1. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second.
2. It takes 8 minutes 17 seconds for light to travel from the Sun’s surface to the Earth.
3. In October 1999 the 6 billionth person was born.
4. 10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.
5. The Earth spins at 1,000 mph but it travels through space at an incredible 67,000 mph.
6. Every year over one million earthquakes shake the Earth.
7. The largest ever hailstone weighed over 1 kg and fell in Bangladesh in 1986.
8. Every second around 100 lightning bolts strike the Earth.
9. Every year lightning kills 1000 people.
10. In October 1999 an Iceberg the size of London broke free from the Antarctic ice shelf.
11. If you could drive your car straight up you would arrive in space in just over an hour.
12. All the hydrogen atoms in our bodies were created 12 billion years ago in the Big Bang.
13. The Earth is 4.56 billion years old…the same age as the Moon and the Sun.
14. The dinosaurs became extinct before the Rockies or the Alps were formed.
15. Female black widow spiders eat their males after mating.
16. When a flea jumps, the rate of acceleration is 20 times that of the space shuttle during launch.
17. The earliest wine makers lived in Egypt around 2300 BC.
18. If our Sun were just inch in diameter, the nearest star would be 445 miles away.
19. The Australian billy goat plum contains 100 times more vitamin C than an orange.
20. Astronauts cannot belch - there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their stomachs.
21. The air at the summit of Mount Everest, 29,029 feet is only a third as thick as the air at sea level.
22. One million, million, million, million, millionth of a second after the Big Bang the Universe was the size of a …pea.
23. DNA was first discovered in 1869 by Swiss Friedrich Mieschler.
24. The molecular structure of DNA was first determined by Watson and Crick in 1953.
25. The thermometer was invented in 1607 by Galileo.
26. Englishman Roger Bacon invented the magnifying glass in 1250.
27. Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1866.
28. Wilhelm Rontgen won the first Nobel Prize for physics for discovering X-rays in 1895.
29. The tallest tree ever was an Australian eucalyptus - In 1872 it was measured at 435 feet tall.
30. Christian Barnard performed the first heart transplant in 1967 - the patient lived for 18 days.
31. The wingspan of a Boeing 747 is longer than the Wright brother’s first flight.
32. An electric eel can produce a shock of up to 650 volts.
33. Human tapeworms can grow up to 22.9m.
34. Chimps can understand 300 different signs.
35. The Ebola virus kills 4 out of every 5 humans it infects.
36. In 5 billion years the Sun will run out of fuel and turn into a Red Giant.
37. Without its lining of mucus your stomach would digest itself.
38. Humans have 46 chromosomes, peas have 14 and crayfish have 200.
39. There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.
40. An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.
41. On the day that Alexander Graham Bell was buried the entire US telephone system was shut down for 1 minute in tribute.
42. The low frequency call of the humpback whale is the loudest noise made by a living creature.
43. The call of the humpback whale is louder than Concorde and can be heard from 500 miles away.
44. A quarter of the world’s plants are threatened with extinction by the year 2010.
45. Each person sheds 40lbs of skin in his or her lifetime.
46. At 15 inches the eyes of giant squids are the largest on the planet.
47. The largest galaxies contain a million, million stars.
48. The Universe contains over 100 billion galaxies.
49. Wounds infested with maggots heal quickly and without spread of gangrene or other infection.
50. More germs are transferred shaking hands than kissing.
51. The longest glacier in Antarctica, the Almbert glacier, is 250 miles long and 40 miles wide.
52. The fastest speed a falling raindrop can hit you is 18mph.
53. A salmon-rich, low cholesterol diet means that Inuits rarely suffer from heart disease.
54. Inbreeding causes 3 out of every 10 Dalmation dogs to suffer from hearing disability.
55. The world’s smallest winged insect, the Tanzanian parasitic wasp, is smaller than the eye of a housefly.
56. If the Sun were the size of a beach ball then Jupiter would be the size of a golf ball and the Earth would be as small as a pea.
57. It would take over an hour for a heavy object to sink 6.7 miles down to the deepest part of the ocean.
58. There are more living organisms on the skin of each human than there are humans on the surface of the earth.
59. The grey whale migrates 12,500 miles from the Artic to Mexico and back every year.
60. Quasars emit more energy than 100 giant galaxies.
61. Quasars are the most distant objects in the Universe.
62. The Saturn V rocket which carried man to the Moon develops power equivalent to fifty 747 jumbo jets.
63. Koalas sleep an average of 22 hours a day, two hours more than the sloth.
64. Light would take .13 seconds to travel around the Earth.
65. Neutron stars are so dense that a teaspoonful would weigh more than all the people on Earth.
66. One in every 2000 babies is born with a tooth.
67. Every hour the Universe expands by a billion miles in all directions.
68. Somewhere in the flicker of a badly tuned TV set is the background radiation from the Big Bang.
69. The temperature in Antarctica plummets as low as -35 degrees Celsius.
70. Space debris travels through space at over 18,000 mph.
71. The International Space Station weighs about 500 tons and is the same size as a football field.
72. Astronauts brought back about 800 pounds of lunar rock to Earth. Most of it has not been analyzed.
73. Tuberculosis is the biggest global killer of women.
74. Hummingbirds consume half of their body weight in food every day.
75. Some species of bamboo grow at a rate of 3ft per day.
76. Saturn would float if you could find an ocean big enough.
77. The highest recorded train speed is 320.2 mph by the TGV train in France.
78. The highest speed ever achieved on a bicycle is 166.94 mph by Fred Rompelburg.
79. The research spacecraft Helios B came within a record 27 million miles of the Sun.
80. 65 million years ago the impact of an asteroid is estimated to have had the power of 10 million H-Bombs.
81. The temperature at the centre of the Earth is estimated to be 5500 degrees Celsius.
82. Argentia in Newfoundland has an average 206 days of fog each year.
83. Mount Waiale’ale in Hawaii is the rainiest place in the world and has 335 rainy days a year.
84. 68% of all UFO sightings are by men.
85. 15% of the world’s fresh water flows down the Amazon.
86. A cat has 32 sets of muscles in each ear.
87. Over two-thirds of people admit to urinating while in public swimming pools.
88. More people die of heart attacks on Monday than on any other day of the week.
89. Beetles are the strongest animals on Earth relative to their size. A rhinoceros beetle can carry 850 times its own weight in its back.
90. In 1961 the Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in Space.
91. In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.
92. In 1885 Karl Benz built the first car powered by an internal combustion engine.
93. Scotsman John Baird invented the Baird televisor (now the television) in 1925.
94. Io, one of Jupiter’s moons, is the most volcanically active place in the Solar System.
95. The Walkman was launched in Japan by Sony in 1979.
96. Traffic lights with red and green gas lights were first introduced in London in 1868. Unfortunately, they exploded and killed a policeman. The first successful system was installed in Cleveland, Ohio in 1914.
97. Ticks are second only to the mosquito as the most dangerous parasites to humans.
98. 3 billion of the world’s 6 billion population are under the age of 25.
99. Infant mortality in 1900 was 142 in 1000 births. By 2000 it had reduced to just 6 in every 1000.
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