100 Interesting Facts about Our World
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 (meters per second - that is 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] October 12th, 1999 was declared "The Day of Six Billion" based on United Nations projections.
4] 10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.
5] The Earth spins at 1,000 mph but it travels through space at an incredible 67,000 mph.
6] Every year over one million earthquakes shake the Earth.
7] When Krakatoa erupted in 1883, its force was so great it could be heard 4,800 kilometers away in Australia.
8] The largest ever hailstone weighed over 1kg and fell in Bangladesh in 1986.
9] Every second around 100 lightning bolts strike the Earth.
10] Every year lightning kills 1000 people.
11] In October 1999 an Iceberg the size of London broke free from the Antarctic ice shelf .
12] If you could drive your car straight up you would arrive in space in just over an hour.
13] Human tapeworms can grow up to 22.9m.
14] The Earth is 4.56 billion years old...the same age as the Moon and the Sun.
15] The dinosaurs became extinct before the Rockies or the Alps were formed.
16] Female black widow spiders eat their males after mating.
17] When a flea jumps, the rate of acceleration is 20 times that of the space shuttle during launch.
19] If our Sun were just inch in diameter, the nearest star would be 445 miles away.
20] The Australian billygoat plum contains 100 times more vitamin C than an orange.
21] Astronauts cannot belch - there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their stomachs.
22] The air at the summit of Mount Everest, 29,029 feet is only a third as thick as the air at sea level.
23] One million, million, million, million, millionth of a second after the Big Bang the Universe was the size of a ...pea.
24] DNA was first discovered in 1869 by Swiss Friedrich Mieschler.
25] The molecular structure of DNA was first determined by Watson and Crick in 1953.
26] The first synthetic human chromosome was constructed by US scientists in 1997.
27] The thermometer was invented in 1607 by Galileo.
28] Englishman Roger Bacon invented the magnifying glass in 1250.
29] Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1866.
30] Wilhelm Rontgen won the first Nobel Prize for physics for discovering X-rays in 1895.
31] The tallest tree ever was an Australian eucalyptus - In 1872 it was measured at 435 feet tall.
32] Christian Barnard performed the first heart transplant in 1967 - the patient lived for 18 days.
33] The wingspan of a Boeing 747 is longer than the Wright brother's first flight.
34] An electric eel can produce a shock of up to 650 volts.
35] '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.
36] The earliest wine makers lived in Egypt around 2300 BC.
37] The Ebola virus kills 4 out of every 5 humans it infects.
38] In 5 billion years the Sun will run out of fuel and turn into a Red Giant.
39] 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.
40] A pig's orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.
41] Without its lining of mucus your stomach would digest itself.
42] Humans have 46 chromosomes, peas have 14 and crayfish have 200.
43] There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.
44] An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.
45] Utopia ia a large, smooth lying area of Mars.
46] On the day that Alexander Graham Bell was buried the entire US telephone system was shut down for 1 minute in tribute.
47] The low frequency call of the humpback whale is the loudest noise made by a living creature.
48] The call of the humpback whale is louder than Concorde and can be heard from 500 miles away.
49] A quarter of the world's plants are threatened with extinction by the year 2010.
50] Each person sheds 40lbs of skin in his or her lifetime.
51] At 15 inches the eyes of giant squids are the largest on the planet.
[s2]52] The largest galaxies contain a million, million stars.
53] The Universe contains over 100 billion galaxies.
54] Wounds infested with maggots heal quickly and without spread of gangrene or other infection.
55] More germs are transferred shaking hands than kissing.
56] The longest glacier in Antarctica, the Almbert glacier, is 250 miles long and 40 miles wide.
57] The fastest speed a falling raindrop can hit you is 18mph.
58] A healthy person has 6,000 million, million, million hemoglobin molecules.
59] A salmon-rich, low cholesterol diet means that Inuits rarely suffer from heart disease.
60] Inbreeding causes 3 out of every 10 Dalmatian dogs to suffer from hearing disability.
61] The world's smallest winged insect, the Tanzanian parasitic wasp, is smaller than the eye of a housefly.
62] If the Sun were the size of a beach ball then Jupiter would be the size of a golf ball and the Earth would be as small as a pea.
63] It would take over an hour for a heavy object to sink 6.7 miles down to the deepest part of the ocean.
64] There are more living organisms on the skin of each human than there are humans on the surface of the earth.
65] The grey whale migrates 12,500 miles from the Arctic to Mexico and back every year.
66] Each rubber molecule is made of 65,000 individual atoms.
67] Around a million, billion neutrinos from the Sun will pass through your body while you read this sentence.
68]...and now they are already past the Moon.
69] Quasars emit more energy than 100 giant galaxies.
70] Quasars are the most distant objects in the Universe.
