on your Family, Class or Troop

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, Plutos 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 embryo 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.

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 worlds 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 years The 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 Earths 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 54,000F (30,000C); 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 136F (58C) in Libya in 1922. The lowest temperature on Earth was -128.6F (-89.6C) 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 seconds Emus 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 crocodiles 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 camels 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 skin Fish 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 lifetime Elephants 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.

The Magnetic Earth

A magnet is an object that emits invisble lines of force between its poles. The earth is no different its just one big magnet emitting its own magnetic field between its two poles. Earths magnetic field is called the magnetosphere and surrounds the planet stretching over 36,000 miles into space, but why do we have a magnetic field and whats it good for ? Well scientists believe that electrical currents within the Earths molten iron core combined with the natural motion generated from the Earths rotation produces our magnetic field. This process is otherwise known as the Dynamo Effect.

So how exactly does the magnetosphere help us ? Well for starters it shields the Earth from the charged particles and radiation emitted from the suns outer surface. This stream of particles also referred to as solar wind, travels towards the Earth at speeds as high as 1,000,000 mph. Was it not for the magnetosphere which stops and deflects the solar wind the Earth would have very little protection from these destructive forces.

What Are Earthquakes ?

Earthquakes like hurricanes are not only super destructive forces but continue to remain a mystery in terms of how to predict and anticipate them. To understand the level of destruction associated with earthquakes you really need to look at some examples of the past. If we go back to the 27th July 1976 in Tangshan, China, a huge earthquake racked up an official death toll of 255,000 people. In addition to this an estimated 690,000 were also injured, whole families, industries and areas were wiped out in the blink of a second. The scale of destruction is hard to imagine but earthquakes of all scales continue to happen all the time. So what exactly are they ? Well the earths outer layer is made up of a thin crust divided into a number of plates. The edges of these plates are referred to as boundaries and its at these boundaries that the plates collide, slide and rub against each other. Over time when the pressure at the plate edges gets too much, something has to give which results in the sudden and often violent tremblings we know as earthquakes. The strength of an earthquake is measured using a machine called a seismograph. It records the trembling of the ground and scientists are able to measure the exact power of the quake via a scale known as the richter scale. The numbers range from 1-10 with 1 being a minor earthquake (happen multiple times per day and in most case we dont even feel them) and 7-10 being the stronger quakes (happen around once every 10-20 years). Theres a lot to learn about earthquakes so hopefully well release some more cool facts in the coming months

Preserve Your Body In Ice Like Otzi

Did you know that under extreme cold the human body can be preserved over 1000s of years. A great example of this was during September 1991 when hikers in the Otztal Alps came across the body of a man who turned out to be over 5000 years old. He was preserved in an airtight pocket beneath a huge glacier which ultimately stopped his body from decaying in the normal manner. Not only were many of his organs still intact but he was still wearing a boot stuffed with grass. Bodies caught in glaciers are usually crushed and torn apart so the fact that this body was so well preserved was an amazing feat in itself. How he froze over is of course an area up for debate with some scientists claiming he was caught in an ice storm whilst others went as far as claiming he was a killed and offered as a ritual sacrifice. Theres plenty about Otzi on the web so dig around and find out more for yourself.

High Speed Avalanches

Although an avalanche can mean the fall of any material e.g. snow, soil and even rocks, in common usage it generally refers to a falling mass of ice and snow which breaks away from the side of a mountain or cliff and surges down at great speed. So how fast do they really travel ? Well a dry snow avalanche can travel at speeds of up to 225 mph with a force equaling that of a hurricane. Whats more interesting is that as the powdery snow hurtles downhill a further blast of air just as destructive may be sent out ahead of the avalanche. Wet snow avalanches on the other hand travel much slower at around 20 mph, this however doesnt make them any less deadly. The greatest avalanches recorded tend to occur on the high mountains of the Himalayas however those which cause the highest death toll fall in the populated valleys of the Alps.

Fractional Distillation Of Air

Did you know that the air we breathe isnt just oxygen, infact its made up of a number of different gases such as nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, argon, neon and many others. Each of these gases carry useful properties so separating them from the air around us is extremely beneficial. The process is called fractional distillation and consists of two steps, the first relies on cooling the air to a very low temperature (i.e. converting it into a liquid), the second involves heating it up thus allowing each gas within the mixture to evaporate at its own boiling point. The key to success here is that every element within air has its own unique boiling temperature. As long as we know these boiling temperatures we know when to collect each gas. So what are the real world benefits of separating and extracting these gases? Well liquid oxygen is used to power rockets, oxygen gas is used in breathing apparatus, nitrogen is used to make fertilizers, the nitric acid component of nitrogen is used in explosives. The other gases all have their own uses too, for example argon is used to fill up the empty space in most light bulbs (thanks to its unreactive nature). Carbon dioxide is used in fire extinguishers and is great for putting out fires in burning liquids and electrical fires. There really are too many uses to list but suffice it to say that fractional distillation is an extremely useful process for humans the world over.

The Oldest Living Thing On Earth

Trees live much longer than any other type of plant or animal. In fact its possible to know the age of a tree by counting the rings in its trunk (One ring generally equates to one year). The oldest living tree and hence one of the oldest known living things on Earth is a bristlecone pine tree located in California, North America, its actually over 4600 years old, now thats old

Do Jelly Fish Have Bones ?

Did you know that all Jellyfish no matter how large or small have no solid skeleton to support their body. Instead their shape is maintained by soft water filled inner tissues, over which its outer layers are stretched. Take a jelly fish out of water and its beautiful shape and size is visible as nothing more than a primitive lump of jelly.

Despite this lack of bone structure dont be confused into thinking these creatures are helpless. These beautiful animals have actually been in existance for over 650 million years (making them outdate the Dinosaurs) and have always been extremely effective as predators. The Box Jellyfish for example is the deadliest sea animal in the world killing more humans than even sharks, and what about the Lions Mane jellyfish which has a diameter of over 8 metres and tentacles as long as 60 meters (thats over half the length of a football field).

Some Animals Just Dont Need Males

Did you know that there are certain animal species where there are no males only females. This is fairly common among insects and worms but also occurs to a lesser extent in some lizards. Due to only one sex existing the females are actually able to lay eggs without the need of a male (i.e. no fertilization is required). This method of reproduction is known as parthenogenesis and will almost always leads to the birth of female offspring. As an example the New Mexico whiptail lizard is 100% parthenogenic and has been bred in captivity for many generations with no males at all. GRIZZLY BEAR FACTS

Did you know that the grizzly bear (Ursus horribilis) can weigh up to 800lbs and reach heights of up to 8 foot when standing on its rear legs. With such mass and size you would expect it to be extremely slow but despite such size it can sprint at speeds as high as 40km/h which is faster than an olympic athlete. In terms of behaviour and temperament the grizzly bear is a solitary animal sticking to itself except during mating season. Its reputation of being extremely aggresive is a little exaggerated as in most cases it wont go out of its way to hunt humans or cause trouble. So why do people fear the grizzly so much ? Well much of its aggressive reputation stems from the fact that it cant climb trees very well, which is what most bears do to avert danger. This ultimately means that a threatened grizzly is more likely to stand its ground and attack an oncoming threat rather than running and hiding. So despite the stories and the movies, the grizzly in most cases is unlikely to go on aggressive hunting sprees. More so theyre omnivores so will just as happily consume berries, fruits, pine nuts and roots. HOW DO CAMELS SURVIVES THE DESERTS?

The body of a camel is so amazingly adapted to survival in the desert that it can with stand even the harshest of desert climates. Their biggest strength has to be their ability to survive without food and water for long periods of time. This unique ability stems from their body being able to store fat in their humps and water in the lining of their stomachs. These stores can be used in times of need which is ideal in deserts where both food and water are extremely scarce. Their wide, padded feet grip well on loose sandy soil and stop the camel from sinking into the sand. An insulating wool coat keeps out both the heat of the day and the cold of the night. Hairy eyelashes, ears and slit nostrils keep out the desert dust and sand. If that wasnt enough camels are also extremely simple about the food they eat, consuming anything from thorny shrubs to desert thistles.

Human Quick Facts

1. If stomachs did not have a lining of mucus, your stomach would digest itself. 2. There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body. 3. It takes about 60 seconds for a human blood cell to make a complete circuit of the body. 4. The average person will shed 40 pounds of skin in his/her lifetime. 5. 1/15th of a pint of blood is pumped with every heartbeat. 6. Humans share 98.4% of our DNA with chimps. In comparison, we share 70% of our DNA with a slug. 7. The lightest baby to survive weighed a mere 283 grams. 8. On average, women say 7,000 words per day while men manage just over 2,000 words. 9. The human brain uses 20% of the bodys energy but is only 2% of the bodys weight. 10. On average, humans lose 40-100 strands of hair per day. 11. A sneeze can exceed the speed of 100mph. 12. A cough can reach the speed of 60mph. 13. The average person will drink about 16,000 gallons of water in his/her lifetime. 14. It takes 17 muscles to smile while taking 43 muscles to frown. 15. The human brain is composed of 75% water. 16. Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete. 17. More germs are transferred while shaking hands compared to kissing. 18. There are approximately 550 hairs in a persons eyebrow. 19. The strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue.

20. A person produces 10,000 gallons of saliva in an average lifetime. 21. The hardest bone in the human body is the jawbone. 22. The number of eye blinks varies greatly from about 29 blinks each minute if you are talking to someone to only 4 blinks each minute if you are reading. 23. The average human blinks 25 times per minute. 24. A nail takes around 6 months to grow from base to the tip. 25. Each second 10,000,000 cells die and are replaced in your body. 26. Your liver performs over 500 functions in your body. 27. The average person spends 1/3 of their lifetime sleeping. 28. More germs are transferred when shaking hands than kissing. 29. The average person (from western culture) consumes 10 liters of alcohol per year. 30. Roughly 75% of people who play the radio in their car sing along to it. 31. Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete. 32. Your right lung takes in more air than your left one does. 33. The human brain is composed of 75% water. 34. 70% of the composition of dust in your home is made up of shed human skin and hair. 35. The tooth is the only part of the human body that cant repair itself. 36. One human hair can support 3kg. 37. Humans are the only animals that cry tears and blush. 38. It takes the interaction of 72 different muscles to produce human speech. 39. If the normal one hundred thousand hairs on a head were woven into a rope, it could support a weight of more than twelve tons. 40. The fingernail grows about 1.5 inches per year. 41. The total amount of skin covering an adult human weighs 6 lbs.

42. The average person flexes the joints in their fingers 24 million times during a lifetime. 43. Each person inhales about seven quarts of air every minute. 44. On average, we breathe between 12 and 18 times a minute. 45. The average guy will grow about 27 feet of hair out of his face during his lifetime. 46. Approximately 1 out of 25 people suffers from asthma. 47. The average man sweats 2 1/2 quarts every day. 48. One out of every hundred American citizens is color blind. 49. An average person laughs about 15 times a day. 50. A human heart beats 100,000 times a day.
Space Quick Facts

1. Saturns rings are made up of particles of ice, dust and rock. Some particles are as small as grains of sand while others are much larger than skyscrapers. 2. Jupiter is larger than 1,000 Earths. 3. The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is a hurricane-like storm system that was first detected in the early 1600s. 4. Comet Hale-Bopp is putting out approximately 250 tons of gas and dust per second. This is about 50 times more than most comets produce. 5. The Sun looks 1600 times fainter from Pluto than it does from the Earth. 6. There is a supermassive black hole right in the middle of the Milky Way galaxy that is 4 million times the mass of the Sun. 7. Halleys Comet appears about every 76 years. 8. The orbits of most asteroids lie partially between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. 9. Asteroids and comets are believed to be ancient remnants of the formation of our Solar System (More than 4 billion years ago!). 10. Comets are bodies of ice, rock and organic compounds that can be several miles in diameter.

