1 – The speed of light is generally rounded down to 186,000 miles per second. In exact terms it is 299,792,458 m/s (equal to 186,287.49 miles per second).
2 – It takes 8 minutes 17 seconds for light to travel from the Sun’s surface to the Earth.
3 – 10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.
4 – The Earth spins at 1,000 mph but it travels through space at an incredible 67,000 mph.
5 – Every year, over one million earthquakes shake the Earth.
6 – When Krakatoa erupted in 1883, its force was so great it could be heard 4,800 kilometers away in Australia.
7 – Every second around 100 lightning bolts strike the Earth.
8 – Every year lightning kills 1000 people.
9 – In October 1999 an Iceberg the size of London broke free from the Antarctic ice shelf .
10 – If you could drive your car straight up you would arrive in space in just over an hour.
11 – Human tapeworms can grow up to 22.9m.
12 – The Earth is 4.56 billion years old…the same age as the Moon and the Sun.
13 – The dinosaurs became extinct before the Rockies or the Alps were formed.
14 – Female black widow spiders eat their males after mating.
15 – When a flea jumps, the rate of acceleration is 20 times that of the space shuttle during launch.
16 – If our Sun were just inch in diameter, the nearest star would be 445 miles away.
17 – Astronauts cannot belch – there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their stomachs.
18 – The air at the summit of Mount Everest, 29,029 feet is only a third as thick as the air at sea level.
19 – One million, million, million, million, millionth of a second after the Big Bang the Universe was the size of a …pea.
20 – DNA was first discovered in 1869 by Swiss Friedrich Mieschler.
21 – The molecular structure of DNA was first determined by Watson and Crick in 1953.
22 – The first synthetic human chromosome was constructed by US scientists in 1997.
23 – The thermometer was invented in 1607 by Galileo.
24 – Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1866.
25 – Wilhelm Rontgen won the first Nobel Prize for physics for discovering X-rays in 1895.
26 – The tallest tree ever was an Australian eucalyptus – In 1872 it was measured at 435 feet tall.
27 – Christian Barnard performed the first heart transplant in 1967 – the patient lived for 18 days.
28 – An electric eel can produce a shock of up to 650 volts.
29 – ‘Wireless’ communications took a giant leap forward in 1962 with the launch of Telstar, the first satellite capable of relaying telephone and satellite TV signals.
30 – The Ebola virus kills 4 out of every 5 humans it infects.
31 – In 5 billion years the Sun will run out of fuel and turn into a Red Giant.
32 – Giraffes often sleep for only 20 minutes in any 24 hours. They may sleep up to 2 hours (in spurts – not all at once), but this is rare. They never lie down.
33 – There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.
34 – An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.
35 – On the day that Alexander Graham Bell was buried the entire US telephone system was shut down for 1 minute in tribute.
36 – The low frequency call of the humpback whale is the loudest noise made by a living creature.
37 – A quarter of the world’s plants are threatened with extinction by the year 2010.
38 – Each person sheds 40lbs of skin in his or her lifetime.
39 – At 15 inches the eyes of giant squids are the largest on the planet.
40 – The Universe contains over 100 billion galaxies.
41 – Wounds infested with maggots heal quickly and without spread of gangrene or other infection.
42 – More germs are transferred shaking hands than kissing.
43 – The fastest speed a falling raindrop can hit you is 18mph.
44 – It would take over an hour for a heavy object to sink 6.7 miles down to the deepest part of the ocean.
45 – Around a million, billion neutrinos from the Sun will pass through your body while you read this sentence.
46 – The deepest part of any ocean in the world is the Mariana trench in the Pacific with a depth of 35,797 feet.
47 – Every hour the Universe expands by a billion miles in all directions.
48 – Somewhere in the flicker of a badly tuned TV set is the background radiation from the Big Bang.
49 – Even traveling at the speed of light it would take 2 million years to reach the nearest large galaxy, Andromeda.
50 – A thimbleful of a neutron star would weigh over 100 million tons.
51 – LOST is the greatest television show of all time (I had to add this, it’s Wednesday!)
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