection, creating a sort of pumpkin shape. The bulge was lessening for centuries but now, suddenly, it is growing, a recent study showed. Accelerated melting of Earth's glaciers is taking the blame for the gain in equatorial girth.

11. What would a 100-pound person weigh on Mars?

The gravity on Mars is 38 percent of that found on Earth at sea level. So a 100-pound person on Earth would weigh 38 pounds on Mars. Based on NASA's present plans, it'll be decades before this assumption can be observationally proved, however.

12. How long is a Martian year?

It's a year long, if you're from Mars. To an earthling, it's nearly twice as long. The red planet takes 687 Earth-days to go around the Sun -- compared to 365 days for Earth. Taking into account Mars' different rotational time (see #13 below) calendars on Mars would be about 670 days long with some leap days needed to keep things square. If you find one, please mail it to me. I'm curious how they worked out the months, given they have two moons. [The initial publication of this fact mistakenly said a Mars calendar would have 687 days.]

13. How long is the average Martian day?

A Martian can sleep (or work) and extra half-hour every day compared to you. Mars days are 24 hours and 37 minutes long, compared to 23 hours, 56 minutes on Earth. A day on any planet in our solar system is determined by how long it takes the world to spin once on its axis, making the Sun appear to rise in the morning and sending it down in the evening.

14. What is the largest volcano?

The Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii holds the title here on Earth. It rises more than 50,000 feet (9.5 miles or 15.2 kilometers) above its base, which sits under the surface of the sea. But that's all volcanic chump change. Olympus Mons on Mars rises 16 miles (26 kilometers) into the Martian sky. Its base would almost cover the entire state of Arizona.

Planet building

15. What was the deadliest known earthquake?

The world’s deadliest recorded earthquake occurred in 1557 in central China. It struck a region where most people lived in caves carved from soft rock. The dwellings collapsed, killing an estimated 830,000 people. In 1976 another deadly temblor struck Tangshan, China. More than 250,000 people were killed.

16. What was the strongest earthquake in recent times?

A 1960 Chilean earthquake, which occurred off the coast, had a magnitude of 9.6 and broke a fault more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) long. An earthquake like that under a major city would challenge the best construction techniques.

17. Which earthquake was more catastrophic: Kobe, Japan or Northridge, California?

The 1994 Northridge earthquake had a magnitude of 6.7 was responsible for approximately 60 deaths, 9,000 injuries, and more than $40 billion in damage. The Kobe earthquake of 1995 was magnitude 6.8 and killed 5,530 people. There were some 37,000 injuries and more than $100 billion in economic loss.

18. How far is it to the center of the Earth?

The distance from the surface of Earth to the center is about 3,963 miles (6,378 kilometers). Much of Earth is fluid. The mostly solid skin of the planet is only 41 miles (66 kilometers) thick -- thinner than the skin of an apple, relatively speaking.

19. What is the highest mountain?

Climbers who brave Mt. Everest in the Nepal-Tibet section of the Himalayas reach 29,035 feet (nearly 9 kilometers) above sea level. Its height was revised upward by 7 feet based on measurements made in 1999 using the satellite-based Global Positioning System.

20. Has the Moon always been so close?

It used to be much closer! A billion years ago, the Moon was in a tighter orbit, taking just 20 days to go around us and make a month. A day on Earth back then was only 18 hours long. The Moon is still moving away -- about 1.6 inches (4 centimeters) a year. Meanwhile, Earth's rotation is slowing down, lengthening our days. In the distant future, a day will be 960 hours long! [Find out why]

21. Where is the lowest dry point on Earth?

The shore of the Dead Sea in the Middle East is about 1,300 feet (400 meters) below sea level. Not even a close second is Bad Water in Death Valley, California, at a mere 282 feet below sea level.

22. Good thing California isn't sinking further, right?

Actually parts of it are, which is so interesting that I snuck this non-question onto the list. In a problem repeated elsewhere in the country, the pumping of natural underground water reservoirs in California is causing the ground to sink up to 4 inches (11 centimeters) per year in places. Water and sewage systems may soon be threatened.

23. What is the longest river?

The Nile River in Africa is 4,160 miles (6,695 kilometers) long.

24. What is the most earthquake-prone state in the United States?

Alaska experiences a magnitude 7 earthquake almost every year, and a magnitude 8 or greater earthquake on average every 14 years. Florida and North Dakota get the fewest earthquakes in the states, even fewer than New York.

25. What's the driest place on Earth?

A place called Arica, in Chile, gets just 0.03 inches (0.76 millimeters) of rain per year. At that rate, it would take a century to fill a coffee cup.

26. What causes a landslide?

Intense rainfall over a short period of time can trigger shallow, fast-moving mud and debris flows. Slow, steady rainfall over a long period of time may trigger deeper, slow-moving landslides. Different materials behave differently, too. Every year as much as $2 billion in landslide damage occurs in the United States. In a record-breaking storm in the San Francisco area in January 1982, some 18,000 debris flows were triggered during a single night! Property damage was over $66 million, and 25 people died.

27. How fast can mud flow?

Debris flows are like mud avalanches that can move at speeds in excess of 100 mph (160 kph).

28. Do things inside Earth flow?

You bet. In fact, scientists found in 1999 that molten material in and around Earth's core moves in vortices, swirling pockets whose dynamics are similar to tornadoes and hurricanes. And as you'll learn later in this list, the planet's core moves in other strange ways, too.

29. What is the wettest place on Earth?

Lloro, Colombia averages 523.6 inches of rainfall a year, or more than 40 feet (13 meters). That's about 10 times more than fairly wet major cities in Europe or the United States.

30. Does Earth go through phases, like the Moon?

From Mars, Earth would be seen to go through distinct phases (just as we see Venus change phases). Earth is inside the orbit of Mars, and as the two planets travel around the Sun, sunlight would strike our home planet from different angles during the year. Earth phases can be seen in recent photographs taken by Mars Global Surveyor and the European Mars Express.

31. What is the largest canyon?

The Grand Canyon is billed as the world's largest canyon system. Its main branch is 277 miles (446 kilometers) long. But let's compare. Valles Marineris on Mars extends for about 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers). If added it to a U.S. map, it would stretch from New York City to Los Angeles. In places this vast scar on the Martian surface is 5 miles (8 kilometers) deep.

32. What is the deepest canyon in the United States?

Over the eons, the Snake River dug Hell’s Canyon along the Oregon-Idaho border. It is more than 8,000 feet (2.4 kilometers) deep. In contrast, the Grand Canyon is less than 6,000 feet deep -- a bit more than a mile.

33. Is Earth the largest rocky planet in the solar system?

Just barely! Earth's diameter at the equator is 7,926 miles (12,756 kilometers). Venus is 7,521 miles (12,104 kilometers) wide. Mercury and Mars, the other two inner rocky planets, are much smaller. Pluto is rocky, too, but it's comparatively tiny (and some say it is not a planet at all).

34. How many of Earth’s volcanoes are known to have erupted in historic time?

About 540 volcanoes on land are known. No one knows how many undersea volcanoes have erupted through history.

35. Is air mostly oxygen?

Earth's atmosphere is actually about 80 percent nitrogen. Most of the rest is oxygen, with tiny amounts of other stuff thrown in.

Venus is almost as big as Earth. Despite sweltering heat at the surface, its clouds might

support life , some scientists say.

36. What is the highest waterfall in the United States?

Yosemite Falls in California is 2,425 feet (739 meters).

37. What percentage of the world’s water is in the oceans?

About 97 percent. Oceans make up about two-thirds of Earth's surface, which means that when the next asteroid hits the planet, odds are good it will splash down.

38. Which two landmasses contain the vast majority of the Earth’s fresh water supply?

Nearly 70 percent of the Earth's fresh-water supply is locked up in the icecaps of Antarctica and Greenland. The remaining fresh-water supply exists in the atmosphere, streams, lakes, or groundwater and accounts for a mere 1 percent of the Earth's total.

39. Which of the Earth’s oceans is the largest?

The Pacific Ocean covers 64 million square miles (165 million square kilometers). It is more than two times the size of the Atlantic. It has an average depth of 2.4 miles (3.9 kilometers).

40. Why is Earth mostly crater-free compared to the pockmarked Moon?

Earth is more active, in terms of both geology and weather. Much of our planet's geologic history was long ago folded back inside. Some of that is regurgitated by volcanoes, but the results are pretty hard to study. Even more recent events evident on the surface -- craters that can by millions of years old -- get overgrown by vegetation, weathered by wind and rain, and modified by earthquakes and landslides. The Moon, meanwhile, is geologically quiet and has almost no weather; its craters tell a billions-year-long tale of catastrophic collisions. Interestingly, some of the oldest Earth rocks might be awaiting discovery on the Moon, having been blasted there billions of years ago by the very asteroid impacts that rattle both worlds.

41. How much surface area does Earth contain?

There are 196,950,711 square miles (510,100,000 square kilometers).

42. What is the largest lake in the world?

By size and volume it is the Caspian Sea, located between southeast Europe and west Asia.

43. Where do most earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur on Earth?

The majority occur along boundaries of the dozen or so major plates that more or less float on the surface of Earth. One of the most active plate boundaries where earthquakes and eruptions are frequent, for example, is around the massive Pacific Plate commonly referred to as the Pacific Ring of Fire. It fuels shaking and baking from Japan to Alaska to South America.

44. How hot are the planet's innards?

The temperature of Earth increases about 36 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius) for every kilometer (about 0.62 miles) you go down. Near the center, its thought to be at least 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit (3,870 Celsius). 45. What three countries have the greatest number of historically active volcanoes?

The top three countries are Indonesia, Japan, and the United States in descending order of activity.

46. How many people worldwide are at risk from volcanoes?

As of the year 2000, USGS scientists estimated that volcanoes posed a tangible risk to at least 500 million people. This is comparable to the entire population of the world at the beginning of the seventeenth century!

47. Which of the following sources stores the greatest volume of fresh water worldwide: lakes, streams or ground water?

Groundwater comprises a 30 times greater volume than all freshwater lakes, and more than 3,000 times what's in the world’s streams and rivers at any given time. Groundwater is housed in natural underground aquifers, in which the water typically runs around and through the stone and other material.

48. Which earthquake was larger, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake or the 1964 Anchorage, Alaska, temblor?

The Anchorage earthquake had a magnitude of 9.2, whereas the San Francisco earthquake was a magnitude 7.8. This difference in magnitude equates to 125 times more energy being released in the 1964 quake and accounts for why the Anchorage earthquake was felt over an area of almost 500,000 square miles (1,295,000 square kilometers).

49. Which earthquake was more destructive in terms of loss of life and relative damage costs, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake or the 1964 Anchorage earthquake?

The 1906 San Francisco earthquake tops this category. It was responsible for 700 deaths versus 114 from the Anchorage earthquake. Property damage in San Francisco was also greater in relative terms due to the destructive fires that destroyed mostly wooden structures of the time.

50. Is Earth's core solid?

The inner portion of the core is thought to be solid. But the outer portion of the core appears molten. We've never been there though, so scientists aren't sure of the exact composition. A radical Hollywood-like idea was recently put forth to blow a crack in the planet and send a probe down there to learn more. An interesting bit of recent evidence shows Mars' core may be similarly squishy. Scientists figured this out by studying tides on Mars (tides on Mars?).