11. The most dangerous asteroids, those capable of causing major regional or global disasters, usually impact the Earth only once every 100,000 years on average. 12. Some large asteroids even have their own moon. 13. Near-Earth asteriods have orbits that cross the Earths orbit. These could potentially impact the Earth. 14. There are over 20 million observable meteors per day. 15. Only one or two meteorites per day reach the surface of Earth. 16. The largest found meteorite was found in Hoba, Namibia. It weighed 60 tons. 17. The typical size of a meteor is about one cubic centimeter, which is equivalent to the size of a sugar cube. 18. Each day, Earth accumulate 10 to 100 tons of material. 19. There are over 100 billion galaxies in the universe. 20. The largest galaxies contain nearly 400 billion stars. 21. The risk of a falling meteorite striking a human occurs once every 9,300 years. 22. A piece of a neutron star the size of a pin point would way 1 million tons. 23. Europa, Jupiters moon, is completely covered in ice. 24. Light reflecting off the moon takes 1.2822 seconds to reach Earth. 25. There has only been one satellite destroyed by a meteor, it was the European Space Agencys Olympus in 1993. 26. The International Space Station orbits at 248 miles above the Earth. 27. The Earth orbits the Sun at 66,700mph. 28. Venus spins in the opposite direction compared to the Earth and most other planets. This means that the Sun rises in the West and sets in the East. 29. The Moon is moving away from the Earth at about 34cm per year. 30. The Sun, composed mostly of helium and hydrogen, has a surface temperature of 6000 degrees Celsius.

31. A manned rocket reaches the moon in less time than it took a stagecoach to travel the length of England. 32. The nearest known black hole is 1,600 light years (10 quadrillion miles/16 quadrillion kilometers) away.
Weather Quick Facts

1. The fastest speed a falling raindrop can hit you is 18mph. 2. During a hurricane, 90% of the people who die end up dying from drowning. 3. The coldest temperature ever recorded was a negative 126.9 degrees fahrenheit in Vostok Station, Antarctica. 4. Between evaporation and falling as precipitation, a droplet of water may travel thousands of miles. 5. The typical lifetime of a small cumulus cloud is between 10 to 15 minutes. 6. A corn field of one acre gives of 4,000 gallons off water per day in evaporation. 7. A molecule of water will stay in Earths atmosphere for an average duration of 10-12 days. 8. Snowflakes falling at 2-4 mph can take about 1 hr to reach the ground. 9. For each minute of the day, 1 billion tons of rain falls on the Earth. 10. At any given time, on average there are about 1800 thunderstorms occurring on earth with 100 lightning strikes per second. 11. Lightning bolts can travel 60 miles. 12. A lightning bolt travels at about 14,000mph and brings 300,000 volts of electricity to the ground. 13. The air located around a lightning bolt is heated to around 30,000 degrees Celsius. This is 5 times hotter than the surface of the sun. 14. The chances of being struck by lightning is about one in three million. 15. The largest hailstone ever recorded in the United States was nearly the size of a soccer ball. It was a 7-inch wide chunk of ice.

16. Lightning sets about 10,000 forest fires every year in the United States. 17. In one day a hurricane can release enough energy to supply all of the nations electrical needs for about six months. 18. The highest temperature ever recorded in the United States was 134 degrees F at Greenland Ranch in Death Valley, California. 19. In 1899, it was so cold that the Mississippi River froze over its entire length. 20. The United States uses an estimated 10 million tons of salt each year to melt ice on the roads. 21. A cubic mile of ordinary fog contains less than a gallon of water. 22. An inch of rain water is equivalent to 15 inches of dry, powdery snow. 23. Every year in the US, 625 people are struck by lightning. 24. The average width of a tornados funnel averages about 100 to 200 yards but may be as wide as a mile.

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Science Facts

Science Facts
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o Humans have 46 chromosomes, peas have 14 and crayfish have 200. Without its lining of mucus your stomach would digest itself. There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body. An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body. Utopia is a large, smooth lying area of Mars. On the day that Alexander Graham Bell was buried the entire US telephone system was shut down for 1 minute in tribute. The low frequency call of the humpback whale is the loudest noise made by a living creature. The call of the humpback whale is louder than Concorde and can be heard from 500 miles away. A quarter of the world's plants are threatened with extinction by the year 2010. Each person sheds 40lbs of skin in his or her lifetime. At 15 inches the eyes of giant squids are the largest on the planet. The largest galaxies contain up to 400 billion stars. The Universe contains over 100 billion galaxies. Wounds infested with maggots heal quickly and without spread of gangrene or other infection. More germs are transferred shaking hands than kissing. The longest glacier in Antarctica, the Albert glacier, is 250 miles long and 40 miles wide.

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The fastest speed a falling raindrop can hit you is 18mph. A healthy person has 6,000 million, million, million hemoglobin molecules. A salmon-rich, low cholesterol diet means that Inuits rarely suffer from heart disease. Inbreeding causes 3 out of every 10 Dalmatian dogs to suffer from hearing disability. At over 2000 kilometers long The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth. A thimbleful of a neutron star would weigh over 100 million tons. The risk of being struck by a falling meteorite for a human is one occurrence every 9,300 years. The driest inhabited place in the world is Egypt where the annual average rainfall is .02 inches. The deepest part of any ocean in the world is the Mariana trench in the Pacific with a depth of 35,797 feet. The largest meteorite craters in the world are in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada and in Vredefort, South Africa. The largest desert in the world, Sahara, is 3,500,000 square miles. The largest dinosaur ever discovered was Seismosaurus who was over 100 feet long and weighed up to 80 tonnes. The African Elephant gestates for 22 months. The short-nosed Bandicoot has a gestation period of only 12 days. The mortality rate if bitten by a Black Mamba snake is over 95%. In the 14th century the Black Death killed 75,000,000 people. It was carried by fleas on the black rat. A dog's sense of smell is 1,000 times more sensitive than a humans. A typical hurricane produces the energy equivalent to 8,000 one megaton bombs. 90% of those who die from hurricanes die from drowning. To escape the Earth's gravity a rocket need to travel at 7 miles a second. If every star in the Milky Way was a grain of salt they would fill an Olympic sized swimming pool. Microbial life can survive on the cooling rods of a nuclear reactor. Micro-organisms have been brought back to life after being frozen in permafrost for three million years. Our oldest radio broadcasts of the 1930s have already traveled past 100,000 stars. Tuberculosis is the biggest global killer of women. One third of Asian women are infected with TB. Each domestic cow emits about 105 pounds of methane a year. Hummingbirds consume half of their body weight in food every day. The larva of the polyphemus moth consumes 86,000 times its birth weight in its first 56 days. Blood sucking hookworms inhabit 700 million people worldwide. Some species of bamboo grow at a rate of 3ft per day. A total of 148 tornadoes swept the south and mid-west of the April 1974. A lunar eclipse of 1 hour 47 minutes occurred on the 16th July 2000. Saturn would float if you could find an ocean big enough. A pinhead-sized piece of a neutron star weighs 1 million tons. A neutron star is 15 miles across and weighs more than the Sun. The highest recorded train speed is 320.2 mph by the TGV train in France. The highest speed ever achieved on a bicycle is 166.94 mph by Fred Rompelburg. The research spacecraft Helios B came within a record 27 million miles of the Sun. 65 million years ago the impact of an asteroid is estimated to have had the power of 10 million HBombs. The temperature at the centre of the Earth is estimated to be 5500 degrees Celsius. Mount Rainier erupts around every 500 years. There are over 100 billion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. Scientists have discovered over 20 planets outside our solar system. Organisms can live in temperatures up to 133 centigrade. There is clear geological evidence that there has been water on Mars. NASA missions in 2003 and 2005 will collect rocks from Mars. Living organisms on Earth can thrive as deep as 2 miles down. Jupiter's moon, Europa, is completely covered in ice. We can produce laser light a million times brighter than sunshine.

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The fastest spacecraft can go 40,000 mph. Babies conceived by IVF are more likely to die during infancy. The surface of Mars is the same area as the Earth's continents. In the US the average vehicle is 5.6 years old. On May 3rd 1999 an outbreak of 76 tornadoes struck Oklahoma and Kansas with wind speeds of up to 318 mph. Jumbo Jets have carried the equivalent of 1.6 million passengers to the Moon and back. Volcanoes on Io eject material at speeds of 2000 mph. The Sun takes about 220 million years to make one revolution of the Milky Way. A human heart beats 100,000 times a day. Every heartbeat pumps 1/15th of a pint of blood. The first bicycle was manufactured in 1817. A cockroach can live for nine days without its head. The biggest shark species has the smallest teeth. The 12 meter long whale shark has more than 4,000 teeth, each only 3mm long. The female lion is a much more efficient hunter than the male. We share 98.4% of our DNA with a chimp - and 70% with a slug. Men who ride a bike for ten hours a week are four times as likely to be impotent as non-bike riders say US scientists. If the neurons from a single brain were divided out equally among the US population, each American would get approximately 366 brain cells. The oldest known hominid skeleton from Ethiopia has been dated at 4.4 million years. The earliest human tools have been dated at 2.7 million years old. Human fetuses react to loud rock music by kicking. At just 12 weeks the human fetus can scowl and squint. By 24 weeks the human fetus can suck its thumb so hard that blisters are raised. At 23 weeks the human fetus experiences REM (Rapid Eye Movement). A newborn's skin is thinner than an adults. The lightest baby to survive weighed a mere 283 grams. More babies are born at night than in the day. The average weight of the male brain is 1.4 kilos: 1.25 for females. Twins have a higher than usual rate of left handedness. 65% of those suffering autism are left handed. One third of all adults experience difficulty distinguishing left from right. Apart from humans the only land animal that cries is the elephant. The Dodo was first discovered in 1507 - 100 years later it was hunted to extinction. The fastest truck in the world, the 376 mph rocket powered Shockwave burns 400 gallons of fuel every mile. The Hobby Eberly Telescope (HET) can collect light 2 million times fainter than the human eye can. Any 1 of a 1000 viruses can cause the common cold. The chemical n-acetyl-cysteine found in raw eggs is proven to help hangovers. Macau, China has 80,000 people per square mile. Greenland has 10 square miles per person. The watch was invented in Nuremberg in 1510. On average women say 7,000 words per day. Men manage just over 2000. In 1522 Ferdinand Magellan's crew completed the first circumnavigation of the world. Health freaks beware! If you jog for 1 hour each day for fifty years you will have spent over two years jogging. Galileo first saw the moons of Jupiter on 7th January 1610 - but they had been discovered a few days earlier by an obscure German Astronomer, Simon Marius. Europeans started drinking tea from China in 1610 and they started drinking coffee in 1615. There are 1600 calories in a pint of Hippopotamus milk. In 1661 the Bank of Stockholm issued the worlds first banknote. Because of thermal expansion the Tower is 15cm taller in Summer. Benjamin Franklin began his research into electricity in 1746. Isaac Newton published his 'Principia' explaining the laws of gravity in 1687.