71] The Saturn V rocket which carried man to the Moon develops power equivalent to fifty 747 jumbo jets.
72] Koalas sleep an average of 22 hours a day, two hours more than the sloth.
73] Light would take .13 seconds to travel around the Earth.
74] Males produce one thousand sperm cells each second - 86 million each day.
75] Neutron stars are so dense that a teaspoonful would weigh more than all the people on Earth.
76] One in every 2000 babies is born with a tooth.
77] Every hour the Universe expands by a billion miles in all directions.
78] Somewhere in the flicker of a badly tuned TV set is the background radiation from the Big Bang.
79] Even traveling at the speed of light it would take 2 million years to reach the nearest large galaxy, Andromeda.
80] The temperature in Antarctica plummets as low as -35 degrees Celsius.
81] At over 2000 kilometers long The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth.
82] A thimbleful of a neutron star would weigh over 100 million tons.
83] The risk of being struck by a falling meteorite for a human is one occurrence every 9,300 years.
84] The driest inhabited place in the world is Aswan, Egypt where the annual average rainfall is .02 inches.
85] The deepest part of any ocean in the world is the Mariana trench in the Pacific with a depth of 35,797 feet.
86] The largest meteorite craters in the world are in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada and in Vredefort, South Africa.
87] The largest desert in the world, the Sahara, is 3,500,000 square miles.
88] The largest dinosaur ever discovered was Seismosaurus who was over 100 feet long and weighed up to 80 tonnes.
89] The African Elephant gestates for 22 months.
90] The short-nosed Bandicoot has a gestation period of only 12 days.
91] The mortality rate if bitten by a Black Mamba snake is over 95%.
92] In the 14th century the Black Death killed 75,000,000 people. It was carried by fleas on the black rat.
93] A dog's sense of smell is 1,000 times more sensitive than a humans.
94] A typical hurricane produces the nergy equivalent to 8,000 one megaton bombs.
95] 90% of those who die from hurricanes die from drowning.
96] To escape the Earth's gravity a rocket need to travel at 7 miles a second.
97] If every star in the Milky Way was a grain of salt they would fill an Olympic sized swimming pool.
98] Microbial life can survive on the cooling rods of a nuclear reactor.
99] Micro-organisms have been brought back to life after being frozen in perma-frost for three million years.
100] Our oldest radio broadcasts of the 1930s have already traveled past 100,000 stars.
2] It takes 8 minutes 17 seconds for light to travel from the Sun's surface to the Earth.
3] October 12th, 1999 was declared "The Day of Six Billion" based on United Nations projections.
4] 10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.
5] The Earth spins at 1,000 mph but it travels through space at an incredible 67,000 mph.
6] Every year over one million earthquakes shake the Earth.
7] When Krakatoa erupted in 1883, its force was so great it could be heard 4,800 kilometers away in Australia.
8] The largest ever hailstone weighed over 1kg and fell in Bangladesh in 1986.
9] Every second around 100 lightning bolts strike the Earth.
10] Every year lightning kills 1000 people.
11] In October 1999 an Iceberg the size of London broke free from the Antarctic ice shelf .
12] If you could drive your car straight up you would arrive in space in just over an hour.
13] Human tapeworms can grow up to 22.9m.
14] The Earth is 4.56 billion years old...the same age as the Moon and the Sun.
15] The dinosaurs became extinct before the Rockies or the Alps were formed.
16] Female black widow spiders eat their males after mating.
17] When a flea jumps, the rate of acceleration is 20 times that of the space shuttle during launch.
19] If our Sun were just inch in diameter, the nearest star would be 445 miles away.
20] The Australian billygoat plum contains 100 times more vitamin C than an orange.
21] Astronauts cannot belch - there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their stomachs.
22] The air at the summit of Mount Everest, 29,029 feet is only a third as thick as the air at sea level.
23] One million, million, million, million, millionth of a second after the Big Bang the Universe was the size of a ...pea.
24] DNA was first discovered in 1869 by Swiss Friedrich Mieschler.
25] The molecular structure of DNA was first determined by Watson and Crick in 1953.
26] The first synthetic human chromosome was constructed by US scientists in 1997.
27] The thermometer was invented in 1607 by Galileo.
28] Englishman Roger Bacon invented the magnifying glass in 1250.
29] Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1866.
30] Wilhelm Rontgen won the first Nobel Prize for physics for discovering X-rays in 1895.
31] The tallest tree ever was an Australian eucalyptus - In 1872 it was measured at 435 feet tall.
32] Christian Barnard performed the first heart transplant in 1967 - the patient lived for 18 days.
33] The wingspan of a Boeing 747 is longer than the Wright brother's first flight.
34] An electric eel can produce a shock of up to 650 volts.
35] '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.
