Fun Zone: April 2006

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 (metres 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 kilometres 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.
18/ Every 7th person in the world is an indian.
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.
52/ The largest galexies 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 haemoglobin molecules.
59/ A salmon-rich, low cholesterol diet means that Inuits rarely suffer from heart disease.
60/ Inbreeding causes 3 out of every 10 Dalmation 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 Artic 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 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/ 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 occurence 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 travelled past 100,000 stars.

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