51. Does all of Earth spin at the same rate?

The solid inner core -- a mass of iron comparable to the size of the Moon -- spins faster than the outer portion of the iron core, which is liquid. A study in 1996 showed that over the previous century, the extra speed caused the inner core to gain a quarter-turn on the planet as a whole. So the inner core makes a complete revolution with respect to the rest of Earth in about 400 years. Immense pressure keeps it solid.

52. How many people have been killed by volcanoes during the last 500 years?

At least 300,000. Between 1980 and 1990, volcanic activity killed at least 26,000 people.

53. How much of the Earth’s surface consists of volcanic rock?

Scientists estimate that more than three-quarters of Earth’s surface is of volcanic origin-- that is, rocks either erupted by volcanoes or molten rock that cooled below ground and has subsequently been exposed at the surface. Most of Earth’s volcanic rocks are found on the sea floor.

54. Can an earthquake cause a tsunami?

If the earthquake originates under the ocean, yes. Near the earthquake’s epicenter, the sea floor rises and falls, pushing all the water above it up and down. This motion produces a wave that travels outward in all directions. A tsunami can be massive but remain relatively low in height in deep water. Upon nearing the shore, it is forced up and can reach the height of tall buildings. One in 1964 was triggered in Alaska and swamped the small northern California town of Crescent City, moving train cars several blocks and killing several people there. Asteroids can cause tsunami, too.

55. Are all tsunamis high waves when they strike a coastline?

Asteroid-generated tsunami

No, contrary to many artistic images of tsunamis, most do not result in giant breaking waves. Rather, most tsunamis come onshore more like very strong and fast tides. The water can rise higher than anyone along a given shore area has ever seen, however. [Model of an East Coast tsunami]

56. How much of the Earth’s land surface is desert?

About one-third.

57. What's the deepest place in the ocean?

The greatest known depth is 36,198 feet (6.9 miles or 11 kilometers) at the Mariana Trench, in the Pacific Ocean well south of Japan near the Mariana Islands.

58. What is the fastest surface wind ever recorded?

The fastest "regular" wind that's widely agreed upon was 231 mph (372 kph), recorded at Mount Washington, New Hampshire, on April 12, 1934. But during a May 1999 tornado in Oklahoma, researchers clocked the wind at 318 mph (513 kph). For comparison, Neptune's winds can rage to 900 mph (1,448 kph).

59. How much fresh water is stored in the Earth?

More than two million cubic miles of fresh water is stored in the planet, nearly half of it within a half-mile of the surface. Mars, too, appears to have a lot of water near its surface, but what's been detected so far is locked up as ice; nobody has estimated how much might be there.

60. How old is Earth?

Our planet is more than 4.5 billion years old, just a shade younger than the Sun. Recent evidence actually shows that Earth was formed much earlier than previously believed, just 10 million years after the birth of the Sun, a stellar event typically put at 4.6 billion years ago.

61. What is the world’s largest desert?

The Sahara Desert in northern Africa is more than 23 times the size of southern California’s Mojave Desert. [Several readers have e-mailed to suggest that arid Antarctica technically tops this category; true, some researchers put it there, but most lists of deserts don't include it.]

62. Which planet has more moons, Earth or Mars?

Mars has two satellites, Phobos and Deimos. The Earth has only one natural satellite, but it's the Moon. The outer planets have lots of Moon, most of them found fairly recently and leading to the possibility that scientists might one day need to redefine what it means to be a moon.

63. What is the world’s deepest lake? Lake Baikal in the south central part of Siberia is 5,712 feet (1.7 kilometers) deep. It's about 20 million years old and contains 20 percent of Earth's fresh liquid water.

64. What is the origin of the word "volcano"?

It derives from Vulcan, the Roman god of fire.

65. How many minerals are known to exist?

There are roughly 4,000 known minerals, although only about 200 are of major importance. Approximately 50-100 new minerals are described each year.

66. What is the total water supply of the world?

The total water supply of the world is 326 million cubic miles (1 cubic mile of water equals more than 1 trillion gallons).

67. What is the world’s largest island?

Greenland covers 840,000 square miles (2,176,000 square kilometers). Continents are typically defined as landmasses made of low-density rock that essentially floats on the molten material below. Greenland fits this description, but it's only about one-third the size of Australia. Some scientists call Greenland an island, others say it's a continent.

Moon making

68. Where are most of Earth’s volcanoes?

The most prominent topographic feature on Earth is the immense volcanic mountain chain that encircles the planet beneath the sea -- the chain is more than 30,000 miles (48,000 kilometers) long and rises an average of 18,000 feet (5.5 kilometers) above the seafloor. It is called the mid-ocean ridge and is where Earth's plates spread apart as new crust bubbles up -- volcanic activity. There are more volcanoes here than on land. The spreading, however, leads to scrunching when these plates slam into the continents. The result: More volcanoes and earthquakes in places like California and Japan.

69. What volcano killed the most people?

The eruption of Tambora volcano in Indonesia in 1815 is estimated to have killed 90,000 people. Most died from starvation after the eruption, though, because of widespread crop destruction, and from water contamination and disease.

70. Were Earth and the Moon separated at birth?

Not quite. But leading theory holds that our favorite satellite was carved partly from Earth shortly after the Earth formed. A Mars-sized object slammed into our fledgling planet. The impactor was destroyed. Stuff flew everywhere and a lot of it went into orbit around Earth. The Moon gathered itself together out of the largely vaporized remains of the collision, while Earth hung in there pretty much intact.

71. How many lightning strikes occur worldwide every second?

On average, about 100. Those are just the ones that hit the ground, though. During any given minute, there are more than a thousand thunderstorms around the Earth causing some 6,000 flashes of lightning. A lot of it goes from cloud-to-cloud.

72. Are rivers alive?

Not in the traditional sense, of course. But like all living creatures, rivers have a life span. They are born, grow in size, and they age. They can even die during the span of geological time.

73. Can asteroids create islands?

Speculation has existed for decades that ancient asteroid impacts might create hot spots of volcanic activity, which could give rise to mountains that poke up through seas that didn't used to be there. There's no firm answer to this question, but a recent computer model suggested Hawaii might have been formed in this manner.

74. Is the state of Louisiana growing or shrinking?

Louisiana loses about 30 square miles (78 square kilometers) of land each year to coastal erosion, hurricanes, other natural and human causes and a thing called subsidence, which means sinking. Much of New Orleans actually sits 11 feet (3.4 meters) below sea level. Parts of the French quarter have sunk 2 feet in the past six decades. The city is protected by dikes, but all experts agree that storm tides from a direct hit by a major hurricane would breach the system and swamp much of the city. In 2000, the director of the U.S. Geological Survey, Chip Groat, said: "With the projected rate of subsidence, wetland loss and sea-level rise, New Orleans will likely be on the verge of extinction by this time next century."

Breaking up

75. How much would seas rise if the Antarctic Ice Sheet melted?

The Antarctic Ice Sheet holds nearly 90 percent of the world's ice and 70 percent of its fresh water. If the entire ice sheet were to melt, sea level would rise by nearly 220 feet, or the height of a 20-story building. Scientists know there's a melting trend underway. The United Nations has said that in a worst-case scenario -- depending on how much global air temperatures increase -- seas could jump 3 feet (1 meter) by 2100.

77. Is ice a mineral?

Yes, ice is a mineral and is formally described as such in Dana's System of Mineralogy.

77. What is the softest of all minerals?

Talc is the softest of minerals. It is commonly used to make talcum powder.

78. What is the hardest of all minerals?

The one that becomes emotionally useless after a divorce but still retains monetary value.

79. How are colors produced in fireworks?

Mineral elements taken from Earth provide the colors. Strontium yields deep reds, copper produces blue, sodium yields yellow, and iron filings and charcoal pieces produce gold sparks. Bright flashes and loud bangs come from aluminum powder.

80. Does Earth have the worst weather in the solar system?

Right now, it's the worst that most humans I know ever experience. But there's lots of wilder weather elsewhere. Mars can whip up hurricane-like storms four times bigger than Texas. Dust storms on the red planet can obscure the entire globe! Jupiter has a hurricane twice the size our entire planet, and it's lasted for at least three centuries (another storm on Jupiter is even bigger). Venus is a living hell, and Pluto is routinely more frigid than the coldest place on Earth (though may change one day, and Pluto may in fact become the last oasis for life).

81. Where are the highest tides?

In Burntcoat Head, Minas Basin, part of the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, tides can range 38.4 feet (11.7 meters). The bay is funnel shaped -- its bottom slopes upward continuously from the ocean inlet. The result is an extreme "tidal bore," a wave-like phenomenon at the leading edge of the changing tide. Bores in Fundy can travel up feeder rivers at 8 mph (13 kph) and be more than 3 feet (1 meter) tall.

82. Where is the world's only equatorial glacier?

Mt. Cotopaxi in Ecuador supports the only glacier on the equator.

83. What is the largest lake in North America?

Lake Superior.

84. What's the deadliest hurricane to ever hit the United States?

A Category 4 hurricane hit Galveston, Texas in 1900 and killed more than 6,000 people (read about the history of it here). The next closest death toll was less than 1,900 from a 1928 Florida hurricane.

85. What is the longest mountain chain on Earth? The Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which splits nearly the entire Atlantic Ocean north to south. Iceland is one place where this submarine mountain chain rises above the sea surface.

Gold rings in surprising places!

86. How much gold has been discovered worldwide to date?

More than 193,000 metric tons (425 million pounds). If you stuck it all together, it would make a cube-shaped, seven-story structure that might resemble one of Donald Trump's buildings. First you'd have to find all those rings that have gone down the drain.

87. What are the two major gold-producing countries?

South Africa produces 5,300 metric tons per year, and the United States produces more than 3,200 metric tons.

88. What North American plant can live for thousands of years?

The creosote bush, which grows in the Mojave, Sonoran, and Chihuahuan deserts, has been shown by radiocarbon dating to have lived since the birth of Christ. Some of these plants may endure 10,000 years, scientists say. If only they could talk.

89. On average, how much water is used worldwide each day?

About 400 billion gallons.

90. Is Saturn the only ringed planet?

Saturn has the most obvious rings. But Jupiter and Neptune both have subtle ring systems, [as does Uranus, readers reminded me]. And even Earth may once have been a ringed planet, the result of some space rock's glancing blow.

91. What is the highest, driest, and coldest continent on Earth?

That would be Antarctica.

92. At what depth do most earthquakes occur?

Most are triggered less than 50 miles (80 kilometers) from the Earth’s surface. Shallower earthquakes have more damage potential, but a temblor's destruction also depends largely on rock and soil conditions as well as building methods.

93. Where are the oldest rocks on Earth found?

Since the ocean floor is being continually regenerated as the continental plates move across the Earth’s surface, the oldest rocks on the ocean floor are less than 300 million years. In contrast, the oldest continental rocks are 4.5 billion years old.

94. What percentage of the world’s fresh water is stored as glacial ice?

About 70 percent. And if you had to replace it all, you'd need 60 years of the entire globe's rainfall, and then you'd have to figure out a way to freeze it all.

95. What is the largest alpine lake in North America?

Lake Tahoe on the California-Nevada border has a 105,000-acre surface, holds 39 trillion gallons of water, and is almost 1,600 feet (488 meters) deep.