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The combined length of the roots of a Finnish pine tree is over 30 miles. Gabriel Fahrenheit invented the mercury thermometer in 1714. 97.2% of the Earth's water is salt water. The oceans contain enough salt to cover all the continents to a depth of nearly 500 feet. Monash University has named a new species of dinosaur Qantassaurus after the Australian airline Qantas! Traveling at the speed of light it would take a spaceship just 1.2822 seconds to reach the Moon. The speed of light, Warp Factor 1 on Star Trek's Enterprise is a mind boggling 670,610,000 miles per hour. Each year more snow falls in Australia than in the whole of the European Alps. The human brain is 2% of the body's weight but uses a hungry 20% of its energy. Women on the pill are 30% more likely to suffer from gum disease. Western adults, on average, consume 10 liters of alcohol a year. If more than 23 people gather in a room there is a better than 1 in 2 chance that at least two of them will share the same birthday. The interstellar gas cloud Sagittarius B contains a billion, billion, billion liters of alcohol. Roy Sullivan of Virginia, USA, was struck by lightning seven times during his lifetime. Later he committed suicide. Alcohol lowers the level of the sex hormone testosterone in men but increases it in women. Polar Bears can run at 25 miles an hour and jump over 6 feet in the air. Ernest Rutherford discovered that the atom had a nucleus in 1911. The silkworm moth has eleven brains. There are over 25 million bubbles waiting to burst out of each bottle of Champagne. 70% of the molecular structure in a tree is also human. 60-65 million years ago dolphins and humans shared a common ancestor - the Mesonycid. In Winter the Antarctic Ice covers 10% of our planet. Parts of the Atacama Desert in ="" w:st="on">Northern Chile have gone without rain for 400 years. It takes the Earth exactly 365.242199 days to orbit the Sun - and that is why every four years we need a leap year. In 1750 James Watt built the first steam powered engine. In 1774 Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen and described its role in combustion and respiration. It wasn't until 1628 that we realized that our hearts pumped blood right around our bodies. The only time the human population declined was in the years following 1347, the start of the epidemic of the plague 'Black Death' in Europe. The first spectacles were invented in 1280. 1000 years ago the first Icelanders discovered ="" w:st="on">North America. Polar Bears cannot be detected by infrared cameras, due to their transparent fur. The longest space flight by a women lasted a total of 188 days, 4 hours and 14 seconds. The biggest star has a diameter of 1800 million miles, making it 2000 times bigger than the Sun. Deserts cover one seventh of the world. The surface of the sand can heat up to an incredible 77 degrees centigrade. The first alarm clock was invented 3,500 years ago by the Egyptians; and in 1955 scientists in the ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">UK invented the first atomic clock. 4,800 years ago the ancient Egyptians worked out that there were 365 days in a year. In 1997 ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Britain suffered an unprecedented 35 tornados. Young giraffes can grow an inch a month. The next total eclipse visible from the ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">UK mainland will be on the 23rd September 2090. Desert rats can copulate 122 times an hour. The average person accidentally eats 430 bugs each year of their life. There are more than 1000 chemicals in every cup of coffee. When a pickle is plugged into an electric current it turns yellow, and gives off a horrendous smell. By 2150 there will be 10 billion humans. In 2000 there were 6 billion. ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">America produces 215 million tons of solid garbage every year.

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At present even the most powerful PCs cannot process as many instructions as the .1gm of a goldfish brain. 384/ A typical PC would have to be a million times more powerful to perform like the human brain. The first photographic negative allowing multiple prints was developed by British inventor William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1830's. In 1801 American inventor James Finley built the first modern suspension bridge over a river near ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Uniontown, ="" w:st="on">PA. The first internal combustion piston engine was built by Frenchman Etienne Lenoir in 1860. After many aborted attempts, the first submarine telegraph cable between Europe and ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">America was successfully laid in 1866. In 1894 Italian physicist Guglielmo Marconi began his work on transmitting radio waves over long distances. Wireless' communications took a giant leap forward in 1962 with the launch of Telstar, the first satellite capable of relaying telephone and TV signals. When completed in 2009 the Three Gorges dam across the Yangtze River in ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">China will be 60 stories high and 1.4 miles long. Windows 2000' contained 29 million lines of code. The Large Hadron Collider or LHC outside of ="" w:st="on">Geneva in ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Switzerland will be the largest science experiment ever. When it opens for business in 2005 it will use a circular tunnel 17 miles in diameter. At 1,483 feet tall the twin Petronas tower in ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Kuala Lumpur, ="" w:st="on">Malaysia is the tallest building in the world. A single rye plant can spread up to 400 miles of roots underground. If you are bitten by a mosquito, it's usually a female sucking blood from her victim to get nutrients for making her eggs. The largest group of insects are the beetles with over 400,000 different species. Dragonflies have the largest eyes and sharpest eyesight of any insect... each eye is made up of more than 30,000 separate rod-like units. Mayflies live for a year or more as larvae; but as adults they live for only a few hours. By swallowing water, the Puffer fish becomes too big for other fish to swallow. Although rainforests only cover 7% of the Earth's surface, at least 40% of all animal and plant species live in them. The coldest temperature ever recorded at minus 126.9?F was in ="" w:st="on">Antarctica at Vostok in 1960. Dutchman Antony van Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope in 1674. Spider web filaments were used in gun sights as the 'cross hairs' until the early 1960's. 88% of all humans are right handed. Bill Gates is left handed. The Millennium Dome in ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">London can be seen from space. The shell is 1km in circumference. An elephant's brain weighs about five times more than a human brain but it's body weighs 100 times more than ours. Every night each human sheds approximately 3 grams of skin particles. The sting of a Box Jelly can kill a human within three minutes. In 1870 in ="" w:st="on">Massachusetts Bay an Arctic Lion's Mane jelly was found with tentacles of 36.5 metres in length. A Platypus is one of two mammals that lays eggs and nurses it's young on milk - the other is an echidna. The International Space Station orbits at 248 miles above the Earth. Up to 15,000 dust mites can live and thrive in just one gram of dust. The temperature on the surface of Mercury exceeds 400 degrees C during the day, and, at night, plummets to minus 200 degrees centigrade. Mosquitoes have been found to prefer biting people with smelly feet. One person in every 2 billion lives to be 116 or older. Tristan de Cunha, an island in the ="" w:st="on">South Atlantic Ocean is populated by 296 people and most of them suffer from asthma.

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Bats always turn left when leaving a cave. Dart-boards are made out of horsehair. When a giraffe's baby is born it falls from a height of six feet, normally without being hurt. The pitches that Babe Ruth hit for his last-ever home run and that Joe DiMaggio hit for his firstever home run were thrown by the same man. Alexander the Great was an epileptic. When a female horse and a male donkey mate, the offspring is called a mule, but when a male horse and a female donkey mate, the offspring is called a hinny. Cranberries are sorted for ripeness by bouncing them; a fully ripened cranberry can be dribbled like a basketball. The original fifty cent piece in Australian decimal currency had around worth of silver in it before it was replaced with a less expensive twelve sided coin. The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets. If you multiply the number 21978 by 4 then you get the number in reverse ie 87912. A pregnant goldfish is called a twit. The muzzle of a lion is like a fingerprint - no two lions have the same pattern of whiskers. A full seven percent of the entire Irish Barley crop goes to the production of Guinness. If the human genome were a book. It would contain one billion words (or as long as 800 bibles); and if you were to read it out loud at the rate of one word per second for eight hours a day, it would take a century. Cat's urine glows under a black light. Mosquitoes are attracted to the color blue twice as much as to any other color. A raisin dropped in a glass of fresh champagne will bounce up and down continually from the bottom of the glass to the top. Amongst the many words that Shakespeare invented are assassination, bump, lonely, bloodstained, leapfrog and mountaineer. Shrimps' hearts are in their heads. There is no more than one-tenth of a calorie's worth of glue on every stamp. The weight of air in a milk glass is about the same as the weight of one aspirin tablet. The first advertisement printed in English in 1477 offered a prayer book. The ad was published by William Caxton on his press in Westminster Abbey. No price was mentioned, only that the book was 'good chepe'. The working section of the piano is called the action. There are about 7,500 parts here, all playing a role in sending the hammers against the strings when keys are struck. There are 1,783 diamonds in ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Great Britain's Imperial State Crown. This includes the 309 carat Star of Africa. There are forty two dots on a pair of dice. There are odor technicians in the perfume trade with the olfactory skills to distinguish 19,000 different odors at twenty levels of intensity each. There are three sets of letters on the standard typewriter and computer keyboards which are in alphabetical order. ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Reading left to right they are f-g-h, j-k-l, and o-p. There is one mile of railroad track in ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Belgium for every one and a half square miles of land. There is one slot machine in ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Las Vegas for every eight inhabitants. A bubble is round because the air within it presses equally against all its parts, thus causing all surfaces to be equidistant from its centre. A conventional sign of virginity in Tudor England was a high exposed bosom and a sleeve full to the wrists. A diamond will not dissolve in acid. The only thing that can destroy it is intense heat. A female pharaoh was unknown in ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Egypt before Hatshepsut, who began her reign in 1502 BC. In order not to shock local convention, she had herself portrayed in male costume, with a beard, and without breasts. A jet or turbo-jet powered aircraft uses more fuel flying at 25,000 feet than 30,000 feet. The higher it flies, the thinner the atmosphere and the less atmospheric resistance it must buck. About 24 percent of alcoholics die in accidents, falls, fires, and suicides.

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A survey revealed that 87 percent of snowmobilers in ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Maine are males. Snowmobiling added 6 million to the state's economy in 1996. About 60 percent of all American babies are named after close relatives. According to a 1995 poll, 1 out of every 10 people admitted that they will buy an outfit intending to wear it once and return it. According to a poll, 58 percent of those responding admitted that they had falsely called in sick to get a day off from work. 39 percent of people interviewed for a poll admitted that they snoop in their host's medicine cabinets. 75 percent of people who play the car radio while driving also sing along with it. Life expectancy in ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">America has grown from 46.6 years for males and 48.7 years for females in 1900. To 72.7 years for males and 76.1 years for females. In a recent 5 year period, 24 residents of ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Tokyo died while bowing to other people. In a survey conducted by a women's magazine; 70 percent of female respondents said they would rather have chocolate than sex. According to hospital figures, dogs bite an average of 1 million Americans a year. According to one source, about 66 percent of magazines found thrown along US roadsides are pornographic. Americans buy about 5 million things that are shaped like Mickey Mouse, or have a picture of Mickey Mouse on them in the course of a day. According to suicide statistics, Monday is the favored day for self destruction. In ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">England, a stone is equal to 14 pounds, a kilogram to 2.2 pounds. In ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Wales, there are more sheep than people. (In 1996, the human population for Wales was 2,921,000; with approximately 5,000,000 sheep) ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Ireland boasts the highest per capita consumption of cereal in the world - 15 pounds per person annually. It can cost up to million to launch a new fragrance. ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Saudi Arabia reportedly has the highest per capita fragrance use in the world at more than a quart a year for every man, woman and child. The Coast Guard Academy in July of 1976 was the first U.S service academy to admit women. ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Sweden has the most phones per capita. There's enough energy in ten minutes of one hurricane to match the nuclear stockpiles of the world. A beautiful mirage called the Fata Morgana appears in the Straits of Messina, between ="" w:st="on">Sicily and ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Italy. It is an image of a town in the sky, but it seems more like a fairy tale landscape than a real town. It is believed to be a mirage of a fishing village situated along the coast. A bolt of lightning can strike the earth with a force as great as 100 million volts. A "cold front" travels at a speed of about 30 miles per hour - faster then the fastest person can run - and may overtake any warm front ahead of it. The resulting mix of air is called an "occluded front". A cumulonimbus cloud can be enormous: six miles across and eleven miles high, and twice as high as ="" w:st="on">Mount Everest. A dripping water tap wastes an average of 40 kilowatt hours of electricity per month. This is the equivalent of running a color television 8 hours a day for about 31 days. A drop of water may travel thousands of miles between the time it evaporates into the atmosphere and the time it falls to the Earth again as rain, sleet, or snow. A green flash is sometimes seen just as the sun sets or rises. This occurs because green light is bent most strongly by the atmosphere. So the green is seen before other colors at sunrise, and after the other colors have vanished at sunset. Three hundred and fourteen acres of trees are used to make the newsprint for the average Sunday edition of the New York Times. There are nearly 63,000 trees in the 314 acres. Traces of copper give the gemstone turquoise its distinctive color. Use of less fertilizer at precisely the right times can cut costs by up to 17 percent for farmers in developing countries and reduce damage to the environment.