36] The earliest wine makers lived in Egypt around 2300 BC.
37] The Ebola virus kills 4 out of every 5 humans it infects.
38] In 5 billion years the Sun will run out of fuel and turn into a Red Giant.
39] 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.
40] A pig's orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.
41] Without its lining of mucus your stomach would digest itself.
42] Humans have 46 chromosomes, peas have 14 and crayfish have 200.
43] There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.
44] An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.
45] Utopia ia a large, smooth lying area of Mars.
46] On the day that Alexander Graham Bell was buried the entire US telephone system was shut down for 1 minute in tribute.
47] The low frequency call of the humpback whale is the loudest noise made by a living creature.
48] The call of the humpback whale is louder than Concorde and can be heard from 500 miles away.
49] A quarter of the world's plants are threatened with extinction by the year 2010.
50] Each person sheds 40lbs of skin in his or her lifetime.
51] At 15 inches the eyes of giant squids are the largest on the planet.
[s2]52] The largest galaxies contain a million, million stars.
53] The Universe contains over 100 billion galaxies.
54] Wounds infested with maggots heal quickly and without spread of gangrene or other infection.
55] More germs are transferred shaking hands than kissing.
56] The longest glacier in Antarctica, the Almbert glacier, is 250 miles long and 40 miles wide.
57] The fastest speed a falling raindrop can hit you is 18mph.
58] A healthy person has 6,000 million, million, million hemoglobin molecules.
59] A salmon-rich, low cholesterol diet means that Inuits rarely suffer from heart disease.
60] Inbreeding causes 3 out of every 10 Dalmatian dogs to suffer from hearing disability.
61] The world's smallest winged insect, the Tanzanian parasitic wasp, is smaller than the eye of a housefly.
62] If the Sun were the size of a beach ball then Jupiter would be the size of a golf ball and the Earth would be as small as a pea.
63] It would take over an hour for a heavy object to sink 6.7 miles down to the deepest part of the ocean.
64] There are more living organisms on the skin of each human than there are humans on the surface of the earth.
65] The grey whale migrates 12,500 miles from the Arctic to Mexico and back every year.
66] Each rubber molecule is made of 65,000 individual atoms.
67] Around a million, billion neutrinos from the Sun will pass through your body while you read this sentence.
68]...and now they are already past the Moon.
69] Quasars emit more energy than 100 giant galaxies.
70] Quasars are the most distant objects in the Universe.
71] The Saturn V rocket which carried man to the Moon develops power equivalent to fifty 747 jumbo jets.
72] Koalas sleep an average of 22 hours a day, two hours more than the sloth.
73] Light would take .13 seconds to travel around the Earth.
74] Males produce one thousand sperm cells each second - 86 million each day.
75] Neutron stars are so dense that a teaspoonful would weigh more than all the people on Earth.
76] One in every 2000 babies is born with a tooth.
77] Every hour the Universe expands by a billion miles in all directions.
78] Somewhere in the flicker of a badly tuned TV set is the background radiation from the Big Bang.
79] Even traveling at the speed of light it would take 2 million years to reach the nearest large galaxy, Andromeda.
80] The temperature in Antarctica plummets as low as -35 degrees Celsius.
81] At over 2000 kilometers long The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth.
82] A thimbleful of a neutron star would weigh over 100 million tons.
83] The risk of being struck by a falling meteorite for a human is one occurrence every 9,300 years.
84] The driest inhabited place in the world is Aswan, Egypt where the annual average rainfall is .02 inches.
85] The deepest part of any ocean in the world is the Mariana trench in the Pacific with a depth of 35,797 feet.
86] The largest meteorite craters in the world are in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada and in Vredefort, South Africa.
87] The largest desert in the world, the Sahara, is 3,500,000 square miles.
88] The largest dinosaur ever discovered was Seismosaurus who was over 100 feet long and weighed up to 80 tonnes.
89] The African Elephant gestates for 22 months.
90] The short-nosed Bandicoot has a gestation period of only 12 days.
91] The mortality rate if bitten by a Black Mamba snake is over 95%.
92] In the 14th century the Black Death killed 75,000,000 people. It was carried by fleas on the black rat.
93] A dog's sense of smell is 1,000 times more sensitive than a humans.
94] A typical hurricane produces the nergy equivalent to 8,000 one megaton bombs.
95] 90% of those who die from hurricanes die from drowning.
96] To escape the Earth's gravity a rocket need to travel at 7 miles a second.
97] If every star in the Milky Way was a grain of salt they would fill an Olympic sized swimming pool.
98] Microbial life can survive on the cooling rods of a nuclear reactor.
99] Micro-organisms have been brought back to life after being frozen in perma-frost for three million years.
100] Our oldest radio broadcasts of the 1930s have already traveled past 100,000 stars.
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