Fate?

96. Have there always been continents?

Not as we know them today. Many scientists figure Earth began as one huge continent -- dry as a bone. Water was delivered in comets, the thinking goes, and the oceans developed. Much more recently, all the world's landmasses were huddled into one supercontinent called Pangaea. It began to break up about 225 million years ago, eventually fragmenting into the continents as we know them today.

97. How much volcanic ash can fall in a day?

I can only give an example. During the 9-hour period of most vigorous activity on May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens dumped more than 540 million tons of ash over an area of more than 22,000 square miles (56,980 square kilometers). It was the most destructive volcanic eruption known to occur in the United States. Fifty-seven people were killed by the eruption including USGS scientist Dr. David Johnston, who was at a monitoring site 5 miles (8 kilometers) from the volcano. An estimated $1 billion damage was caused by the eruption, through mudflows and landslides as well as what fell from the sky.

98. What is feldspar?

A better question might be, "Who but a geologists could love feldspar?" It happens to be the most common mineral in Earth's crust. But I couldn't find anything about it that most of us really need to know.

99. What are the most extreme locations in the United States, compass-wise?

This one is a bit tricky, and as it turns out three or even four of the answers may catch you off guard. The westernmost point is the aptly named West Point of Amatignak Island, Alaska. The northernmost point is Point Barrow, Alaska. The southernmost point is the southern tip of the island of Hawaii. The easternmost point -- go ahead, take a guess! -- is Pochnoi Point at Semisopochnoi, Alaska. Huh? Look at a world map. The tip of the Aleutian Islands lies on the other side of the 180-degree longitude line --- the International Dateline -- putting Pochnoi Point barely but officially in the Eastern Hemisphere.

100. If you were to arrange Earth, the Moon and Mars like Matryoshka nesting dolls, how would they be ordered?

Mars would nest inside Earth, and the Moon would fit neatly inside Mars. Earth is about twice as big as Mars, which is about twice as big as the Moon.

101. Will Earth always be here?

Astronomers know that over the next few billion years, the Sun will swell so large as to envelop Earth. If we're still here, we'll probably fry and the planet will be vaporized. There's a chance, however, that the changing mass of the Sun will cause Earth to move into a more distant and pleasant orbit. One mathematical calculation shows it would be theoretically possible for humans to engineer such a move before it's too late.

Astronauts are taller upon return to EarthYou must have read this little astronomy tidbit on one of our Astronomy facts pages:An Astronaut can be up to 2 inches taller returning from space. The cartilage disks in the spine expand in the absence of gravity.

This is an effect of microgravity (when gravity is very little or none.) Gravity is what keeps us on the ground! Our spines, when not being compressed by gravity, are free to expand, thus making us taller. This is not only true for astronauts in space, but also us poor ordinary folks when we sleep! Why? Because the less pull there is by G forces, the happier our spine is to grow. So, it can be said that the more you sleep, the taller you may become!

All of us have experienced The G Force. Nope, it’s neither a new Playstation game, nor a summer Hollywood blockbuster starring Lindsey Lohan! It’s a great gravitational force present all around us. Notice how our stomach feels funny when we’re on a roller coaster or even a regular fun ride? That’s the G Force in action!What is the cartilage disk, you may wonder, and how amazing that it can make one taller, eh? A cartilage disk is like a protecting cushion between bones where the bones meet each other. The cartilage disk we’re talking about here is the one in our spine or what we generally know as our backbone. Our backbone is the one that is separated by spinal discs and holds the spinal cord in place.But here’s the catch: neither the Astronaut’s, nor a sleeping beauty’s spine continues to remain taller indefinitely. As soon as the astronaut returns to Earth, his or her height gradually returns to normal. The same is the case with us: When we wake up and stand upright or go about our daily business, our height comes down to earth, so to speak!

ONE BILLION:

How much is one billion? It's common knowledge that a billion has three more zeros than a million, and is one thousand times a million, but comprehending its enormous magnitude is often misunderstood. To appreciate the distance of one billion light years, the concept of one billion people, or the value of one billion dollars, let's try putting this number into perspective.

To count to one thousand, counting one number every second continuously, it would take 17 minutes. Counting to one million at the same rate, it would take 12 days (counting nonstop, day and night). But counting to one billion would take 32 years!

That's right; years.

Imagine counting $1 billion with $1,000 dollar bills (hypothetically). Using the above calculations, at the rate of $1,000 per second, you'd be counting your cash for 12 days!

Bill Gates was estimated to be worth approximately $40 billion in 1998. At the present age of 44, let's predict that he lives another 40 years. Assuming he retires tomorrow, and never earns a dime of interest, in order to deplete his funds at a constant rate over the next 40 years, he would have to spend $1 billion (or $1000 million) a year! That's $83 million a month, $19 million a week, or breaking it down further, he would have to spend over $114,000 an hour, day and night, for 40 years. Bill Gates, ladies and gentleman, is a rich man.

One final comparison: one million is one thousand thousand, and one billion is one thousand million. As illustrated below, there is an astonishing difference between an "m" and a "b" in front of "illion!" Using the same scale below (where one billion is 6 inches to the right of one million), one trillion would reside on the same line, 500 feet to the right of one billion!

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SOUND SPEED VS. LIGHT SPEED:

The speed of sound at sea level is 760 MPH. The speed of light is 186,282 miles/sec, or just over 670,000,000 MPH! This equates to light traveling over 880,000 times faster than sound. In comparison, traveling at the speed of sound is relatively insignificant when trying to achieve speeds approaching that of light.

(look for more on this topic soon!)

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OVERPOPULATION:

A fascinating, yet devastating problem.

(look for more on this topic soon!)

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THE SCOOP ON THE INTERNET:

The Internet is one of the most amazing mediums to ever be developed. It has become the largest and most easily accessible sharing of informational databases. In a nutshell, the Internet is merely a bulletin board that is accessible from anywhere in the world. More specifically, it is a large network of interconnected computers, and with only a few exceptions, almost all aspects of the Internet are available free to all users!

The Internet is combining information and communication, by funneling a wide scope of technologies into a single media. Gone are the days where it was necessary to leave your house to buy a book, research a topic, or mail a letter. Also gone are the days that you needed to turn your TV on for the weather or the news. Even magazines and newspapers are finding competition against their own Internet versions (offered by most major publishers).

Many people have said to me, "what� the big deal about the Internet; I have yet to find a use for it." The fact that you�e made it to this site suggests that you are a somewhat Internet savvy individual (and have good tastes, I might add). But if I may, I� like to offer a diverse list of several amazing things about the Internet,

including places to visit with links where appropriate:

1. Communicate with anyone in the world, for free!

2. Call anyone's telephone in the U.S. for free! (link)

3. Download practically any song recorded, in CD quality!

4. Almost everything is free!

5. Practically endless information (doubling in size every year)

6. Listen to the Chicago O�are Air Traffic Controllers LIVE!

7. Watch NASA-TV Live! (link)

8. Watch astronauts in space LIVE (when the shuttle is on a mission)

9. Track any domestic flight by looking at a moving map with the actual airplane� moving position! (link)

10. View up-to-the-minute weather, including live satellite imagery, Doppler radar, moving maps

11. Buy and Sell stocks in real time online

12. Reserve Airline Tickets

13. Download and listen to thousands of movie sound clips from various films! (link)

14. Buy Books and music online

15. many more ideas and links coming soon!

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INTERESTING FACTS:

• There are 86,400 seconds in a day.

• Using a scale of the earth being 1 day old, the human being has only existed for 36 seconds.

• If one was to weigh all of the land animals of the earth, 10% of that mass would be ants.

• Second to our sun, to reach the closest star to earth, Alpha Centauri, one would have to travel the speed of light for over 4 years.

• There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.

• "Stewardesses" is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.

• A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.

• It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.

• There are 336 dimples on a regulation golf ball.

• All 50 states are listed across the top of the Lincoln Memorial on the back of the $5 bill.

• No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver or purple.

• The longest one-syllable word in the English language is "screeched."

• "Dreamt is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt".

• Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.

• Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.

• The average person's left hand does 56% of the typing.

• A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.

• There are more chickens than people in the world.

• Almonds are a member of the peach family.

• A dragonfly has a life span of 24 hours.

• An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.

• Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.

• There are only four words in the English language that end in "dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.

• A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.

• The giant squid has the largest eyes in the world.

• The average person falls asleep in seven minutes.

• It is impossible to lick your elbow.

• Half of all Americans live within 50 miles of their birthplace.

• Everyday more money is printed for Monopoly than the U.S. Treasury.

• The cost of raising a medium-sized dog to the age of eleven: $6,400.

• The average number of people airborne over the U.S. any given hour: 61,000.

• "I am." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.

• Honey is the only food that doesn't spoil.

• If you were to spell out numbers starting from "one", the letter "a" would first appear as character 1000.

• At least 75% of people who read this will try to lick their elbow.

1. The speed of light is exactly 186,287.49 miles per second or 299,792,458 meters per second.2. It takes 8 minutes 17 seconds for light to travel from the Sun’s surface to the Earth.3. 10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.4. The Earth spins at 1,000 mph but it travels through space at an incredible 67,000 mph.5. Every year over one million earthquakes shake the Earth.6. When Krakatoa erupted in 1883, its force was so great it could be heard 3000 miles away in Australia.7. The largest hailstone measured weighed over two pounds and fell in Bangladesh in 1986.8. Every second around 100 lightning bolts strike the Earth.9. Every year lightning kills 1000 people.10. On February 20, 2010 an Iceberg the size of Rhode island broke free from the Antarctic ice shelf (see clickable image below).11. If you could drive your car straight up you would arrive in space in just over an hour.12. The air at the summit of Mount Everest, 29,029 feet is only a third as thick as the air at sea level.13. DNA was first discovered in 1869 by Swiss Friedrich Mieschler.14. The molecular structure of DNA was first determined by Watson and Crick in 1953.15. The first synthetic human chromosome was constructed by US scientists in 1997.16. The thermometer was invented in 1607 by Galileo.17. Englishman Roger Bacon invented the magnifying glass in 1250.18. Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1866.19. The tallest tree ever was an Australian eucalyptus – In 1872 it was measured at 435 feet tall.20. Christian Barnard performed the first heart transplant in 1967 – the patient lived for 18 days.21. The wingspan of a Boeing 747 is longer than the Wright brother’s first flight.22. An electric eel can produce a shock of up to 650 volts.23. ‘Wireless’ communications took a giant leap forward in 1962 with the launch of Telstar, the first satellite capable of relaying telephone and satellite TV signals.24. The earliest wine makers lived in Egypt around 2300 BC.25. The Ebola virus kills 4 out of every 5 humans it infects.26. Giraffes often sleep for only 20 minutes in any 24 hours. They may sleep up to 2 hours (in spurts – not all at once), but this is rare. They never lie down.27. A pig’s orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.

28. Without its lining of mucus your stomach would digest itself.29. Humans have 46 chromosomes, peas have 14 and crayfish have 200.30. There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.31. An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.32. The low frequency call of the humpback whale is the loudest noise made by a living creature.33. The call of the humpback whale is louder than Concorde and can be heard from 500 miles away.34. A quarter of the world’s plants are threatened with extinction by the end of 2010.35. Each person sheds 40 pounds of skin in his or her lifetime.36. At 15 inches the eyes of giant squids are the largest on the planet.