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Variations in color in pearls are still a mystery, but some experts believe that high water temperatures contribute a golden cast to some pearls. Waste industry experts estimate that Americans discard 250 million tires each year, and that more than 3 million are stored in landfills. Tires burning at landfills generate huge amounts of noxious air pollution. A hailstone weighing more than one and a half pounds once fell on ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Coffeyville, ="" w:st="on">Kansas. No one was hit. A hurricane that hit ="" w:st="on">Puerto Rico in 1928 dropped 30 inches of rain over the island. The deluge was estimated to weigh 2,800,000,000 tons. A large cumulonimbus cloud can hold enough water for 500,000 baths. Most of the water droplets in a cloud re-evaporate and never reach the ground. Only one fifth actually falls as rain. A polar air mass moving South from ="" w:st="on">Canada may pick up from the ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Mississippi basin more than nine times as much water as flows out from the mouth of the river. At the height of the property boom in ="" w:st="on">Japan during the 1980's the Emperor's 300 acre palace in central ="" w:st="on">Tokyo was valued at more than all ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Canada. A Saguaro Cactus can top 60 feet, and may live 300 years. If you add up the numbers 1-100 consecutively (1+2+3+4+5 etc) the total is 5050. The maximum weight for a golf ball is 1.62oz. The dot over the letter 'i' is called a title. Mark Twain was born on a day in 1835 when Halleys Comet came into view. When he died in 1910, Halleys came into view again. Ethernet is a registered trademark of Xerox, Unix is a registered trademark of AT&T. Charlie Brown's father was a barber. Only female mosquitoes bite. Caesar salad has nothing to do with any of the Caesars. It was first concocted in a bar in ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Tijuana, ="" w:st="on">Mexico, in the 1920's. A coat hanger is 44 inches long if straightened. A snail can sleep for three years. More people are killed by donkeys annually than are killed in plane crashes. Blue Whales weigh as much as 30 elephants and are as long as three greyhound buses. Birds do not sleep in their nests. They may occasionally nap in them, but they actually sleep in other places. Butterflies taste with their hind feet. Jellyfish have no brains, yet they can tell light from dark and sense movement. Pogonophobia' is the fear of beards. The word 'monosyllable' meaning 'one syllable' actually has five syllables in it. Aspirin was discovered during experimentation with a waste product. Budweiser beer is named after a Czech town. 365 different languages are spoken in ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Indonesia. The first contraceptive diaphragms, centuries ago, were citrus rinds i.e. half an orange rind. The first female telephone operator was Emma M. Nutt, who started working for the Telephone Dispatch Company in ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Boston, on September 1st 1878. Prior to that all operators were men. There is no one who does not dream. Those who claim to have no dreams, laboratory tests have determined, simply forget their dreams more easily than others. A bushel of apples weighs about 42 pounds. A recent ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Gallup poll shows that 69 percent of Americans believe they will go somewhere after death. A recent survey reveals that one in four Americans 'believe in' Astrology, up from 18 percent in 1988. A ="" w:st="on">Gallup survey showed that in the ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">US, 8 percent of kissers kept their eyes open, but more than 20 percent confessed to an occasional peek. Forty-one percent said they experienced their first serious smooch when they were 13, 14 or 15 years old. 36

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percent between the ages of 16 and 21. The most memorable kiss in a film was in Gone with the Wind, according to 25 percent of those polled. A survey of 1,023 children aged 10 to 13 showed the number who felt uncomfortable talking with their parents nearly doubles when they turn 13. Over fifty billion aspirin tablets are taken worldwide each year. In the US, Delaware, Virginia and Michigan rank as the top three states for Ritalin use, and most of the prescriptions are for elementary and middle school age children. Doctors in these states prescribe at least 33 grams for every 1,000 residents, 56 percent more than the national average, according to figures compiled by the Federal Drug Enforcement Agency. The average life span of ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">London residents in the middle of the 19th century was 27 years. For members of the working class that number dropped to 22 years. It is estimated that 60 percent of home smoke detectors in use do not work because they don't have a battery in them, or the battery has run out. It is estimated that there are 61,000 people airborne over the ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">USA all the time. Artist Xavier Roberts first designed his soon-to-be-famous Cabbage Patch Dolls in 1977 to help pay his way through university. They had soft faces and were made by hand, as opposed to the hardfaced mass market dolls, and were originally called 'Little People'. Before the invention of mass marketed hair care products, households were pretty much of their own concocting family shampoos and conditioners. Four Wheel Roller Skates were invented by James L. Plimpton in 1863. No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver or purple. Winston Churchill was born in a ladies room during a dance. When the ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">University of ="" w:st="on">Nebraska Cornhuskers play American Football at home, the stadium becomes the state's third largest city. The characters Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street were named after Bert the cop and Ernie the taxi driver in Frank Capra's 'Its a Wonderful Life'. Steel drums are the only non-electric instrument invented in the 20th century. The longest musical piece written is Vexations by Erik Satie. It consists of a 180 note composition which must be repeated 840 times. The entire piece takes 18 hours and 40 minutes. The Eisenhower interstate system requires that one mile in every five must be straight. These straight sections are usable as airstrips in times of war or other emergencies. Virginia Woolf wrote all her books standing. Rabbits cannot vomit. The Giant Squid has the largest eyes in the world. The Grateful Dead were once called The Warlocks. Moon was Buzz Aldrin's mother's maiden name. (Buzz Aldrin was the second man on the moon in 1969) It was discovered on a space mission that a frog can throw up. The frog throws up it's stomach first, so the stomach is dangling out of it's mouth. Then the frog uses its forearms to dig out all of the stomach's contents and then swallows the stomach back down again. Charles de Gaulle's final words were, "It hurts". In the 1983 film 'Jaws 3D' the shark blows up. Some of the shark guts were stuffed ET dolls which were being sold at the time. ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Montana mountain goats will butt heads so hard their hooves fall off. Wilma Flintstone's maiden name was Wilma Slaghoopal, and Betty Rubble's maiden name was Betty Jean McBricker. Telly Savalas and Louis Armstrong died on their birthdays. Spot, Data's cat on Star Trek: The Next Generation, was played by six different cats. There are 92 known cases of nuclear bombs lost at sea. One in every ten people in the world live on an island. The petals of the world's largest flower are 1.5 feet long. If the Arctic ice cap were to melt, the sea level would rise by an average of 230 feet. The study of ants is called Myrmecology. Eating with a fork was once considered scandalous.

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The first ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">US 'Labor Day' was celebrated on a Tuesday in 1882. Napoleon died of arsenic poisoning. Gore-Tex is made with Teflon. There are two radios for every man, woman, and child in the ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">United In 1970 only 5% of the American population lived in cities. The average person receives eight birthday cards annually. Henri Nestle was originally a baby food manufacturer. His work and research with condensed milk aided Daniel Peter in inventing a method to successfully combine chocolate and milk in a solid form the first milk chocolate - in 1875. ="" w:st="on">Antarctica is 98 percent ice and 2 percent barren rock. The average thickness of the ice sheet is 7,200 feet. This amounts to 90 percent of all the ice and 70 percent of all the fresh water in the world. ="" w:st="on">Antarctica is the only continent without reptiles or snakes. ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Finland has the greatest number of islands in the world: 179,584. The odd zigzag in the North Carolina/South Carolina state line, just south of ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Charlotte, resulted when boundary commissioners altered the line in 1772 to avoid splitting the Catawba Indians between the two British Colonies. A chest x-ray comprises 90,000 to 130,000 electron volts. A chip of silicon a quarter inch square has the capacity of the original 1949 ENIAC computer, which occupied a full city block. The word trivia comes from the Latin word trivium, a place where 3 roads meet. The perfect opportunity to exchange stories, gossip, and information. When Coca-Cola was first sold in ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">China, they used characters that would sound like "Coca-Cola" when spoken. Unfortunately, what they turned out to mean was "Bite the wax tadpole". It did not sell well. In ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Japan, 20% of all publications sold are comic books. 50% of bank robberies take place on Friday's. The evaporation from a large oak or beech tree is from ten to twenty-five gallons in twenty-four hours. It takes 12 bees their entire lifetime to make a tablespoon of honey. A large swarm of locusts can eat 80,000 tons of corn in a day! Some biblical scholars believe that Aramaic (the language of the ancient Bible) did not contain an easy way to say "many things" and used a term which has come down to us as 40. This means that when the bible - in many places - refers to "40 days," they meant many days. Sneezes can travel up to 100mph A goldfish is the only animal that can see both infrared and ultraviolet light. If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days, you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee. The human heart creates enough pressure when it pumps out to the body to squirt blood 30 feet. 1 in 5,000 ="" w:st="on">North Atlantic lobsters are born bright blue. In 1973 ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Bhutan issued a stamp that looked like a record. Put it on a record player and it would actually play the Bhutanese national anthem! Thomas Edison invented the talking doll in 1888. In 2000, across the global economy, travel and tourism accounted for around 11 per cent of world exports, goods and services, surpassing trade in food, textiles, and chemicals. Nearly 80 per cent of international tourists come from Europe and the ="" w:st="on">Americas, while only 15 per cent come from East Asia and the Pacific, and five per cent from Africa, the Middle East and ="" w:st="on">South Asia. Around 3.5 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions come from air travel, a share that is expected to increase as air travel does. The secret to balsa wood's lightness can only be seen with a microscope. The cells are big and very thinned walled, so that the ratio of solid matter to open space is as small as possible. Only about 40% of the volume of a piece of balsa is solid substance. In 1870 Thomas Adams introduced Black Jack, the first manufactured flavoured gum, and one that is still sold today.

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Patagonia, in the south of ="" w:st="on">Argentina and ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Chile, became so popular for reclusive celebrities (including George Soros, Sylvester Stallone and Ted Turner) in the 1990s that at one stage, a sixth of the region was said to be owned by 350 foreigners. A poll of 1,004 Americans for TIME and CNN in 1996 found that 82 percent believed in the healing power of prayer, and 64 per cent that doctors should pray with their patients. Contributing to about 300,000 deaths per year, obesity is only exceeded by smoking as a cause of death. 60.8 million Americans have some form of cardiovascular disease, ranging from congenital heart defects to high blood pressure and hardening of the arteries. Grapefruit was discovered in the West Indies in the early 1700s and first introduced to ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Florida in the 1820s. In the ="" w:st="on">United States today, most grapefruit is still grown in ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Florida. Walter Diemer, an accountant for Fleer, invented modern bubble gum, in 1928. Pink was the only coloring nearby when he made the first batch and so the trend was set. The gum was named Dubble Bubble. 22% of all the plant species on the planet are in ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Brazil. ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Brazil also has the most species of mammals (524), fresh water fish, insects and parrots of anywhere. The UK National Lottery says that 27% of female winners keep the winning ticket in their bra. Kenneth Grahame, the author of the children's classic, The Wind in the Willows, was the Secretary of the Bank of England 1898 - 1908. The book was published in 1908, the year in which he retired from the Bank. Although platinum was used by the South American Indians before the fifteenth century. They could not melt it, but developed a technique for sintering it with gold on charcoal, to produce artifacts. "Coffee" comes from the Latin form of the genus Coffee, a member of the Rubiaceae family which includes more than 500 genera and 6,000 species of tropical trees and shrubs. The average adult male Polar Bear weighs between 850 and 900 pounds, but one was killed in 1960 that weighed 2,210 pounds. That is the weight of a small family car! Most neuroscientists estimate that some form of autism is found in every five or six hundred people. This means that in the ="" w:st="on">UK more than a hundred thousand people have autism, and almost six hundred thousand in the ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">US. Researchers at the ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">University of ="" w:st="on">Chicago investigated eighty-six children with autism and found that all of them had an abnormal version of a gene that is responsible for the transportation of serotonin around the body. About five percent of the fathers of non-autistic children are employed in some kind of engineering, compared with about twelve percent of the fathers of children with autism. It is estimated that the global damage wrought by the 1982-1983 El Nino and related climactic anomalies cost over billion. The cost of the 1997-1998 El Nino is much more. The storm of October 16th 1997 in ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Britain (the worst since 1703) toppled over 15 million trees in southeast Enland alone. The average human brain consumes just 12 Watts of power - about one-tenth of what it takes to burn an ordinary light bulb. The human retina is made up of about 120 million rod cells. A single second of video tape contains about 22 megabytes of data, the very rough equivalent of about thirty copies of a 200 page book. There are roughly 3500 hair cells and 30,000 nerve fibers found in the cochlea, a bony structure shaped like a snail's shell that's located deep within the inner ear. Talking machines really hit the commercial mainstream in 1978, when Texas Instruments released Speak and Spell, the first device in which the human voice was electronically duplicated on a single chip. Of the roughly 6500 languages now spoken, up to half are already endangered or on the brink of extinction. Linguists estimate that a language dies somewhere in the world every two weeks. It is estimated that three-quarters of the world's mail and up to 80 percent of e-mail is currently (2002) written in English. How long this will remain true with the rise of Chinese use of the internet is open to debate.

