Scientific Facts

1. * Planck's Length : Length is always an integral multiple of this length. This is a Quantum of Length
2.  Diameter of Proton: 10^-20 Meter
3.  Diameter of Electron: 10^-17 Meter
4.  Planck's Time : time is always integral multiple of this time. This is Quantum of Time.One Planck time is the time it would take a photon travelling at the speed of light to cross a distance equal to one Planck length. Theoretically, this is the smallest time measurement that will ever be possible,
5. There are 62,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body – laid end to end they would circle the earth 2.5 times
6. At over 2000 kilometers long, The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth
7. The risk of being struck by a falling meteorite for a human is one occurrence every 9,300 years
8.  A thimbleful of a neutron star would weigh over 100 million tons
9.  A typical hurricane produces the energy equivalent of 8,000 one megaton bombs
10. Blood sucking hookworms inhabit 700 million people worldwide
11.  The highest speed ever achieved on a bicycle is 166.94 mph, by Fred Rompelberg
12.  We can produce laser light a million times brighter than sunshine
13. 65% of those with autism are left handed
14. The combined length of the roots of a Finnish pine tree is over 30 miles
16. The oceans contain enough salt to cover all the continents to a depth of nearly 500 feet
17.  The interstellar gas cloud Sagittarius B contains a billion, billion, billion liters of alcohol [JFrater is planning to move there in the near future]
18.  Polar Bears can run at 25 miles an hour and jump over 6 feet in the air
19.  60-65 million years ago dolphins and humans shared a common ancestor
20.  Polar Bears are nearly undetectable by infrared cameras, due to their transparent fur
21. The average person accidentally eats 430 bugs each year of their life
22.  The average person accidentally eats 430 bugs each year of their life
23.  A single rye plant can spread up to 400 miles of roots underground
24.  The temperature on the surface of Mercury exceeds 430 degrees C during the day, and, at night, plummets to minus 180 degrees centigrade
25.  The evaporation from a large oak or beech tree is from ten to twenty-five gallons in twenty-four hours
26.  Butterflies taste with their hind feet, and their taste sensation works on touch – this allows them to determine whether a leaf is edible
27.  The speed of light is exactly 186,287.49 miles per second or 299,792,458 meters per second.
28.  It takes 8 minutes 17 seconds for light to travel from the Sun’s surface to the Earth.
29.  10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.
30.  The Earth spins at 1,000 mph but it travels through space at an incredible 67,000 mph.
31.  Every year over one million earthquakes shake the Earth.
32.  When Krakatoa erupted in 1883, its force was so great it could be heard 3000 miles away in Australia.
33.  The largest hailstone measured weighed over two pounds and fell in Bangladesh in 1986.
34.  Every second around 100 lightning bolts strike the Earth.
35.  Every year lightning kills 1000 people.
36.  On February 20, 2010 an Iceberg the size of Rhode island broke free from the Antarctic ice shelf  (see clickable image below).
37.  If you could drive your car straight up you would arrive in space in just over an hour.
38.  The air at the summit of Mount Everest, 29,029 feet is only a third as thick as the air at sea level.
39.  DNA was first discovered in 1869 by Swiss Friedrich Mieschler.
40.  The molecular structure of DNA was first determined by Watson and Crick in 1953.
41.  The first synthetic human chromosome was constructed by US scientists in 1997.
42.  The thermometer was invented in 1607 by Galileo.
43.  Englishman Roger Bacon invented the magnifying glass in 1250.
44.  Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1866.
45.  The tallest tree ever was an Australian eucalyptus – In 1872 it was measured at 435 feet tall.
46.  Christian Barnard performed the first heart transplant in 1967 – the patient lived for 18 days.
47.  The wingspan of a Boeing 747 is longer than the Wright brother’s first flight.
48.  An electric eel can produce a shock of up to 650 volts.
49.  ‘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.
50.  The earliest wine makers lived in Egypt around 2300 BC.
51.  The Ebola virus kills 4 out of every 5 humans it infects.
52.  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.
53.  A pig’s orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.
54.  Without its lining of mucus your stomach would digest itself.
55.  Humans have 46 chromosomes, peas have 14 and crayfish have 200.
56.  There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.
57.  An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.
58.  The low frequency call of the humpback whale is the loudest noise made by a living creature.
59.  The call of the humpback whale is louder than Concorde and can be heard from 500 miles away.
60.  A quarter of the world’s plants are threatened with extinction by the end of 2010.
61.  Each person sheds 40 pounds of skin in his or her lifetime.
62.  At 15 inches the eyes of giant squids are the largest on the planet.
63.  The largest galaxies contain a million, million stars.
64.  It is thought the Universe contains over 100 billion galaxies.
65.  Wounds infested with maggots heal quickly and without spread of gangrene or other infection.
66.  More germs are transferred shaking hands than kissing.
67.  The longest glacier in Antarctica, the Almbert glacier, is 250 miles long and 40 miles wide.
68.  The fastest speed a falling raindrop can hit you is 18mph.
69.  A healthy person has 6,000 million, million, million haemoglobin molecules.
70.  A salmon-rich, low cholesterol diet means that Inuits rarely suffer from heart disease.
71.  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.
72.  It would take over an hour for a heavy object to sink 6.7 miles down to the deepest part of the ocean.
73.  There are more living organisms on the skin of each human than there are humans on the surface of the earth.
74.  The grey whale migrates 12,500 miles from the Artic to Mexico and back every year.
75.  The Saturn V rocket which carried man to the Moon develops power equivalent to fifty 747 jumbo jets.
76.  Koalas sleep an average of 22 hours a day, two hours more than the sloth.
77.  Light would take .13 seconds to travel around the Earth.
78.  Males produce one thousand sperm cells each second – 86 million each day.
79.  Even travelling 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 kilometres long The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth.
82.  The driest inhabited place in the world is Aswan, Egypt where the annual average rainfall is .02 inches.
83.  The deepest part of any ocean in the world is the Mariana trench in the Pacific with a depth of 35,797 feet.
84.  The largest meteorite craters in the world are in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada and in Vredefort, South Africa.
85.  The largest desert in the world, the Sahara, is 3,500,000 square miles.
86.  The largest dinosaur ever discovered was Seismosaurus who was over 100 feet long and weighed up to 80 tons.
87.  The African Elephant gestates for 22 months.
88.  The mortality rate if bitten by a Black Mamba snake is over 95%.
89.  In the 14th century the Black Death killed 75,000,000 people. It was carried by fleas on the black rat.
90.  A dog’s sense of smell is 1,000 times more sensitive than a humans.
91.  A typical hurricane produces the energy equivalent to 8,000 one megaton bombs.
92.  To escape the Earth’s gravity a rocket need to travel at 7 miles a second.
93.  Microbial life can survive on the cooling rods of a nuclear reactor.
94.  Human tapeworms can grow up to 22.9m.
95.  Female black widow spiders eat their males after mating.
96.  When a flea jumps, the rate of acceleration is 20 times that of the space shuttle during launch.
97.  The Australian billygoat plum contains 100 times more vitamin C than an orange.
98.  Astronauts cannot belch – there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their stomachs.
99.  There are over 1000 thunderstorms going on at any given time.