37. The largest galaxies contain a million, million stars.38. It is thought the Universe contains over 100 billion galaxies.39. Wounds infested with maggots heal quickly and without spread of gangrene or other infection.40. More germs are transferred shaking hands than kissing.41. The longest glacier in Antarctica, the Almbert glacier, is 250 miles long and 40 miles wide.42. The fastest speed a falling raindrop can hit you is 18mph.43. A healthy person has 6,000 million, million, million haemoglobin molecules.44. A salmon-rich, low cholesterol diet means that Inuits rarely suffer from heart disease.45. If the Sun were the size of a beach ball then Jupiter would be the size of a golf ball and the Earth would be as small as a pea.46. It would take over an hour for a heavy object to sink 6.7 miles down to the deepest part of the ocean.47. There are more living organisms on the skin of each human than there are humans on the surface of the earth.48. The grey whale migrates 12,500 miles from the Artic to Mexico and back every year.49. The Saturn V rocket which carried man to the Moon develops power equivalent to fifty 747 jumbo jets.50. Koalas sleep an average of 22 hours a day, two hours more than the sloth.51. Light would take .13 seconds to travel around the Earth.52. Males produce one thousand sperm cells each second – 86 million each day.53. Even travelling at the speed of light it would take 2 million years to reach the nearest large galaxy, Andromeda.54. The temperature in Antarctica plummets as low as -35 degrees celsius.55. At over 2000 kilometres long The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth.56. The driest inhabited place in the world is Aswan, Egypt where the annual average rainfall is .02 inches.57. The deepest part of any ocean in the world is the Mariana trench in the Pacific with a depth of 35,797 feet.

58. The largest meteorite craters in the world are in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada and in Vredefort, South Africa.59. The largest desert in the world, the Sahara, is 3,500,000 square miles.60. The largest dinosaur ever discovered was Seismosaurus who was over 100 feet long and weighed up to 80 tons.61. The African Elephant gestates for 22 months.62. The mortality rate if bitten by a Black Mamba snake is over 95%.63. In the 14th century the Black Death killed 75,000,000 people. It was carried by fleas on the black rat.64. A dog’s sense of smell is 1,000 times more sensitive than a humans.65. A typical hurricane produces the nergy equivalent to 8,000 one megaton bombs.66. To escape the Earth’s gravity a rocket need to travel at 7 miles a second.67. Microbial life can survive on the cooling rods of a nuclear reactor.68. Human tapeworms can grow up to 22.9m.69. Female black widow spiders eat their males after mating.70. When a flea jumps, the rate of acceleration is 20 times that of the space shuttle during launch.71. The Australian billygoat plum contains 100 times more vitamin C than an orange.72. Astronauts cannot belch – there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their stomachs.

73. There are over 1000 thunderstorms going on at any given time.74.

Ancient Greek Science and Philosophy"No fact is so simple that it is not harder to believe than to doubt at the first presentation." - Lucretius The Ancient Greeks were the first people to systematically examine the world to attempt to discover why it worked the way it appeared to. Their ideas were so influential that, for two millennia, Western science was influenced almost entirely by Greek ideas. The later Romans, Arabs, and medieval Europeans did little more than enlarge on Greek ideas. (source)The Greek philosopher Thales (624-546 B.C.) is considered to be the first philosopher, as he was the first man in history to ask questions such as "Of what is the Universe made?", and to answer without introducing gods and demons. In later centuries, when the Greeks made up lists of the "seven wise men", Thales invariably was placed first. [ Philosophy | Ancient Greek Science and Philosophy ] (source)The Lydians, who were allies of the Greek Spartans, and the Medes, who were dominated by Cyrus of Persia, had been locked in a five-year war in Asia Minor on May 28th, 586 B.C., when the two armies were again preparing for another battle. At this point a solar eclipse occurred, one that is believed to have been predicted by Thales, a Greek mathematician. When the Medes and Lydians observed the eclipse, they ceased fighting and signed a peace treaty. Incidentally, this is the earliest event in human history that we are able to assign an exact date to, due to the eclipse. [ Calendars | Ancient Greek Science and Philosophy ] (source) The first person we know who realized the Earth couldn't be flat was the Greek philosopher Anaximander. Around 560 B.C., he suggested that the Earth had a cylindrical shape. By 350 B.C., the concept of a spherical Earth was so satisfying and free of paradox that it was generally accepted by scholars even in the absence of direct proof. Eighteen more centuries were to pass before that direct proof occurred - the lone surviving ship in an expedition once commanded by Ferdinand Magellan sailed completely around the globe. (source)The true size of the Earth was known seventeen and a half centuries before it was first circumnavigated. In 230 B.C., the Greek philosopher Eratosthenes worked out its circumference of

25,000 miles by studying shadows cast by the sun in both Alexandria and Syene on the day of the summer solstice. (source)In the sixth century B.C., a half-mile tunnel was dug on the Aegean island of Samos under the supervision of the Greek architect Eupalinus. Though the tunnel was started at both ends and worked toward the middle, the two halves met only a couple of feet off centre - a stunning achievement for those days. (source)When Greek mathematicians first proved the the square root of two is an irrational number, they celebrated by sacrificing 100 oxen. (source)In 435 B.C., the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras suggested that the sun was not just a small glowing circle of light. He maintained that it was a glowing rock larger than the Peloponnesus. For maintaining such beliefs (and, to be fair, for political reasons too), he was exiled from Athens. [ Ancient Greek Science and Philosophy | Solar System ] (source)Euclid is the most successful textbook writer of all time. His Elements, written around 300 B.C., has gone through more than 1,000 editions since the invention of printing. [ Ancient Greek Science and Philosophy | Mathematics and Mathematicians | Literature ] (source)The greatest contribution of the Phoenicians, a group of seafaring Canaanites who lived on the eastern Mediterranean seacoast, was an alphabet that was later adapted by the Greeks. [ Ancient People | Ancient Greek Science and Philosophy ] The Greek scientist Aristarchus believed that the motions of the heavenly bodies could easily be understood if it were assumed that all of the planets, including Earth, revolved around the sun and that the stars must be infinitely far away because they seemed motionless. Copernicus knew of Aristarchus' views and mentioned them in a passage in De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium that he later eliminated, as though not wishing to compromise his own originality. [ Ancient Greek Science and Philosophy | Solar System | Geniuses ] Aristotle observed that dolphins gave birth to live young who were attached to their mothers by umbilical cords and so, in the book Generation of Animals, written around 340 B.C., he classified dolphins as mammals. It was not until the nineteenth century that this statement was confirmed by modern science. [ Animals | Ancient Greek Science and Philosophy ] (source)The first Greek astronomer to suggest the sun was the centre of the solar system was Aristarchus of Samos, around 290 B.C. No one took him seriously, and his writings no longer exist. We know of him today only because Archimedes (whose writings do exist) referred to Aristarchus as holding this apparently nonsensical notion. [ Firsts | Ancient Greek Science and Philosophy | Solar System ] (source)Socrates was said to always have worn an old, worn-out coat, always to have gone shoeless, and to have been ugly. [ Ancient Greek Science and Philosophy | Philosophy and Religion ] (source)The nature of sound was one area of physics in which the ancient Greeks made significant progress in understanding. Around 400 B.C., Archytas of Tarentum stated that sound was produced by bodies striking together, with swift motion producing high pitch and slow motion low pitch. Later, Aristotle included air as a body that produces sound when struck, stating that sound was propagated by one part of the air striking the next until it reached the ear, and also correctly noted that, without a medium such as air or water, man could not hear sound. (source) The Greek physician Hippocrates (ca. 460–ca. 377 B.C.) taught, among other things, that south winds cause deafness, dimness of vision, heaviness of the head, and torpor. (source)Socrates, one of the greatest philosophers of Ancient Greece, was forced to commit suicide by drinking hemlock after he was found guilty of "corrupting the youth of Athens". [ Ancient Greek Science and Philosophy | Philosophy and Religion ] (source)The ancient Greeks ground lenses out of quartz crystals and used them for kindling fires. (source)Aristotle believed that a body falls at a speed in proportion to its weight (so that a ten-pound weight would fall ten times faster than a one-pound weight), and that the speed of a falling body is

inversely proportional to the resistance of what it falls through (so that a body falling in a vacuum would fall at an infinite rate). (source)The first Greek to observe ocean tides, in the Atlantic in the early third century B.C., was the navigator and astronomer Pytheas, who also produced the correct explanation for them. He was 2,000 years ahead of his time, for it took that long for tides to be attributed (by Newton) properly to the influence of the moon. Until Newton's time, most scholars refused to believe that the moon could have any effect on the ocean, especially because one tide each day took place when the moon was not even visible in the sky. (source)The best-known story about Archimedes is that when he discovered the principle of buoyancy in the bathtub, he ran naked through the streets of Syracuse, shouting "Eureka! Eureka!" ("I have found it! I have found it!"). That was not a very astonishing thing for him to have done. The Greeks habitually exercised in the nude, and the sight of a naked male figure meant little to them. (source)The Greek engineer Hero invented a primitive steam engine in the first century A.D. The principle behind it is still used today in the rotating lawn sprinkler. (source)Electrical shocks given by torpedo fish were used for medicinal purposes by the ancient Greeks and Romans. From the fifth century B.C. the Greeks applied torpedo fish on the thorax of sick people in order to stimulate their vital reflexes, and the Romand doctor Scribonius Largus mentioned the efficacy of the fish's shocks in treating chronic diseases. [ Ancient Greek Science and Philosophy | Medicine and Health ] (source)In the year 391, the largest repository of knowledge in the ancient world, the Library of Alexandria, was burned by a crowd of fanatic monks under the leadership of the Christian Archbishop Theophilus. Hypatia (who lived from around 370 to 415 A.D.) was a soaring figure of beauty, eloquence, and learning, and the last recorded member of the great Library of Alexandria and the only noted woman scholar of antiquity. She taught Neoplatonism (hence, she was a pagan) and helped to demonstrate Euclid's ideas. Although Christian bishops were among her pupils, she was the subject of violent antagonism on the part of zealots. She was murdered in 415 by rioting fanatic monks, under the leadership of bishop Cyril, who brutally sliced her body to pieces with oyster shells gathered from the Alexandrian harbour. [ Geniuses | Ancient Greek Science and Philosophy | Lasts ] (source)Twenty-three centuries passed between the Greek philosopher Xenophanes' surmise that mountains on which seashells were found must originally have been covered by the sea and the Scottish geologist James Hutton's scientific deduction that made sober sense of what had seemed lunacy. (source)The first person to propose that everything is made of atoms was the Greek philosopher Democritus, around 440 B.C. He reasoned that, if he were to attempt to cut an object in half over and over again, he would eventually reach a tiny grain of matter that could not be cut in half. Democritus called these hypothetical building blocks of matter "atoms", after the Greek atomos, "uncuttable". (source)The ancient Greeks constructed pyramids of porous rocks in desert climates, which were used as water catchers. They could capture and condense surprisingly large quantities of water. A group of 13 pyramids at Theodosia in the Crimea that were built around 500 B.C. averaged almost 40 feet high and were placed on hills around the city. As the wind moved through the stones, the changing temperatures throughout the day caused moisture to condense, run down, and feed a network of pipes. (source)Claudius Ptolemy, a second-century astronomer working in Alexandria, Egypt, wrote thirteen volumes on his observations that were so influential that they came to be known as the Almagest, Arabic for "the greatest". Ptolemy's theories, which held that the Earth stood still in the heavens while the moon, sun, and planets moved around it and that the stars sat in a concave dome that arched over the universe, were completely wrong; however, the influence of these theories held

back the science of astronomy for nearly 1,500 years. (source)Aristotle believed that swallows passed the winter buried in heaps at the bottom of rivers. Archytas, of Tarentum, is reported, so long ago as 400 B.C., to have made a pigeon that could fly.