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The average person is able to detect and distinguish between about 10,000 different smells, using approximately 400 receptors. Smell and taste are both intimately related. More than 90 per cent of a meal's flavor - apart from the four basic tastes of sweet, sour, bitter and salty - is actually fragrance, which rises up from food during chewing and is forced across the olfactory epithelium through the nasopharynx at the back of the throat. There is a medical condition called Anosmia, where the sufferers have no sense of smell at all. They can still sense sweet, sour, bitter and salty tastes; but flavor, which is virtually all smell, is totally gone. So that for example they would not be able to savor fine wine, or enjoy lemon meringue pie. Hell indeed! The average cup of coffee contains more than 1000 different chemical components, none of which is tasted in isolation but only as part of the overall flavor. About one in every 2000 people automatically sees colors when hearing words, letters or numbers The vast majority (roughly 90 per cent) are female. The Sound Pressure Levels typical of commonly encountered noise sources in decibels, with the threshold of hearing being zero. Rustle of leaves - 10; Soft whisper - 30; Mosquito buzzing - 40; Average townhouse - 50; Ordinary conversation - 60; Busy street - 70; Power mower - 100; Threshold of pain 120; Loud Rock Concert - 130; Jet engine at 30m - 150; Rocket engine at 30m - 180. Humans generally hear sound waves whose frequencies are between 20 and 20,000 Hz. Below 20 Hz, sounds are referred to as infrasonic, and above 20,000 Hz as ultrasonic. The speed of sound in water is approximately 1500 m/s while the speed of sound in air is approximately 340 m/s. Therefore, a 20 Hz sound in the water is 75 m long whereas a 20 Hz sound in air is 17 m long. African elephants are the largest mammals living on solid ground. They reach lengths up to 7.5 m and weights up to 7500 kg. Research has shown that the sun impacts our productivity at work and school. Workers in offices with constant sunlight and large windows have been shown to be both more efficient with their time and more accurate in completing their tasks. The same is true in schools. Schools with more daylight saw their students outperform counterparts in darker schools by 5% to 15%. Daniel F. Kripke, a researcher with the ="" w:st="on">University of ="" w:st="on">California San Diego, surveyed adults in ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">San Diego, who wore wrist meters to register the amount of sunlight they received during the day. The study found that the majority were only exposed to sunlight for less than one hour per day and some did not go outdoors at all during a 48-hour period. The more than 1,000 disorders of the brain and nervous system result in more hospitalizations than any other disease group, including cancer and heart disease. Neurological illnesses affect more than 50 million Americans annually at costs exceeding 0 billion. In 1973, scientists discovered receptors for opiates on neurons in several regions of the brain that suggested the brain must make substances very similar to opium. The brain reaches its maximum weight near age 20 and slowly loses about 10 percent of its weight over a lifetime. Each year in the US, more than 97 million Americans suffer chronic, debilitating headaches or a bout with a bad back or the pain of arthritis -- all at a total cost of some 0 billion. Epilepsy can start at any age and can result from inheriting a mutant gene. Manic depression affects 1.2 percent of Americans aged 18 or older annually, or 2.2 million individuals. Approximately equal numbers of men and women suffer from the condition. In 1997, 1.5 million Americans were current cocaine users. The most common central nervous system disease of young adults after epilepsy is multiple sclerosis (MS) which affects more than 300,000 people in the ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">US. Roughly one in every 500 people in ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">America suffers from Tourettes Syndrome, a little understood genetic condition that affects males three to four times as frequently as females. Recycling all of your home's waste newsprint, cardboard, glass, and metal can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 850 pounds a year. Enough energy is saved by recycling one aluminum can to run a TV set for three hours or to light one 100 watt bulb for 20 hours.

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Annually, enough energy is saved by recycling steel to supply ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Los Angeles with electricity for almost 10 years. The Greatest mass extinction in Earth's history was at the end of the Permian age about 251 million years ago. Over 900 million people speak Mandarin Chinese, making it the most spoken first language on Earth. By contrast, English is spoken by over 400 million people as a first language; but has a further 1.1 billion who speak it as a second language i.e. 1.5 billion speakers in total, or approximately a quarter of all the people on Earth speak at least some English. The first standardized system of measurement was created around 2700BC in ="" w:st="on">Mesopotamia. The word Jeep? comes from GP? which is short for General Purpose. In 1997, the ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">United States emitted about one-fifth of total global greenhouse gases. If emissions of carbon dioxide were halted today, it would take more than a century for the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide to approach its pre-industrial level. By 2100, in the absence of emissions control policies, carbon dioxide concentrations are projected to be 30-150% higher than today's levels. The coldest known star is an unnamed star about 160 light years from Earth. Its surface temperature is only 2600F which is 7400F cooler than the Sun! The largest known Nebula (cloud of gas and dust) is the Tarantula Nebula, named for its shape. Our Galaxy's oldest stars are Red Dwarfs, which are also the smallest and most abundant, numbering 70% of the Galaxy's Stars. The highest point on Mars is the Olympus Mons Volcano, which has a 50-mile wide summit and rises 13? miles above a lava-strewn plain. The 'Red Planet' isn't really red at all, NASA photographs indicate that it is more of a tan or butterscotch color. A Martian day is surprisingly similar in length to one on Earth (24 hours and 37 minutes), but a Martian year is nearly twice as long (687 days). Laser stands for 'Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation'. A laser beam is produced when light bounces back and forth between two mirrors with a special medium (gas, liquid, or solid) between them. As it bounces, the light triggers energized atoms in the medium to release more light, some of which leaks out through one of the mirrors to produce the laser beam. The first laser was constructed in 1960 by Theodore H. Maiman of the ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">United States using a rod of ruby. Ruby lasers are used to drill holes in diamonds and sapphires for watch bearings. Quicksand is formed when sand, clay, and water are mixed in just the right way, with a surface that seems solid until you step on it, and it suddenly becomes liquid! The machine to win the first flying prize in 1901 was an airship. The modern safety match was invented in ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Sweden in 1855 by J.E. Lundstrom. It works because one of the chemicals needed to start the fire is in the striking surface. It has been estimated that sand deposits in the ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Sahara ="" w:st="on">Desert cover about 7,000,000 square km (2,700,000 square miles). Johannes Kepler used the recorded movement of Mars to formulate his three laws of planetary motion in the 17th Century, which laid the foundation for modern Astronomy. Dirty snow melts faster than white snow because it's darker and absorbs more heat. Abdul Kassem Ismael, Grand Vizier of Persia in the tenth century, carried his library with him wherever he went. The 117,000 volumes were carried by 400 camels trained to walk in alphabetical order. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin ate roasted turkey from foil packets at their first meal on the moon. Certain frogs can be frozen solid then thawed, and continue living. If you take one pound of cobwebs and spread them out in one straight line, it will go around the earth 2 times.

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As women age, there is a general thinning of head hair. But many older women experience an increase in hair elsewhere: an estimated 40 percent of women over the age of 80 are likely to be troubled by excessive facial hair. As many as 80 percent of men experience enlargement of the prostate, a gland at the base of the bladder that produces fluid needed to transport and nourish sperm. While the problem does not generally affect sexual capacity or enjoyment, it causes more frequent or difficult urination. ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Iceland consumes more Coca-Cola per capita than any other nation In ancient ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">China doctors would only receive fees if the patient stayed in good health. Sometimes if the patients health became too bad, the doctor had to pay them. In ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Sweden in the Middle Ages, a mayor was once elected by a louse. The candidates rested their beards on a table and the louse was placed in the middle. The louse's chosen host was elected mayor. In ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">China, the bride wears red. More types of fish swim in ="" w:st="on">Brazil's Amazon River than in the entire ="" w:st="on">Atlantic Ocean. On male shirts the buttons are on the right side, on female shirts the left side. This is because in Victorian times, the men were right handed and buttoned their own shirts, but women had a maid to dress them and the buttons were on the correct side for the maids to do up. Police in ="" w:st="on">Hong Kong stopped a man because he seemed to be 'oddly shaped'. He was found to be wearing 18 bras and 45 pairs of ladies' panties. ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Tabasco sauce is made by fermenting vinegar and hot peppers in a French oak barrel which has three inches of salt on top and is aged for three years until all the salt is diffused through the barrel. It typically takes twelve years and close to billion dollars to develop a new medicine. The Boomtown Rats, whose lead singer was Bob Geldof, biggest hit was inspired by a female random killer whose excuse was 'I don't like Mondays'. In 1935 Jesse Owens broke 4 world records in 45 minutes. In 1963, as part of a National Cancer Institute Program to screen plant species for anticancer activity, the US Forest Service collected Pacific Yew tree bark and shipped it to the NCI for study. It was subsequently discovered that an extract (taxol) of the bark has anti-tumor activity. Cystallite is the material snooker balls are made from. Duplication in the human genome is more extensive then it is in other primates. About 5% of the human genome consists of copies longer than 1,000 bases. Some duplications cause disease. A type of Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease, for example, arises from a duplication of 1.5 million bases in a gene on chromosome 17. The disease causes numb hands and feet. The genome of flowering plants doubled twice, an estimated 180 and 112 million years ago, and rice did it again 45 million years ago. In February 2001 it was announced that the human genome contains not 100,000 genes as originally expected, but only 30,000. Allied bombers were issued with Biro pens as fountain pens leaked at high altitude. A study of more than half a million children in ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Denmark has concluded that the triple vaccine that protects against measles, mumps and rubella (mmr) does not cause autism. Two of the greatest writers who ever lived, William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes (who wrote Don Quixote), both died on 23rd April 1616. In 2000, the last year for available statistics, the pharmaceutical industry in the ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">US employed 57,488 technicians and scientists, 339 more than in 1999. Nevertheless, the industry has lost jobs, mainly among clinical researchers, whose numbers fell from 14,402 in 1999 to 11,999 in 2000. Research and development investment by pharmaceutical companies has gone from billion (US) a year in 1980 to .3 billion in 2001; and is expected to have increased by another to billion in 2002 when figures are finally released. Until 1936 in ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">New York, it was against the law to wear topless bathing suits, for women and men.

