100 Important 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.
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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.

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.