Let’s Dig Some Gold FactsA sciensational chemistry fact on Gold, undoubtedly the most sought after precious metal throughout our history:An ounce of gold can be stretched into a wire 80 kms (50 miles) long.

Gold is not only precious, but pure gold is also very, very soft. So soft, in fact, that a single gram can be beaten into a sheet of one square meter! If you ever get some pure gold to play with (you wish, eh?), remember the following sciensational fact:Absolutely pure gold is so soft that it can be moulded with the hands.

So why does it feel hard as a rock? Well, that is because the Gold we’re used to seeing as jewellery and gold bars and coins and what not, is usually not pure at all! Yup, to make gold stay in a particular shape, jewellers mix Gold with other hard metals. Metal mixtures of this kind are also called alloys.You know that Gold is always referred with carats, don’t you: 18 carats, 24 carats, etc. The term carat (also called karat) is a hint for us to know exactly how much pure Gold was used in that hard shiny Gold bar we’re ogling over. Twenty-four carats is fine pure Gold. Now if a Gold coin says 18 carats, it means that it was made with 18 parts of pure Gold, and remaining six parts of another metal to make it more solid and durable. The other metal that they use is usually a mixture (alloy, remember) of platinum or silver – which is another precious metal, so don’t think your jeweller is fibbing ya!Another fascinating thing about Gold is the fact that this shiny metal and Copper are the only two non-white metals! So let’s give Copper a shiny tip of our hat, too.Speaking of the golden shine, did you know that the chemical symbol for Gold in the periodic table of elements – Au – is derived from the Latin word ‘aurum‘? And what is aurum? It means ‘glowing dawn’. It is often suggested that the word aurum has a connection with the Roman goddess of the dawn, Aurora.One wonders how much Gold is there in the Earth really, don’t you think?First, Gold comes from our Earth’s crust (a post about the Crust later, we promise.) And there’s plenty of it for everyone to have big sackfuls of it! Consider this sciensational fact:There’s enough gold in the Earth’s crust to cover the entire land surface knee-deep.

How about that. So, let’s not lose our sleep over it any more than it deserves!

Here’s a brief look at what lightning can do when it strikes certain things…

16. When lightning strikes a tree: Lightning can definitely do some damage to trees. The University of Minnesota has provided a guide about lightning strikes on trees. Along with a few pieces of useful information, the guide is quoted as saying, “A lightning strike can be a traumatic experience for both the tree and its caretaker.” I guess if it’s your favorite tree.

• When lightning strikes a car: When a bolt of lightning strikes an automobile, the outer surface and frame of the car will carry the electricity. It often discharges through one of the tires leaving the inside occupants unharmed. The image of the car lightning strike is from a man-made lightning bolt. You can see the electricity leaving the car through the front tire.

• When lightning strikes a boat: During any year, boat owners are at a 1.2 in 1,000 risk of their boat being hit by lightning. A steel boat often receives no damage or very minimal damage from lightning strikes. In other cases, boats made of wood or fiberglass can be damaged with cracks, electronic failure and even reports of boats sinking. 33% of all lightning strikes on boats come from Florida.

• When lightning strikes an airplane: You may not know it but lightning strikes on airplanes are quite frequent. It is estimated that lightning strikes each airplane in the U.S. commercial fleet at least once per year. The last plane crash due to a lightning strike happened in 1967 when it caused the fuel tank to explode. The below video shows a jumbo jet taking off during a thunderstorm.

When lightning strikes a person who lives: The back of a man who was struck by lightning. There’s a reddish feathery pattern from the striking point to the exit point of the bolt. Only about 20% of people die instantly from lightning strikes.

• When lightning strikes animals: Read Death by lightning for giraffes, elephants, sheep and cows by Darren Naish for a fascinating look at animal deaths due to lightning

Other interesting facts about lightning strikes include:• Pollution causes an increase in lightning strikes. Lightning strikes increase by as much as

25% during the working week.• A bolt of lightning can heat air around it to 50,000 degrees F.

• A lightning bolt can contain 100,000,000 volts of electricity and be more than 5 miles long.

• There’s an average of 25,000,000 lightning strikes every year.

• On average, 67 people die from lightning strikes in the U.S. every year. This is more deaths than caused by tornadoes and hurricanes.

• A lightning bolt can travel at 60,000 miles per second.

• 80% of all people struck by lightning survive. Although, they often have long-term injuries.

Over the Moon factsThe moon is our nearest universal neighbour. Some say the Moon does not deserve to be called just a satellite of the Earth at all, and should be paid more respect as a minor or sub-planet because it is the fifth largest moon in our entire solar system.

So, how big is the moon? It’s about 1/50th the volume of the Earth and has a diameter of 3,474 km (see a previous post to get more ideas about diameters and stuff!). So in terms of overall size, this is what our astronomy science facts says:The moon is 27% the size of the Earth.

Let’s look at the moon. The surface of the moon looks dark and bright, doesn’t it. The darker areas on the moon are called Maria. Nope, they’re not named after Maria Sharapova but it is the plural for mare, meaning sea – though there are no seas there at all. The brighter moon areas, however, are rather unimaginatively known as Lunar Highlands. The moon has no water or any wetlands, of course. In fact, another sciensational astronomy fact tells us that:The moon is one million times drier than the Gobi Desert.

Since the Moon is a huge body in space, and also because it is so close to our planet, it can have direct affect on the Earth, simply because it’s there! For example, take this fact:There is a high and low tide because of our moon and the Sun.

That is because the Moon has great gravitational pull and it tries to pull the water out of our oceans whenever it is right above it! Though it only succeeds in creating great waves, that’s it. One of the reasons why Moon has such direct affects on the Earth is also because it is quite big for being a moon to a planet. In fact, so big that it makes another crazy science fact for us:The Earth-Moon size ratio is the largest in our solar system, excepting Pluto-Charon.

We’ve got a great planet! And a great moon to match!

Picking your brain factsWhere would we be without our brains, eh? Let’s take a quick look at this wonderful organ.Thanks to Sciensational reader Sidd posting on our biology facts page, we know thatThe number of neuron cells in our brain is more than the total number of stars in our galaxy.

That number is about 100 billion! What are neurons? Neurons are electrically charged little cells in our brain to make use of all the information we get from our senses, like eyes, ears, touch, etc. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to make sense of anything at all!The brain is divided into several parts for study, but for now, let’s take the three major parts of the brain: The Cerebrum, the Cerebellum, and the Brain Stem.

The Cerebrum, also called the forebrain, is responsible for our language, memory, movement and all. As you’re reading this and trying to understand it, you’re using your Cerebrum.Next, we have the Cerebellum which controls how we understand or ‘perceive’ things through our senses. It is also responsible for our motor controls, which means using our bones and muscles. You are enjoying reading this post while sitting comfortably, with your balance intact, right? That’s thanks to the Cerebellum! To understand the importance of Cerebellum, consider the fact that this brain part’s Latin name actually means “little brain.”Then we have the lower part of the brain, The Brain Stem. This is where our brain connects to our spinal cord. What does it do? Well, there are many parts of our body that need to work without us being too worried about controlling them deliberately, like the heart pumping and our stomach digesting our food, etc. That’s part of what the Brain Stem is good for! It really keeps our body under control!Our brain uses quite a lot of energy that we have in our body. In fact, Sciensational reader Anchal Srivastava from Gorakhpur, India sent us this brainy biology facts bit:The normal energy used by our brain is 0.1 calories per minute, and could go up to 1.5 during activities such as puzzle-solving.

Since our brain is one of the most important organs, it has a king’s share of our body’s resources. Consider the following brain fact:While only 2% in weight, the human brain requires 15% of the body’s heart work, 20% of oxygen and 25% of all glucose.

How big is it? An average adult human brain weighs around 1300 grams or about 3 pounds. The appearance of the brain is pinkish, but if you looked at it closely, it would seem to contain both white and grey matter. The almost-white matter of the brain is the one that covers nerve fibres and is called myelin. The nerve cells that remain uncovered make for the appearance of the famous ‘grey matter.’So let’s work our brains, nerves and grey matter for good!

Relax, there’s no pressure now!Science trivia hunters loved this sciensational physics fact:At the ocean’s deepest point, due to immense pressure, an iron ball would take more than an hour to sink to the ocean floor.

This is because of pressure (hydrostatic pressure in this case.) Let’s see, or rather, feel what it is.

Look around. Feel anything? No? You’re wrong! There is pressure! It’s all about pressure. Pressure is all around us, even right now as you read this post. Our bodies, on a normal sea level ground, constantly fight a pressure of about 1 kilogram per square inch! But we don’t even feel it, do we?If you’ve ever been on an airplane, you must have noticed how your ears pop when the plane reaches a certain altitude. That’s pressure playing tricks on us, as the airplane makes it comfortable for us by adjusting its cabin pressure, because the pressure outside would simply suck us right out of the plane!And it’s all the same with a heavy iron ball deep near the ocean floor, where the ball has to fight water pressure. You see, water is heavy – much heavier than air, so naturally it exerts more pressure. The deeper we go into the sea, the more water above us, meaning more weight above us – more pressure! We can feel a little sample of this pressure when we’re right at the bottom of a swimming pool and feel our ear drums being pinched — kind of ears popping on an airplane above.

Say we’re at the deepest point of the ocean, which we know is the Mariana Trench, thanks to Sciensational reader Apurv from Gaya, India who submitted this fact.The deepest location on Earth is Mariana Trench, about 11km deep in the North Pacific ocean.

Now the pressure at the Mariana Trench is an amazing 8 tons per square inch! Compare that to a measly 1 kg right now to most of us on sea level, ha!What this means is that a heavy iron ball to us now feels heavy because of such little pressure around us. But, when it meets its true pressure match under ocean, at mighty 8 tons, it would be like a breadcrumb floating inside your goldfish’s bowl!Speaking of Mariana Trench, Sciensational reader Nikhil gave us an idea of just how deep that is:If Mount Everest were placed at the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean, its peak would still be a mile underwater.

Now that’s deep!

Some Diamond Facts are Forever!Diamonds are really the most fascinating gemstones in the world. They have adorned the crowns of kings and queens throughout our history. A diamond is considered the most precious of all gemstones, and is surely justified in this role.

As often claimed by people selling them, Diamonds are indeed truly timeless, because they were created by immense temperature and pressure billions of years ago, deep inside the earth and can indeed last and last. As a matter of fact, diamonds have been carbon dated to be at least 3.4 billion years old. Now that’s old enough to be called ‘ageless’, eh?Let’s shine some light on a few diamond facts and take this first sciensational physics fact about diamonds:Diamonds are the hardest known substance.