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One study has found that children whose mothers were treated with anti-epilepsy drugs designed to calm brain activity were more likely to have developmental problems and lower IQ. Simply making a basic memory chip and running it for the typical lifespan of a computer eats up 800 times the chip's own weight in fossil fuel. The 180m sprint of the 776 BC Olympics (the earliest recorded) was won by Coroebus. An estimated 10 million to 30 million Americans were given a polio vaccine between 1955 and 1963 which was contaminated with the simian virus SV40, according to an ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Institute of ="" w:st="on">Medicine report issued 22nd Oct 2002. In 1990, there were 239 near misses, or 'air proximity incidents', reported in European Airspace. By 1999 this had risen to 499. Global Air Traffic is rising at a rate of 7% per annum. There are approximately 300 boats reported stolen each year in ="" w:st="on">Wisconsin and over 27,000 boats stolen each year in the ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">United States. The course record for the ="" w:st="on">Oxford v Cambridge University Boat Race is 16 mins 19 secs - set by ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">Cambridge in 1998. SPF stands for Sun Protection Factor. This number is a multiplier that tells you how much longer you can remain in the sun without burning when wearing a sun block. For instance, if you can usually tolerate the sun for 10 minutes without a burn, an SPF 15 will provide you with 15 times that, or 150 minutes of protection without burning. Rice plants may have up to 55,000 genes. The average American will eat a half-ton of cheese in his/her lifetime. The main source of which will come from pizza, where in ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">America there are 4.2 billion pizza purchases made every year, which equates to 11.5 million purchases every day, half of which are on Friday and Saturday. Cheddar is the best-selling cheese in the ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">U.S. with mozzarella a close second. 1 oz. of cheese contains the same protein as 8 oz. of milk. There are more than 1,000 varieties of cherries in the ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">United States, but fewer than 10 are produced commercially. Over 70% of the ="" w:st="on">="" w:st="on">UK population eats fish and chips more than once every six months and just under 50% eat it once a month. 14% of all adults enjoy fish and chips once or twice a week. Fish and chips was the only take-away food not to be rationed during the Second World War. Frederick Lord Woolton, Minister of Food at the time, even allowed mobile frying vans to carry fish and chips to evacuees around the country! The word perfume comes from the Latin per fumum, which means "through smoke" (per means through, fumum means smoke). Eau de cologne - contains about 3-5% perfume oil. Used by men. Aftershave lotions & splash colognes - contains about 0.5-2% perfume oil. Used by men. Eau de parfum contains about 15-18% perfume oil. Used by women. Eau de toilette - contains about 4-8% perfume oil. Used by women. Since perfume scent retains longer on oily skin, apply a layer of petroleum jelly (eg, Vaseline) onto your skin before putting on perfume.

Read some fun animal facts for kids and find out more about cats, dogs, insects, birds, whales, horses, sharks, mammals and much more. Children will love the cool, crazy, strange, funny, weird, odd, bizarre and wacky information as well as did you know facts and other interesting animals info that will help them learn a thing or two along the way.

Rats breed so quickly that in just 18 months, 2 rats could have created over 1 million relatives. The blue whale can produce the loudest sound of any animal. At 188 decibels, the noise can be detected over 800 kilometres away. Horses and cows sleep while standing up. Giant Arctic jellyfish have tentacles that can reach over 36 metres in length. Locusts have leg muscles that are about 1000 times more powerful than an equal weight of human muscle. Instead of bones, sharks have a skeleton made from cartilage. Insects such as bees, mosquitoes and cicadas make noise by rapidly moving their wings. The horn of a rhinoceros is made from compacted hair rather than bone or another substance. Sharks lay the biggest eggs in the world. Even when a snake has its eyes closed, it can still see through its eyelids. Unlike humans, sheep have four stomachs, each one helps them digest the food they eat. Despite the white, fluffy appearance of Polar Bears fur, it actually has black skin. The average housefly only lives for 2 or 3 weeks. Mosquitoes can be annoying insects but did you know that it's only the female mosquito that actually bites humans. Cats use their whiskers to check whether a space is too small for them to fit through or not.

Read some fun planet Earth facts for kids and find out more about our world, volcanoes, earthquakes, minerals, structures, gas, weather and much more. Children will love the cool, crazy, strange, funny, weird, odd, bizarre and wacky information as well as did you know facts

and other interesting Earth info that will help them learn a thing or two along the way.

Hawaii is moving towards Japan at the speed of 10cm a year. This is because they are on different tectonic plates. The worlds largest desert is the Sahara, it covers about one third of Africa! Earthquakes that occur out at sea can cause huge tsunamis capable of reaching land and endangering people. The earth isn't perfectly round, it is slightly fattened at the north and south poles. Scientists have the dated the Earth as being between 4 and 5 billion years old! Mt Everest is the highest mountain on earth, its peak reaches 8,848 metres (29028 feet) above sea level. Talc is the softest mineral found on Earth, reaching just 1 on Mohs scale of hardness, it is often used to make talcum powder. Although earthquakes can be deadly, most are very small and not even felt by humans. The volcanic rock known as pumice is the only rock that can float in water. Stretching out to an impressive length of 6696 kilometres (4160 miles) long, the Nile River is the longest river on earth. Natural gas doesn't have an odour, strong smells are added to it by humans so it can be detected when there are leaks.

Read some fun human body facts for kids and find out more about bones, skeletons, eyes, blood, muscles, the brain, heart and much more. Children will love the cool, crazy, strange, funny, weird, odd, bizarre and wacky information as well as did you know facts and other interesting human body info that will help them learn a thing or two along the way.

The brain uses over a quarter of the oxygen used by the human body. The smallest bone found in the human body is located in the middle ear. The staples (or stirrup) bone is only 2.8 millimetres long. It takes the body around 12 hours to completely digest eaten food. As well as having unique fingerprints, humans also have unique tongue prints. Antibiotics are only effective against bacteria, they won't help in fighting off a virus. The colour of a humans skin is determined by the level of pigment melanin that the body produces. Those with small amounts of melanin have light skin while those with large amounts have dark skin. Red blood cells carry oxygen around the body. They are created inside the bone marrow of your bones. Infants blink only once or twice a minute while adults average around 10. Hummingbirds are so agile and have such good control that they can fly backwards. Your sense of smell is around 10000 times more sensitive than your sense of taste. Your nose and ears continue growing throughout your entire life.

Read some fun chemistry facts for kids and find out more about atoms, elements, gases, liquids, solids, metals, chemicals, experiments and much more. Children will love the cool, crazy, strange, funny, weird, odd, bizarre and wacky information as well as did you know facts and other interesting chemistry info that will help them learn a thing or two along the way.

Hydrogen is the first element on the periodic table. It has an atomic number of 1. It is highly flammable and is the most common element found in our universe. Although it is still debated, it is largely recognized that the word 'chemistry' comes from an Egyptian word meaning 'earth'. At room temperature, mercury is the only metal that is in liquid form. Things invisible to the human eye can often be seen under UV light, which comes in handy for both scientists and detectives. Alkali metals such as sodium, potassium, rubidium, caesium and francium are extremely reactive elements, just putting them in water can result in an explosion! They are carefully stored in oil to prevent this happening. Humans breathe out carbon dioxide (CO2) while plants breathe it in. Plants use the carbon dioxide to make food from sunlight (photosynthesis). Chemical reactions occur all the time, including through everyday activities such as cooking. Try adding an acid such as vinegar to a base such as baking soda and see what happens! Water expands as it drops in temperature, by the time it is frozen it takes up about 9% more space. Helium is lighter than the air around us so it floats, that's why it is perfect for the balloons you get at parties. Athletes at the Olympic Games have to be careful how much coffee they drink. The caffeine in coffee is a banned substance because it can enhance performance. One or two cups are fine but they can go over the limit with more than five. (update - as of 2004 caffeine has been taken back off the WADA banned list but its use will be closely monitored to prevent future abuse by athletes.)

Read some fun space facts for kids and find out more about astronomy, the Moon, planets, our Sun, the Milky Way galaxy, our Universe and much more. Children will love the cool, crazy, strange, funny, weird, odd, bizarre and wacky information as well as did you know facts and other

interesting space info that will help them learn a thing or two along the way.

The sun is over 300000 times larger than earth. Venus is the hottest planet in our solar system with a surface temperature of over 450 degrees celcius. The moon appears to have more craters and scars than Earth because it has a lot less natural activity going on, the Earth is constantly reforming its surface through earthquakes, erosion, rain, wind and plants growing on the surface, while the moon has very little weather to alter its appearance. Saturn isn't the only ringed planet, other gas giants such as Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune also have rings, they are just less obvious. Footprints and tyre tracks left behind by astronauts on the moon will stay there forever as there is no wind to blow them away. In 2006, astronomers changed the definition of a planet. This means that Pluto is now referred to as a dwarf planet. Because of lower gravity, a person who weighs 100kg on earth would only weigh 38kg on the surface of Mars. The only planet that rotates on its side like a barrel is Uranus. The only planet that spins backwards relative to the others is Venus. The first man made object sent into space was in 1957 when the Russian satellite named Sputnik was launched. Jupiter's 4 biggest moons are named Europa, Ganymede, Callisto and Io. It is because of the Sun & Moons gravity that we have high & low tides.

Read some funny science facts for kids. Children will love the cool, crazy, strange, funny, weird, odd, bizarre and wacky information as well as did you know facts and other interesting info that

will help them learn a thing or two along the way.

Kangaroos and Emus can't walk backwards. Butterflies taste food by standing on top of it! Their taste receptors are in their feet unlike humans who have most on their tongue. Most of the dust in your home is actually dead skin! Yuck! Although the Stegosaurus dinosaur was over 9 metres long, its brain was only the size of a walnut. Humans get a little taller in space because there is no gravity pushing down on them. Rabbits and parrots can see behind themselves without even moving their heads! A hippopotamus may seem huge but it can still run faster than a man. Even if an analog clock is broken, at least it shows the correct time twice a day. Sneezing with your eyes open is impossible. The trickiest tongue twister in the English language is apparently "Sixth sick sheiks sixth sheeps sick". Give it a try and see for yourself.

Read some fun space facts for kids and find out more about plants, food, trees, physics, science processes and much more. Children will love the cool, crazy, strange, funny, weird, odd, bizarre and wacky information as well as did you know facts and other interesting info that will help them learn a thing or two along the way.

The noise that is thunder is created when the air around lightning gets rapidly heated and expands at a rate faster than the speed of sound. Rather than putting on weight from eating celery you actually lose it, you burn more calories from the chewing than you put on from the food itself. Sound travels 4 times faster in water than it does through air. Cranberries can be tested for ripeness by bouncing them, if they are ripe they should have a bouncing quality. Travelling at 80 kilometres per hour, a car uses half its fuel to overcome wind resistance. The largest living structure on Earth is the Great Barrier Reef. Found in Australia, it is over 2000 kilometres long. The QWERTY keyboard layout used on most computers was invented way back in the 1860's. Some types of bamboo can grow nearly a metre a day! Diamonds are the hardest known substance. Light from the sun can reach a depth of 80 metres in the ocean. When you crack a whip, it makes a loud noise because the tip is actually moving faster then the speed of sound!

Biology facts & trivia - 1

Some species of The little Alaskan Wood Frog is capable of reviving earthworm can have as many as 10 itself back to normal life after staying completely frozen for hearts. Submitted by: Jhun Mark months, during which its heart, brain and other organs stop Soriano functioning. Submitted by: Jaleks - PH There are more species of fish in Amazon river than in the entire Atlantic Ocean (Over 2,000). Submitted by: Will Bryant Chameleons often have United States. tongues longer than their bodies. Submitted by: Maureen - Cavite, PH Dolphins and whales are mammals A worm is both male and female at the same time (a hermaphrodite.) Submitted by: Science Chem Geek - Parker, that don't drink water. Submitted by: Orange - United Kingdom. PA, United States.

Sheeps, goats and the octopus have almost rectangular-oval pupils in their eyes. Submitted by: Abby -

Giraffes could pass out with blood filling their brain when they lower their neck, so they have a spongelike organ in the head which slowly gathers and releases blood. Submitted by: Miia - London, United Kingdom.