A diamond’s hardness has been known to be recognized since antiquity, and that’s probably why the name diamond itself comes from the ancient Greek word adamas, which means ‘invincible.’However, the fact about the hardness of diamonds is true only for all naturally occurring materials, because a structurally different form of carbon (an allotrope) called Aggregated Diamond Nanorods, is even harder than Diamond. But that should not take a single carat of credit away from the diamond at all, because it is still all pure, natural carbon. So naturally carbon, in fact, that we have another sciensational fact dedicated to it:Most gemstones contain several elements, except diamond which is all carbon.

Yup, that’s the popular crystalline gemstone shape and form of carbon we know as the great diamond.There are, however, other less perfect forms of diamonds, too. These lesser diamonds are used mainly for industrial purposes. One is called Bort, which is not a Star Trek alien but a dark crystal and is used mostly in drilling-bits for crushing other material. Another imperfect diamond is a mass of many tiny diamonds called Ballas. Then there is Carbonado, and no, it is not a fizzy energy soda drink. Carbonado is sometimes referred to as ‘black diamond’ because it can be dark opaque or grayish in colour.And you thought diamonds only looked good in glass cases!

Some Prime Quality Facts!Time for some prime facts roundup, or prime numbers round up to be arithmetically exact. Take the following sciensational mathematics fact:The largest prime number is 9,808,358 digits long; more than the number of atoms in the universe.

The basics first. What is a prime number? It’s when a number can be divided only by itself, with no remainder, and by the number 1. You know, 1, 3, 5, 7, 11… The list literally goes on.

What makes discovering a new, long prime so sciensational? Well, you have to prove that a new big Prime Suspect number is indeed a prime, by doing the simple formula of “divided only by itself and 1″ which means showing the world that when divided by all the previous primes, you didn’t get a whole number as a remainder. That’s quite a task to prove a prime number, but thanks to computers and all, we are discovering new, long primes frequently. The largest prime above was confirmed to be a new big prime as late as September, 2006.The fact above has another fascinating fact in itself: the number of atoms in the universe. Though it is a discussion for a different post altogether, let’s just know that the number of atoms in the universe can be written in just 80 digits. That makes our biggest prime find even greater.Another sciensational maths fact says:2 and 5 are the only primes that end in 2 or 5.

That is true for all decimal numbers for all known primes!

Warm and Sunny FactsThe Sun is our nearest star in the universe. Nearest, however is a very relative term because the Sun is a whopping 93 million miles away from us. In fact Sciensational reader Demandude from Missouri, United States had this Astronomy fact for us:The sun is about 149 million kms (93 million miles) from earth, yet it’s 270,000 times closer than the next nearest star, which is 4.3 light years away.

That nearest star, the star that is closest to us after the Sun, is a faint star known as Proxima Centauri. This star, in fact, to our naked eye, is part of a group of stars called the Alpha Centauri, which appear to us a single star (a more detailed post on this later.)Let’s see how big our Sun is then, shall we. Another sciensational astronomy fact tells usThe Sun contains over 99.8 percent of the total material (mass) in our solar system, while Jupiter contains most of the rest.

Now that’s cool (or hot?), but how do we know what this means in relation to our Earth? Well, another astronomy fact comes to our rescue and helps us put things in perspective:About 1000 Earths would fit inside Jupiter – and the Sun could hold about 1000 Jupiters.

How’s that for an idea of the cosmic magnitude, eh? To put it even more precisely, take another astronomy facts tidbit:The Sun is 330,330 times larger than Earth.

That in essence means that one hundred Earths would have to be placed side by side to equal the width of the Sun! In terms of volume, the Sun could comfortably hold about one million Earths inside its sphere!

That takes care of the size. How about the Sun’s age? It’s computed after various considerations to be about 4.57 billion years. This means it is much, much older and existed much, much before us modern humans have existed for only about 200,000 years or so.Here’s another juicy fact: Just as planets travel around it, the Sun also travels around the Milky Way galaxy, with its entire family of planets! In fact, another astronomy fact reveals to us thatThe Sun travels at a speed of 250km (155 miles) per second, but it still takes 230 million years for it to complete a single revolution of the galaxy.

And just as our Earth has its year when it finishes a revolution around the Sun, the Sun also has a year: a Cosmic Year. What is it? Thanks again to our astronomy facts, we know thatA cosmic year is the amount of time it takes the Sun to revolve around the center of the Milky Way, about 230 million years.

Apart from giving us its heat, the Sun also dumps huge amounts of material as it burns. Yup, consider the following fact:Every second, the Sun pumps more than a million tons of material into the space through the solar wind (electrically charged particles.)

Although we are nowhere near the beginning of discussing our fascinating star, and will definitely continue to discuss more things Sunny, let us conclude this post by a humbling fact that despite its great magnitude to us Earth dwellers, the Sun is considered nothing but a dwarf star: just an average low luminosity star amongst the community of stars!

We all have some bones to pickWe are all made of flesh and bones. Our bodies are held together by the skeleton, which is a piece of wonder in itself. Let’s talk about them fascinating bones, shall we. There are quite a few biology facts on human body at sciensational.

Let’s begin with this one:The smallest bone in the human body is the stapes or stirrup bone located in the middle ear. It is approximately .11 inches (.28 cm) long.

We may owe all our hearing to this wonderful little bone shaped like a stirrup, because it transmits sound vibrations through our hearing system!There are about 206 bones in a grown-up’s body. But more than half of them are located just in our hands and feet! In fact, one quarter of our bones are in the feet alone. It’s hardly surprising, isn’t it, since most of our lives are spent using these body parts more often than any other.Another remarkable thing is that when we’re born, we have somewhere around 300 to 350 bones to begin our little lives with. So where do the rest go as we grow up? Well, they don’t go anywhere, except that sometime around the age between 12 and 14, some of our smaller bones, kind of, get together and blend into larger, big and stronger bones!Speaking of stronger bones, here’s another sciensational biology fact:Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.

Yup, that’s the thigh bone, or the Femur bone as it is called – the biggest and strongest bone in our body. It is easily capable of lifting or supporting 30 times its own volume and weight! Now that’s got to be stronger than concrete, eh?Apart from having more bones as infants, another interesting baby fact is that the little small ones

don’t have kneecaps! Well, actually they do but their kneecaps have not yet turned into hard bones, and are still soft cartilage (remember a previous post about that?). These softie kneecaps gradually harden into bones (the process is called ossification.)So, as we fill our brains with these bone facts, let’s remember that our brain is so generously protected by our skull, which itself is made of no less than 30 bones! So much for calling someone a bone-head!

We’re not going to finish this PiConsider the following mathematics fact on Sciensational about the value of Pi:The digits to the right of the Pi’s (3.141…) decimal point can keep going forever, and there is no pattern to these digits at all.

Pi, represented by π , the 16th letter of Greek alphabets, has been considered the most mysterious and fascinating number in mathematics for thousands of years!

But what on earth is it? It is a number of course, and a constant value. In the simplest terms, a circle’s circumference divided by diameter always gives you the same number. That number, or ratio, is the value of Pi, ie 3.14159.Yeah, but what does it do? You ask. What has Pi done to deserve this high and mighty position? So let’s roughly get right through it (literally!).Take a circle, say a tree trunk. Now put your arms around it. The area that your arms are covering is called the circumference. Now drill a hole right through the tree trunk. Well, of course it’s not a very decent thing to do to a tree, but let’s suppose that for now! The distance from one point of the hole to the next point is called the diameter. Now suppose the tree was too big for you to put your arms around, but someone nasty had already drilled a hole. What you have now is only one measurement, that is the diameter, and you must find the circumference. SO, thanks to the delicious Pi, we can find out what the circumference is! Here’s the simple formula:Circumference = Pi x DiameterSo if the length of the drilled hole was 5 meters (you checked by running your pet mouse with a string tied to its tail, for example), 5 multiplied by 3.14159 is…? You guessed it, a humongous tree only the giant King Kong could cover with his arms!Who discovered this value of Pi? Well, to be sure, it’s been known to us for thousands of years, at least 4000 years. The ancient Babylonians were using it, so it could date much before that.But that’s not the point. You see, the exact value of Pi is not known! That’s a pretty strange thing for a number that is a constant, right? So the bigger the circle, the bigger the value without any pattern emerging after the 3.xxx value. That means it never ends! A number that doesn’t end is called irrational.Here’s another whopper: Pi is supposedly a ratio between two values, right? But since its value never ends, it is an irrational number. Irrational numbers cannot be fractions! That’s why sciensational visitor Tiff from Witherbee, USA sent this sciensational math fact:Pi (3.14159…) is a number that cannot be written as a fraction.

To wrap it up, we paid our homage to the Great Pi by giving our sciensational math facts pages’ symbol designed after it. Hail to the Pi!

10 Weird Science Facts

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* The blood vessels, which form a vital part of the circulatory system in human beings, are responsible for enabling the transport of blood throughout the body. If blood vessels were made to lay end to end, all of them together would encircle the Earth twice, by stretching up to a distance of about 100,000 kilometers. * The human brain, which is the core of the central nervous system and a miraculous creation of nature, can process as many as 70, 000 thoughts in a day! * Seahorses reproduce in a weird way. It is the male seahorses that get pregnant and give birth to the offsprings. A male seahorse can give birth to as less as one to as many as two thousand fry at one time. One pregnancy lasts for about two to four weeks. When the fry are ready to be born, the male seahorse undergoes muscular contractions to expel the offspring from its pouch. * Polar bears can run about 25 miles an hour and jump to about 6 feet in air. Polar bear fur consists of a layer of thick under-fur covered by an outer layer of guard hairs. The guard hairs appear in shades of white to tan but are actually transparent. The transparent fur makes the polar bears almost invisible under infrared photography! * Venus, the second-closest planet to the Sun has continued to arouse the interest of many scientists for years after its discovery. It is the brightest natural object in the night sky, except for the Moon. Interestingly, it orbits the Sun in a clockwise direction, whereas the rest of the planets revolve in an anticlockwise manner. A strange aspect of the orbital of Venus is that it reaches the point closest to Earth after every 584 days. * Science has revealed that a tropical cyclone releases heat energy at the rate of 50 to 200 exajoules per day. This rate of the release of energy comes to about 200 times the world's capacity of generating electrical energy. This rate of energy release is equivalent to that released during an explosion of a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes! * Foetus in foetu is a rare abnormality that refers to the phenomenon of a fetus getting trapped inside a twin's body. The fetus continues to grow like a parasite inside a person's body, leeching the person's blood supply. It gradually grows so large that it begins harming the host's body, after which it has to be surgically removed. * On an average, a person accidentally eats about 430 bugs in each year of his/her life. This one is definitely weird. Isn't it?

• Bamboo trees fall under the group of woody perennial evergreen plants. Interestingly, giant bamboo species form the largest members of the grass family. Bamboo is the fastest growing woody plant in the world. Some species of bamboo achieve a growth rate of an astonishing 3-4 feet per day!

• I am sure, coffee is a daily drink of the most of you all. But did you know that a single cup of coffee contains over 1000 chemical substances. Weird this is!

50 interesting facts

1 The speed of light is generally rounded down to 186,000 miles per second. In exact terms it is� 299,792,458 m/s (equal to 186,287.49 miles per second).

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2 It takes 8 minutes 17 seconds for light to travel from the Sun s surface to the Earth.� �

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3 10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.�

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4 The Earth spins at 1,000 mph but it travels through space at an incredible 67,000 mph.�

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5 Every year, over one million earthquakes shake the Earth.�

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6 When Krakatoa erupted in 1883, its force was so great it could be heard 4,800 kilometers away� in Australia.

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7 Every second around 100 lightning bolts strike the Earth.�

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8 Every year lightning kills 1000 people.�

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9 In October 1999 an Iceberg the size of London broke free from the Antarctic ice shelf .�

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10 If you could drive your car straight up you would arrive in space in just over an hour.�

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11 Human tapeworms can grow up to 22.9m.�

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12 The Earth is 4.56 billion years old the same age as the Moon and the Sun.� �

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13 The dinosaurs became extinct before the Rockies or the Alps were formed.�

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14 Female black widow spiders eat their males after mating.�

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15 When a flea jumps, the rate of acceleration is 20 times that of the space shuttle during launch.�

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16 If our Sun were just inch in diameter, the nearest star would be 445 miles away.�

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17 Astronauts cannot belch there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their stomachs.� �

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18 The air at the summit of Mount Everest, 29,029 feet is only a third as thick as the air at sea� level.

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19 One million, million, million, million, millionth of a second after the Big Bang the Universe� was the size of a pea.�

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20 DNA was first discovered in 1869 by Swiss Friedrich Mieschler.�

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21 The molecular structure of DNA was first determined by Watson and Crick in 1953.�

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22 The first synthetic human chromosome was constructed by US scientists in 1997.�

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23 The thermometer was invented in 1607 by Galileo.�

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24 Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1866.�

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25 Wilhelm Rontgen won the first Nobel Prize for physics for discovering X-rays in 1895.�

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26 The tallest tree ever was an Australian eucalyptus In 1872 it was measured at 435 feet tall.� �

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27 Christian Barnard performed the first heart transplant in 1967 the patient lived for 18 days.� �

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28 An electric eel can produce a shock of up to 650 volts.�

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29 Wireless communications took a giant leap forward in 1962 with the launch of Telstar, the� � � first satellite capable of relaying telephone and satellite TV signals.

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30 The Ebola virus kills 4 out of every 5 humans it infects.�

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31 In 5 billion years the Sun will run out of fuel and turn into a Red Giant.�

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32 Giraffes often sleep for only 20 minutes in any 24 hours. They may sleep up to 2 hours (in� spurts not all at once), but this is rare. They never lie down.�

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33 There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.�

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34 An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.�

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35 On the day that Alexander Graham Bell was buried the entire US telephone system was shut� down for 1 minute in tribute.

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36 The low frequency call of the humpback whale is the loudest noise made by a living creature.�

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37 A quarter of the world s plants are threatened with extinction by the year 2010.� �

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38 Each person sheds 40lbs of skin in his or her lifetime.�

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39 At 15 inches the eyes of giant squids are the largest on the planet.�

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40 The Universe contains over 100 billion galaxies.�

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41 Wounds infested with maggots heal quickly and without spread of gangrene or other infection.�

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42 More germs are transferred shaking hands than kissing.�

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43 The fastest speed a falling raindrop can hit you is 18mph.�

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44 It would take over an hour for a heavy object to sink 6.7 miles down to the deepest part of the� ocean.

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45 Around a million, billion neutrinos from the Sun will pass through your body while you read� this sentence.

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46 The deepest part of any ocean in the world is the Mariana trench in the Pacific with a depth of� 35,797 feet.

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47 Every hour the Universe expands by a billion miles in all directions.�

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48 Somewhere in the flicker of a badly tuned TV set is the background radiation from the Big� Bang.

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49 Even traveling at the speed of light it would take 2 million years to reach the nearest large� galaxy, Andromeda.

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50 A thimbleful of a neutron star would weigh over 100 million tons.�

Another 50 interesting facts

A collection of 50 interesting facts you may not know......

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There are over 1 million Earthquakes that shake the Earth every year......

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Light Travels at an astonishing 186,000 miles per second.....

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The Eagle Nebula is over seven light years tall.... The Eagle Nebula is where stars are formed....

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Andromeda is our nearest galaxy and it would take 2 million years to get there on our fastest spacecraft......

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The human eye can distinguish 50 different shades of grey......

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It is impossible to tickle yourself because your brain is programed to feel it before you even thought of doing it.......

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The world's first test tube twins are Stephen and Amanda Mays born 5th of June 1981.....

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The oldest known disease in the world is leprosy.....

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A person infected with the SARS virus, has a 95-98% chance of recovery.....

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There are 10 million species of life on planet Earth not including sub species.....

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Land is 29% of Earth's surface, which covers 57,268,900 square miles.......

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The Driest place on Earth is Atacama desert on the coast of Chile, South America. Some places have not received rainfall in 400 years. Average overall is .01 cm per year......

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In 1950, 15% of the earth's land surface was covered by rain-forest, now more than 1/2 of that 15% is gone forever.....

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The tallest tree ever recorded was a Eucalyptus tree in Australia which stood at 445 feet tall......

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Sperm can be manufactured from scratch in a science lab.........

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500,000 trees must be cut down to produce each week s Sunday newspaper......

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Blood makes up 7% of your body's total weight......

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Red Blood cells, white Blood cells, plasma and platelets are made naturally by the body in the bone marrow......

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Bamboo can grow 9 inches a day in perfect conditions......

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Rain-forests act as the world's thermostat by regulating temperatures and weather patterns.......

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The Preying Mantis is the only insect that can turn its head........

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There are more organisms in a shovelful of dirt than there are people on the planet.....

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Every human being spent about half an hour as a single cell......

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Every star in the night sky is a distant sun in a different galaxy our nearest star is the sun......

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Sound travels through water 3 times faster than through the air........

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Water expands by 9% when it is frozen........

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Angel Falls in Venezuela is the tallest waterfall on the planet standing at 979 meters tall, it takes 14 seconds for the water to reach the rock pool beneath after falling of its edge.....

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The peregrine falcon is the fastest animal on the planet it can travel up to 200 mph when in flight.....

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1 light year equals 9,470,000,000,000 km..... (1 light year = 9.47 x1012 km).......

1

3 foot of water is bullet proof.... the bigger the bullet the more chance you have at survival... the size of the bullet and the speed it travels at when it meets the volume and density of the water it pulls itself apart in the first three feet....

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A sneeze can exceed the speed of 100mph....

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Your teeth are the only part in your body that can't repair itself...... Every thing else has the ability to fix itself....

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We are all born colour blind its the people that don't develop strong muscles in their cornea that end up being colour blind....

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The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth.... it stretches for over 200 km....

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The worlds oceans contain enough salt to cover all the continents to a depth of nearly 500 feet.....

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Polar Bears are almost undetectable by infrared cameras, its because of their transparent fur....

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A single rye plant can spread up to 100 miles of roots underground.....

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A giraffe has the same amount of vertebrae as a human.... they are just much larger than ours...

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Mars takes 697 days to orbit the sun......

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Camels have three eyelids and extra long eye lashes to keep the sand from their eyes during storms...

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Porcupines float in water.......

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The largest hailstone that fell from the sky weighed over 1.2 kg and it fell in Bangladesh in 1986....

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Earths life expectancy is 5 Billion years from 2010.......

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It takes 60 seconds for a single blood cell to travel around your body and back to your heart....

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15% of the world s fresh water flows down the Amazon River....

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Half of the world s 6 billion people are under the age of 25......

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The call of the humpback whale is the loudest sound produced by any living animal....

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Our Universe contains over 100 billion galaxies........

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A raindrop can only hit you at 18mph maximum.....

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A dog's sense of smell is 1,000 times more sensitive than a humans......

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Read more: http://www.bukisa.com/articles/135551_50-interesting-science-facts-you-may-not-know#ixzz0ogOEj1PF

General science facts

Did you know that there are 206 bones in the adult human body and there are 300 in children (as they grow some of the bones fuse together).

Flea's can jump 130 times higher than their own height. In human terms this is equal to a 6ft. person jumping 780 ft. into the air.

The most dangerous animal in the world is the common housefly. Because of their habits of visiting animal waste, they transmit more diseases than any other animal.

Snakes are true carnivorous because they eat nothing but other animals. They do not eat any type of plant material.

The world's largest amphibian is the giant salamander. It can grow up to 5 ft. in length.100 years ago: The first virus was found in both plants and animals.90 years ago: The Grand Canyon became a national monument & Cellophane is invented.80 years ago: The food mixer and the domestic refrigerator were invented.70 years ago: The teletype and PVC (polyvinyl-chloride) were invented.60 years ago: Otto Hahn discovered nuclear fission by splitting uranium, Teflon was

invented.50 years ago: Velcro was invented.40 years ago: An all-female population of lizards was discovered in Armenia.30 years ago: The computer mouse was invented.20 years ago: First test-tube baby born in England, Pluto s moon, Charon, discovered.10 years ago: First patent for a genetically-engineered mouse was issued to Harvard Medical

School.5 years ago: The first successful cloning of human embryoThe smallest bone in the human body is the stapes or stirrup bone located in the middle ear.

It is approximately .11 inches (.28 cm) long.The longest cells in the human body are the motor neurons. They can be up to 4.5 feet (1.37

meters) long and run from the lower spinal cord to the big toe.There are no poisonous snakes in Maine.The blue whale can produce sounds up to 188 decibels. This is the loudest sound produced

by a living animal and has been detected as far away as 530 miles.The largest man-made lake in the U.S. is Lake Mead, created by Hoover Dam.The poison arrow frogs of South and Central America are the most poisonous animals in the

world.A new born blue whale measures 20-26 feet (6.0 - 7.9 meters) long and weighs up to 6,614

pounds (3003 kg).The first coast-to-coast telephone line was established in 1914.The Virginia opossum has a gestation period of only 12-13 days.

The Stegosaurus dinosaur measured up to 30 feet (9.1 meters) long but had a brain the size of a walnut.

The largest meteorite crater in the world is in Winslow, Arizona. It is 4,150 feet across and 150 feet deep.

The human eye blinks an average of 4,200,000 times a year.Skylab, the first American space station, fell to the earth in thousands of pieces in 1979.

Thankfully most over the ocean. It takes approximately 12 hours for food to entirely digest.Human jaw muscles can generate a force of 200 pounds (90.8 kilograms) on the molars.The Skylab astronauts grew 1.5 - 2.25 inches (3.8 - 5.7 centimeters) due to spinal

lengthening and straightening as a result of zero gravity.An inch (2.5 centimeters) of rain water is equivalent to 15 inches (38.1 centimeters) of dry,

powdery snow.Tremendous erosion at the base of Niagara Falls (USA) undermines the shale cliffs and as a

result the falls have receded approximately 7 miles over the last 10,000 years.40 to 50 percent of body heat can be lost through the head (no hat) as a result of its extensive

circulatory network.A large swarm of desert locusts (Schistocerca gregaria) can consume 20,000 tons

(18,160,000 kilograms) of vegetation a day.The largest telescope in the world is currently being constructed in northern Chile. The

telescope will utilize four - 26 ft. 8 in. (8.13 meters) mirrors which will gather as much light as a single 52 ft. 6 in. (16 meters) mirror.

The Hubble Space Telescope weighs 12 tons (10,896 kilograms), is 43 feet (13.1 meters) long, and cost $2.1 billion to originally build.