The acceleration rate of a flea's jump is 20 times that of a space shuttle during launch. Submitted by: Sruthi R Coimbatore, India A woodpecker can peck with a force as high as 1,200 g's with each impact - equivalent to a human striking head against a wall at a speed of 25km (16 The Brazilian "railroad worm" has a head that glows miles) an hour each time. with a red light, and has a green light on its side. Submitted by: Sruthi R - Coimbatore, India The Golden "Poison Dart" frog in South America is most poisonous vertebrate in the world. Submitted by: Sruthi R - Coimbatore, India

A large woodpecker can peck as fast as 20 times a second and up to 12,000 times a day. Submitted by: Kenneth Lugtu Pampanga, Philippines The world's smallest flowering plant is the Wolffia, whose one full bouquet of flowers can fit on the head of a push-pin. Submitted by: Hyde Avocados have the highest fibre and calories of any fruit. Submitted by: Hyde

Rafflesia Arnoldii is the largest flower in world, and can grow as big as an umbrella. Submitted by: Hyde Pineapple is actually a giant berry. Submitted by: Hyde

Our eyes can distinguish as many as 10 million distinct colour variations.

Rats can swim for half a mile (0.8 km) without rest, and can tread water for three straight days. Submitted by: Skittles - United States An average adult human has skin weighing about 3 kilograms in total. Submitted by: Rob

While we're awake, our brain generates enough power to illuminate a light bulb of 25 watts. Submitted by: Rob

While hibernating, frogs breathe through their skin. Submitted by: Skittles - United States

The world's smallest rodent is Pygmy Jerboa measuring only a couple of inches in length - and can run as fast as a horse. Submitted by: Skittles - United States

The world's smallest frog - The Little Grass Frog - is no bigger than a house fly. Submitted by: Skittles - United States

The electric eel of South With more than 80,000 arms, the Basket Starfish has America (Electrophorus electricus) the greatest number of arms. Submitted by: Melon Head can generate over 600 volts, and can United States paralyze even a horse. Submitted by: Melon Head - United States

The normal energy used by our brain is 0.1 calories per minute, While only 2% in weight, the human brain requires 15% of the body's and could go up to 1.5 during activities such as puzzleheart work, 20% of oxygen and 25% solving. Submitted by: Anchal Srivastava - Gorakhpur, India of all glucose. For every 1000 red blood cells in our body, there is only about one white cell. Submitted by: aDaM14393 - Philippines Philippines Armadillos spend about 80% of their lives asleep. Submitted by: Rozelle - Cavite Philippines An Octopus has three hearts. Submitted by: Sevy - Giddarbaha, India

The human heart has enough pressure to squirt blood up to 30 feet away. Submitted by: Cynthia - Quebec, Canada

The Methuselah tree in California, USA, is the oldest living organism (4,800 years old) known today. Submitted by: Kenneth - Philippines

The Giant Burrowing Frog doesn't croak. It hoots like an owl. Submitted by: Jethro Alba Philippines Philippines An alligator may go through 2000 to 3000 teeth in a lifetime. Submitted by: Jethro Alba - Marikina City, Philippines

Honeybees have remained unchanged in form or structure for 20 million years. Submitted by: Jieian - Philippines

Whales were once land mammals that moved to the sea and adapted to marine life. Submitted by: Faye - Tuguegarao, Philippines

The tongue of a blue whale is bigger than a taxi cab, and can weigh as much as an elephant. Submitted by: Jethro Alba - Marikina City, Philippines. There are more insects in a single square mile of fertile soil than The longest recorded distance flown there are people on the entire earth. Submitted by: jj - United by any chicken is 301.5 feet (about 92 meters) in 13 seconds. Submitted States by: Jethro, Philippines. Elephants can hear through their feet. Submitted by: jakx - St. Petersburg, United States Bananas are actually giant herbs related to the orchid family. Submitted by: Hyde

The adult heart pumps about 7,500 litres of blood every day.

There are more bacteria and microbes in our body than actual cells that make up the body. Submitted by: Emily - New Castle, Pennsylvania, United States The blue whale can produce the An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain. Submitted by: kittie loudest sound produced by an power - Pennsylvania, United States animal - up to 188 decibels - and detected as far away as 853 kms (530mi). Submitted by: Nikhil India The giraffe is one of the quietest animals: it has no vocal chords A goldfish (like most marine fish) to make any noise. Submitted by: Aien - Manila, Philippines. can survive in a tank full of human blood. Submitted by: Yashna, Canada. In seahorses, it's the male who gives birth to the young. Submitted by: Beau - Indianapolis, United States You shed and regrow your skin every 28 days, that's about 1000 times in a lifetime. Submitted by: Larry - Houston, United An iguana always lands on its feet. Submitted by: Jay - United States

The shark has to keep moving to stay alive. Submitted by: Jay United States

The human eye blinks an average of Fleas can jump 130 times higher than their own height. In 4,200,000 times each year. human terms, that's a 6ft tall person jumping 780 ft in the air. Submitted by: Marita Submitted by: Marita

The liver is the only organ able to regenerate itself completely. Submitted by: Jay - United States

A fish never closes its eyes. Submitted by: Jay - United States

Only female mosquitoes bite people.

The Reticulated Pythons are the world's longest snake and also the longest reptile. Submitted by: eryka Manila, Philippines.

95% of all the animal species on the earth are insects. Submitted by: me knows me facts, Canada

The human brain is 75% water. Submitted by: EMO - Calais, Maine, United States

If you shrunk a car to the size of a roach, the roach could outrun A lobster has a sense of smell about 1000 times keener than a human. the car. Roaches can run about 200 scale miles per hour. Submitted by: Hades - Milledgeville, Georgia, United States Submitted by: Hades - Milledgeville, Georgia, United States Frogs eat their skin after they shed it. 95% of all animals are invertebrates (without a backbone or spinal column). Submitted by: damandude - Missouri, United Submitted by: Wild Child - Driggs, United States States

Porcupines float in water.

A hedgehog's heart beats 300 times a minute on average.

The world's termites outweigh the world's humans 10 to 1.

The average person has over 1,460 dreams a year.

Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.

Elephants are the only land animal that can't jump. Submitted by: Ron Griffin

If a person or an animal is born colorblind, they instantly have excellent night vision. Submitted by: FlamegiantX - Lee's Summit, Missouri, United States A teaspoonful of soil may contain 100 million bacteria.

Eighty-five percent of all life on Earth is Plankton.

You can figure out which way is south if you are near a tree stump. The growth rings are wider on the south side. Babies are born far sighted - their eyes start to focus properly between 3 to 6 months of age.

Eighty-five percent of all the plants and animals live in the sea.

Men have more blood in their circulatory system than women and more red blood cells.

Your blood vessels, if laid end to end, would encircle the globe twice over.

Some species of Bamboo can grow at the rate of 1 ? metres in 24 hours.

A single bacteria cell, given all the food it needs, could divide into a ball of cells the size of the Earth in 24 hours. DNA unravels at 7000 RPM (revolutions per minute).

The DNA in a single human cell is 37 metres long when unravelled.

Every four days the worlds population increases by one million people.

If all major forms of cardiovascular disease were eliminated, human life expectance would increase by 9.78 years. Women blink nearly twice as much as men.

The right lung takes in more air than the left.

The ears of a cricket are located on the front legs, just below the knee.

The ant can lift things 10 times its own weight.

20/20 vision means the eye can see normally at 20 feet. 20/15 is Healthy nails grow about 2 cm each year. Fingernails grow four times as better; the eye can see at 20 feet what another eye sees at fast as toenails. 15 feet.

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

Ants do not sleep.

Elephants have been known to remain standing after they die.

The average human produces a quart of saliva a day -- about 10,000 gallons in a lifetime

A cockroach can live for several weeks without its head. Submitted by: Gads - New York, United States.

Fish are the only vertebrates that outnumber birds.

Seventy percent of the dust in your home consists of shed human skin

Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen make up 90% of the human body.

A mosquito has 47 teeth.

Shark's teeth are literally as hard as steel.

Lobsters have blue blood.

The heart of giraffe is two feet long, and can weigh as much as twenty four pounds.

Cheetah's can accelerate from 0 to 70 km/h in 3 seconds.

Crocodiles swallow stones to help them dive deeper.

A crocodile's tongue is attached to the roof of its mouth.

The largest eggs in the world are laid by a shark.

The animal with the largest brain in relation to its body is the ant. A starfish can turn its stomach inside out.

Hummingbirds can't walk.

Moths have no stomach.

On an average, most people blink about 15,000 times in a 16hour day (awake.)

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.

The human body has enough fat to produce 7 bars of soap.

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

15 million blood cells are produced and destroyed in the human body every second.

In your lifetime, you'll shed over 40 pounds of skin.

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.

Everyone's tongue print is different.

The human brain is 80% water.

Only humans sleep on their backs.

There are more beetles than any other kind of creature in the world.

Armadillos can walk underwater.

Hummingbirds are the only animals able to fly backwards.

Ants cannot chew their food, they move their jaws sideways, like scissors, to extract the juices from the food. The common goldfish is the only animal that can see both infra-red and ultra-violet light.

Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.

An iguana can stay under water for twenty-eight minutes.

Porcupines float in water.

Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs only have Emus and kangaroos cannot walk backwards. about ten.

Shrimp's heart is in its head. Submitted by: Scien

The average person falls asleep in seven minutes.

Starfish don't have brains.

Chimpanzees are the only animals that can recognize themselves in a mirror.

House flies have a lifespan of two weeks.

The Atlantic Giant Squid's eye can be as large as 15.75 inches (40 centimeters) wide.

The longest living cells in the body are brain cells which can live It takes approximately 12 hours for food to entirely digest. an entire lifetime.

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

The world's largest amphibian is the giant salamander. It can grow up to 5 ft. in length.

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. Snakes are true carnivorous because they eat nothing but other animals. They do not eat any type of plant material. 93% of a water melon is water.

When you get goosebumps and your hair stands, the hair helps to trap air, making you feel warmer by keeping in your body heat. Submitted by: Jeremy - United States

The human body has less muscles in it than a caterpillar.

When you blush, your stomach lining also reddens.

The human body contains about six-thousand miles of blood vessels.

The surface area of a human lung is equal to that of a tennis court.

Chemistry facts & trivia - 1

Gallium is a metal which melts on palm of the hand, due to its low melting point (29.76 C). Submitted by: Karanpal Singh - Amritsar, India The noble gas Xenon lasers can cut through materials that are so tough even diamond tipped blades will not cut. Submitted by: Josh Davies - Llanelli, Wales

Twenty percent of Earth's oxygen is produced by the Amazon forest. Submitted by: Jassim - Salem, India

Gold and Copper are the only two non-white metals.

The burning sensation we get from chilli peppers is because of a The lighter was invented before the match (in 1816 by J.W. Dobereiner). chemical called Capsaicin. Submitted by: Cam - England. Submitted by: Leah Hopson Denver, United States Honey does not spoil. Submitted by: Ashalaya - Racine, Wisconsin, United States Each time lightning strikes, some Ozone gas is produced, thus strengthening the Ozone Layer in the Earth's atmosphere.

An average adult body contains around 250g (1/2lb) of salt. There's enough gold in the Earth's crust to cover the entire land surface knee-deep. The metal with the highest melting point is tungsten, at 3410 degrees Celcius (6170F).

One inch (2.5cm) of rain is equal to 10 inches (25cm) of snow.

An ounce of gold can be stretched into a wire 80 kms (50 miles) long. Mosquitoes like the scent of estrogen, hence, women get bitten by mosquitoes more often than men do. Natural gas has no odour. The smell is added artificially so that leaks can be detected. Air becomes liquid at about minus 190 degrees Celsius.

Mercury is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature. Absolutely pure gold is so soft that it can be moulded with the hands. It is estimated that a plastic container can resist decomposition for as long as 50,000 years.

Water expands by about 10% as it freezes.

If you slowly pour a handful of salt into a totally full glass of water it will not overflow. In fact, the water level will go down.