The longest living cells in the body are brain cells which can live an entire lifetime. The largest flying animal was the pterosaur which lived 70 million years ago. This reptile

had a wing span of 36-39 feet (11-11.9 meters) and weighed 190-250 pounds (86-113.5 kilograms).The Atlantic Giant Squid's eye can be as large as 15.75 inches (40 centimeters) wide.Armadillos, opossums, and sloth's spend about 80% of their lives sleeping.The starfish species, Porcellanaster ivanovi, has been found to live in water as deep as

24,881 feet (7,584 meters).The tentacles of the giant Arctic jellyfish can reach 120 feet (36.6 meters) in length.The greatest tide change on earth occurs in the Bay of Fundy. The difference between low

tide and high tide can be as great as 54 ft. 6 in. (16.6 meters).The highest temperature produced in a laboratory was 920,000,000 F (511,000,000 C) at the

Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor in Princeton, NJ, USA.The most powerful laser in the world, the Nova laser at Lawrence Livermore National

Laboratory, CA, USA, generates a pulse of energy equal to 100,000,000,000,000 watts of power for .000000001 second to a target the size of a grain of sand.

The fastest computer in the world is the CRAY Y-MP C90 supercomputer. It has two gigabytes of central memory and 16 parallel central processor units.

The heaviest human brain ever recorded weighed 5 lb. 1.1 oz. (2.3 kg.).The deepest part of the ocean is 35,813 feet (10,916 meters) deep and occurs in the Mariana

Trench in the Pacific Ocean. At that depth the pressure is 18,000 pounds (9172 kilograms) per square inch.

The largest cave in the world (the Sarawak Chamber in Malaysia) is 2,300 feet (701 meters) long, 980 feet (299 meters) wide, and more than 230 feet (70 meters) high.

The hottest planet in the solar system is Venus, with an estimated surface temperature of 864 F (462 C).

The ears of a cricket are located on the front legs, just below the knee.The first electronic digital computer (called ENIAC - the Electronic Numerical Integrator

and Calculator) was developed in 1946 and contained over 18,000 vacuum tubes.The leg muscles of a locust are about 1000 times more powerful than an equal weight of

human muscle.The cosmos contains approximately 50,000,000,000 galaxies.There are between 100,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000 stars in a normal galaxy.Sound travels about 4 times faster in water than in air.Scientists have discovered that copper pollution of the atmosphere occurred about 2500

years ago. This was discovered by analyzing ice cores from Greenland. The pollution was attributed to the Romans who used copper for military purposes and to produce coins.

Hydrofluoric acid will dissolve glass.In a full grown rye plant, the total length of roots may reach 380 miles (613 km).In a full grown rye plant, the total length of fine root hairs may reach 6600 miles (10,645

km).A large sunspot can last for about a week.If you could throw a snowball fast enough, it would totally vaporize when it hit a brick wall.Boron nitride (BN) is the second hardest substance known to man.The female Tarantula Hawk wasp paralyzes a large spider with her sting. She then lays her

eggs on the motionless body so that her developing young have a fresh supply of spider meat to feed on.

The seeds of an Indian Lotus tree remain viable for 300 to 400 years.The only letter not appearing on the Periodic Table is the letter J . Velcro was invented by a Swiss guy who was inspired by the way burrs attached to clothing.Hershey's Kisses are called that because the machine that makes them looks like it's kissing

the conveyor belt.October 10 is National Metric Day.If you stretch a standard Slinky out flat it measures 87 feet long.The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar

melted in his pocket.Super Glue was invented by accident. The researcher was trying to make optical coating

materials, and would test their properties by putting them between two prisms and shining light through them. When he tried the cyano-acrylate, he couldn't get the prisms apart.

No matter its size or thickness, no piece of paper can be folded in half more than 7 times.A car traveling at 80 km/h uses half its fuel to overcome wind resistance.Knowledge is growing so fast that ninety per cent of what we will know in fifty years time,

will be discovered in those fifty years.According to an old English system of time units, a moment is one and a half minutes.The typewriter was invented in 1829, and the automatic dishwasher in 1889.The wristwatch was invented in 1904 by Louis Cartier.When glass breaks, the cracks move at speeds of up to 3,000 miles per hour.By raising your legs slowly and laying on your back, you can't sink in quicksand.Ten minutes of one hurricane contains enough energy to match the nuclear stockpiles of the

world.

Most gemstones contain several elements. The exception? The diamond. It's all carbon.Diamonds are the hardest substance known to man.Which of the 50 states has never had an earthquake? North Dakota.When hydrogen burns in the air, water is formed.Sterling silver contains 7.5% copper.Cars were first made with ignition keys in 1949.J.B Dunlop was first to put air into tires.Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone, also set a world water-speed record of

over seventy miles an hour at the age of seventy two.It is energy-efficient to turn off a fluorescent light only if it will not be used again within an

hour or more. This is because of the high voltage needed to turn it on, and the shortened life this high voltage causes.

The Earth's equatorial circumference (40,075 km) is greater than its polar circumference (40,008 km).

Lake Baikal is the deepest lake in the world.Due to gravitational effects, you weigh slightly less when the moon is directly overhead.The Earth's average velocity orbiting the sun is 107,220 km per hour.There is a high and low tide because of our moon and the Sun.The United States consumes 25% of all the world s energy.Flying from London to New York by Concord, due to the time zones crossed, you can arrive

2 hours before you leave.There is enough fuel in a full tank of a Jumbo Jet to drive an average car four times around

the world.The surface speed record on the moon is 10.56 miles per hour. It was set with the lunar

rover.If you could drive to the sun -- at 55 miles per hour -- it would take about 193 yearsThe moon is one million times drier than the Gobi Desert.Just twenty seconds worth of fuel remained when Apollo 11's lunar module landed on the

moon.A Boeing 707 uses four thousand gallons of fuel in its take-off climb.The planet Saturn has a density lower than water. So, if placed in water it would float.Since 1959, more than 6,000 pieces of 'space junk' (abandoned rocket and satellite parts)

have fallen out of orbit - many of these have hit the earth's surface.It takes 70% less energy to produce a ton of paper from recycled paper than from trees.Every year in the US, 625 people are struck by lightning.Hawaii is moving toward Japan 4 inches every year.The rocket engine has to supply its own oxygen so it can burn its fuel in outer space.The North Atlantic gets 1 inch wider every year.Oxygen is the most abundant element in the Earth s crust, waters, and atmosphere (about

49.5%)A stroke of lightning discharges from 10 to 100 million volts & 30,000 amperes of

electricity.A bolt of lightning is about 54,000°F (30,000°C); six times hotter than the Sun.Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe (75%).The average distance between the Earth & the Moon is 238,857 miles (384,392 km).

The moon is 27% the size of the Earth.The Earth weighs 6.6 sextillion tons, or 5.97 x 1024 kg.The center of the Sun is about 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million °C).Sunlight takes about 8 minutes & 20 seconds to reach the Earth at 186,282 miles/sec

(299,792 Km/sec).The highest temperature on Earth was 136°F (58°C) in Libya in 1922.The lowest temperature on Earth was -128.6°F (-89.6°C) in Antarctica in 1983.Sunlight can penetrate clean ocean water to a depth of 240 feet.The average ocean floor is 12,000 feet.The temperature can be determined by counting the number of cricket chirps in fourteen

seconds and adding 40.House flies have a lifespan of two weeks.Chimps are the only animals that can recognize themselves in a mirror.Starfish don't have brains.The average person falls asleep in seven minutes.Shrimp's hearts are in their heads.Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.The longest recorded flight of a chicken is thirteen secondsEmus and kangaroos cannot walk backwards.Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs only have about ten. Porcupines float in water.An ostrich's eye is bigger that its brain. An iguana can stay under water for twenty-eight minutes.The common goldfish is the only animal that can see both infra-red and ultra-violet light.It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.The pupil of an octopus' eye is rectangular.Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.The leg bones of a bat are so thin that no bat can walk.Ants cannot chew their food, they move their jaws sideways, like scissors, to extract the

juices from the food.Hummingbirds are the only animals able to fly backwards.A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.A cat's jaws cannot move sideways.Armadillos get an average of 18.5 hours of sleep per day.Armadillos can walk underwater.There are more beetles than any other kind of creature in the world.Certain frogs that can survive the experience of being frozen. Only humans sleep on their backs.The human brain is 80% water.Everyone's tongue print is different.As an adult, you have more than 20 square feet of skin on your body--about the same square

footage as a blanket for a queen-sized bed.In your lifetime, you'll shed over 40 pounds of skin.

15 million blood cells are produced and destroyed in the human body every second.Every minute, 30-40,000 dead skin cells fall from your body.The brain uses more than 25% of the oxygen used by the human body.If your mouth was completely dry, you would not be able to distinguish the taste of

anything.There are more living organisms on the skin of a single human being than there are human

beings on the surface of the earth.Muscles are made up of bundles from about 5 in the eyelid to about 200 in the buttock

muscle.Muscles in the human body (640 in total) make up about half of the body weight.The human body has enough fat to produce 7 bars of soap.The human head is a quarter of our total length at birth, but only an eighth of our total length

by the time we reach adulthood.Most people blink about 17,000 times a day.Moths have no stomach.Hummingbirds can't walk.Sea otters have 2 coats of fur.A starfish can turn its stomach inside out.A zebra is white with black stripes.The animal with the largest brain in relation to its body is the ant.The largest eggs in the world are laid by a shark.A crocodile s tongue is attached to the roof of its mouth.Crocodiles swallow stones to help them dive deeper.Giraffes are unable to cough.Sharks are immune to cancer.Despite the hump, a camel s spine is straight.Cheetah's can accelerate from 0 to 70 km/h in 3 seconds.A giraffe's neck contains the same number of vertebrae as a human.The heart of giraffe is two feet long, and can weigh as much as twenty four pounds.On average, Elephants sleep for about 2 hours per day.Lobsters have blue blood.Shark's teeth are literally as hard as steel.A mosquito has 47 teeth.Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen make up 90% of the human body.Seventy percent of the dust in your home consists of shed human skinFish are the only vertebrates that outnumber birds.A cockroach can live for several weeks without its head.The average human produces a quart of saliva a day -- about 10,000 gallons in a lifetimeElephants have been known to remain standing after they die.The embryos of tiger sharks fight each other while in their mother's womb, the survivor

being the baby shark that is born.Ants do not sleep.Nearly a third of all bottled drinking water purchased in the US is contaminated with

bacteria.Rats multiply so quickly that in 18 months, two rats could have over 1 million descendents.

An Astronaut can be up to 2 inches taller returning from space. The cartilage disks in the spine expand in the absence of gravity.

The oldest known fossil is of a single-celled organism, blue-green algae, found in 3.2 billion year-old stones in South Africa.

The oldest multicellular fossils date from ~700 million years ago.The earliest cockroach fossils are about 280 million years old.Healthy nails grow about 2 cm each year. Fingernails grow four times as fast as toenails.20/20 vision means the eye can see normally at 20 feet. 20/15 is better; the eye can see at 20

feet what another eye sees at 15 feet.The average person has 100,000 hairs on his/her head. Each hair grows about 5 inches (12.7

cm) every year.There are 60,000 miles (97,000 km) in blood vessels in every human.