Hydrogen gas is the least dense substance.

Liquid air looks like water with a bluish tint.

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe (75%).

Oxygen is the most abundant element in the Earth's crust, waters, and atmosphere (about 49.5%)

The only letter not appearing on the Periodic Table is the letter J.

Hydrofluoric acid will dissolve glass.

A bee sting is acidic and a wasp sting is alkali. To treat a sting by one of these you should use the opposite type of chemical.

The amount of carbon in the human body is enough to fill about 9,000 'lead' pencils.

physics facts & trivia - 1

Lake Baikal in Russia contains more water than all the North American Great Lakes combined.

The mass of our entire atmosphere is estimated to be some 5.5 quadrillion tons (55 followed by 14 zeros). Submitted by: Sruthi R - Coimbatore, India

The world's densest wood, the Black Ironwood (Olea laurifolia), does not float on water and therefore sinks. Submitted by: Sruthi R - Coimbatore, India Chewing gum was invented by a dentist, named William Semple - as a way to exercise your jaws. Submitted by: Bob

The diameter of a proton is approximately 0.000000000001 mm (1/25,000,000,000,000 inch). You can convert graphite into diamond by applying a temperature of 3000 Celsius and pressure of 100,000 atm. Submitted by: Hyde

The amount of water beneath our ground soil is 50 times as much as all the water in the rivers and lakes combined.

The first ten feet of the ocean hold as much heat as the Earth's entire atmosphere.

On average, our bodies constantly resist an atmospheric pressure of about 1 kilogram per square inch. The lightning bolt is 3 times hotter than the sun. Submitted by: Jieian - Philippines

The deepest location on Earth is Mariana Trench, about 11km deep in the North Pacific ocean. Submitted by: Apurv - Gaya, India

The bark of the redwood tree is fireproof. Submitted by: Hyde If given the same mass, our body would actually be hotter than the sun. Submitted by: Eddy - United States

If Mount Everest were placed at the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean, its peak would still be a mile underwater. Submitted by: Nikhil, India

Many physicists believe wormholes (a "shortcut" through space and time) exist all around us but they are smaller than atoms. Submitted by: Jay - United States

The Atlantic Ocean grows at about the same rate as your fingernails. Submitted by: Do do bird - United States

A solar panel 100 miles by 100 miles (161x161km) in the Mojave Desert (USA) could replace all the coal now burned to generate electricity in the entire U.S. Submitted by: Jay - United States If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days, you would have produced just enough sound energy to heat up one cup of coffee. Submitted by: me knows me facts, Canada

The average ice berg weighs 20,000,000 tons.

Lightning strikes about 6,000 times per minute on our planet.

A gallon of water weighs 8.34 pounds (3.8kg).

If an item moves very, very fast, it becomes smaller and heavier.

Minus 40 degrees Celsius is exactly the same temperature as minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

Hot water freezes quicker than cold water.

The only rock that floats in water is pumice.

Mexico City is sinking at a rate of 18 inches (46cm) per year as a result of draining water.

1 inch (25mm) of rain water is equivalent to 15 inches (381mm) of dry, powdery snow. The oldest and largest clearly visible meteorite crater site in the world is The Vredefort Dome in Free State, South Africa. It is 380km across. The temperature in fahrenheit can be determined by counting the number of cricket chirps in 14 seconds and adding 40. Sunlight can penetrate clean ocean water to a depth of 73 meters (240ft.)

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 16.6 meters (54 ft.)

The average ocean floor is about 3,600 meters deep (12000ft).

The North Atlantic gets 2.5 centimetres (1in) wider every year.

Hawaii is moving toward Japan 10 centimetres (4 inches) every year.

Due to gravitational effects, you weigh slightly less when the moon is directly overhead. Lake Baikal is the deepest lake in the world.

When hydrogen burns in the air, water is formed.

Most gemstones contain several elements, except diamond which is all carbon.

Diamonds are the hardest known substance. When glass breaks, the cracks move at speeds of more than 4,500 km/h (3,000 miles).

If you could throw a snowball fast enough, it would totally vaporize when it hit a brick wall.

On a clear day, a beam of sunlight can be reflected off a mirror and seen up to 40km away.

At the ocean's deepest point, due to immense pressure, an iron There is enough fuel in a full tank of ball would take more than an hour to sink to the ocean floor. a jumbo jet to drive an average car around the world four times.

A car travelling at 80 km/h uses half its fuel to overcome wind resistance.

Math facts & trivia - 1

From 0 to 1,000, the letter "A" only appears in 1,000 ("one thousand").
SUBMITTED BY: RAMIL ARGET E - PH

2 is called the "oddest" Even Prime-number. 2 is a unique Even Prime because all Even-numbers are divisible by 2. But any number apart from 2 that is divisible by 2, is not a Prime.

1 12 123 and

x x x so

9 + 2 = 11 9 + 3 = 111 9 + 4 = 1111 on. SUBMITT ED BY: RO B

40 when written "forty" is the only number with letters in alphabetical order, while "one" is the only one with letters in reverse order. SUBMITTED BY:
RO B

1 googol = 10 100 ; 1 googolplex = 10 googol = 10 10100 .

111 111 111 x 111 111 111 = 12345678 9 87654321

Pi (3.14159...) is a number that cannot be The opposite sides of a written as a fraction. SUBMITTED BY: T IFF dice cube always add up to W ITHERBEE, UNIT ED STAT ES seven. SUBMITT ED BY: RAMESH PUNE, INDIA

21978 when multiplied by 4 is the same number with digits in reverse order: 21978 x 4 = 87912

If you add up the numbers 1-100 consecutively (1+2+3+4+5...) the total is 5050.

The billionth digit of Pi is 9.

1 and 2 are the only numbers where they are the values of the numbers of factors they have.

2 and 5 are the only primes that end in 2 The largest prime number or 5. is 9,808,358 digits long; more than the number of atoms in the universe.

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.

astronomy facts & trivia - 1

The largest of modern constellations is Hydra. SUBMITTED With only 3 stars, Crux is the smallest of modern constellations.
SUBMITTED BY: CHRIS J IMMS - PH BY: CHRIS J IMMS - PH

Earth is the only planet not named after a Roman or Greek god. SUBMITT ED BY: J ACO B O HIO , UNITES ST AT ES.

Saturn's moon Titan has hundreds of times more oil and natural gas than all the known reserves on Earth.

Interstellar space is not complete If a pinhead-size piece of the vacuum: there are a few hydrogen atoms Sun were placed on Earth, one per cubic centimeter. SUBMITTED BY: SRUT HI R - would have to stand as far as CO IMBAT ORE, INDIA 145 kilometers (90 miles) away to be safe. SUBMITT ED BY: SRUTHI R CO IMBAT ORE, INDIA

The star "Lucy" in constellation A neutron star has Centaurus is actually a huge cosmic such density that a teaspoonful diamond of 10 billion trillion trillion of its matter would weigh more carats. SUBMITT ED BY: SRUTHI R - CO IMBATO RE, INDIA than all the people on Earth.

SUBMITTED BY: SRUTHI R - CO IMBATO RE, INDIA

Although it is closest to the Sun, Mercury has ice in its craters.

Due to its size, Pluto's moon Charon is also considered to be a double dwarf planet (two planets orbiting each other), rather than a moon orbiting its planet. SUBMITTED BY: J EUEL VALENZUELA CIT Y, PHILIPPINES

Jupiter is so big that twice the mass of the rest of our Solar System's planets combined would still not be enough to equal its mass.

Made up of billions of pieces of ice, the average thickness of each of Saturn's seven giant rings only ranges from about 200 to 3000 meters.

The deepest surface point on Mars is Hellas, about 3 km deep.

Pluto is no longer considered a planet. It is now known as a "Dwarf Planet".

The full moon always rises at sunset and sets at sunrise. About 1000 Earths would fit inside Jupiter - and the Sun could hold about 1000 Jupiters.

Voyager 1 spacecraft is the farthest human-made object in the universe. SUBMITT ED BY: HYDE

The planet Saturn has a density lower than water. So, if placed in water it would float.
SUBMITTED BY: AM, SING APORE

The speed of light - 299 million meters a second - would still take about 26 billion years to reach one end of the visible universe to the other. SUBMITTED BY: NIK, INDIA On Uranus, each pole gets around 42 years of continuous sunlight, followed by 42 years of darkness.
SUBMITTED BY: NICCI - J ACKSO NVILLE, NO RTH CARO LINA, UNITED ST ATES

The sky is blue because when sunlight collides with our atmosphere, colours of the shortest wavelengths (violet and blue) are scattered - and our eyes are more sensitive to see blue. SUBMITTED BY: K NEW YO RK, UNITED STAT ES

One of Jupiter's moons is believed to grow and shrink because of the water beneath its frozen surface. SUBMITT ED BY: J AY UNITED STAT ES

The number of neuron cells in our brain is more than the total number of stars in our galaxy. A dwarf star is so dense that it would take 8 men to lift a teaspoon full of its matter. SUBMITTED BY: HADES - MILLEDG EVILLE,
G EORGIA, UNIT ED ST ATES SUBMITTED BY: SIDD

The planet Venus has the longest day.

The Earth is the densest planet in the solar system.

The moon orbits the Earth every 27.32 days

Every second, the Sun pumps more than a million tons of material into the space through

the solar wind (electrically charged particles.)

The planet Venus does not tilt as it goes around the Sun, so consequently, it has no seasons.

Since Neptune's discovery in 1846, it has made just about three-quarters of one revolution around the Sun.

The pressure at the centre of the Earth is 27,000 tons per square inch.

Uranus is tipped on its side so that one pole is pointed at the Sun, so its poles are warmer than its equator.

The smallest planet in our solar system is Pluto (now called 'dwarf planet' and not a true planet.)

A cosmic year is the amount of time it takes the Sun to revolve around the center of the Milky Way, about 225 million years.

The star Alpha A day on the planet Mercury is Herculis is so big that 25 of our twice as long as its year. Mercury rotates entire solar system would have very slowly but revolves around the Sun to be placed end to end to equal in slightly less than 88 days. the star's diameter.

The star Sirius B is so dense, a handful The Sun contains over 99.8 of it weighs about 454,000 kgs (1 million percent of the total material pounds.) (mass) in our solar system, while Jupiter contains most of the rest.

The Sun is 330,330 times larger than Earth.

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. SUBMITT ED BY: DAM

A neutron star is the strongest magnet in A new star is born in our galaxy the universe. every 18 days.

If a pulsar's (small star made up of densely packed neutrons) piece the size of a small coin landed on Earth, it would weigh approximately 100 million tons.

A day on Mercury, from sunrise to sunset, lasts about six Earth months.

A space vehicle must move at a rate of at The Sun loses 360 million least 27.35km (17 miles) per second to tonnes of material each day. escape Earth's gravity.

The Earth-Moon size ratio is the largest in our solar system, excepting PlutoCharon.

The 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.

Olympus Mons on Mars is the largest Jupiter's core is non-metal, but volcano in our solar system, almost three due to the immense pressure times taller than Mount Everest on Earth. inside Jupiter, the core has become a metal. This metal is

liquid metallic hydrogen.

The cosmos contains approximately 50,000,000,000 galaxies. The hottest planet in the solar system is Venus, with an estimated surface temperature of 462 Celcius (864 F).

Sound travels about 4 times faster in water than in air.

A large sunspot can last for about a week.

The Earth orbits the sun at an average speed of 107,220 kms per hour.

There is a high and low tide because of our moon and the Sun.

The moon is one million times drier than The moon is 27% the size of the the Gobi Desert. Submitted by: Carol Earth. Cooper - United States

The Earth weighs 6.6 sextillion tons, or 5.97 x 1024 kg.

Sunlight takes about 8 minutes & 20 seconds to reach the Earth at 186,282 miles/sec (299,792 Km/sec).

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