50 Interesting Science Facts

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 (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. 10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.
4. The Earth spins at 1,000 mph but it travels through space at an incredible 67,000 mph.
5. Every year, over one million earthquakes shake the Earth.
6. When Krakatoa erupted in 1883, its force was so great it could be heard 4,800 kilometers away in Australia.
7. Every second around 100 lightning bolts strike the Earth.
8. Every year lightning kills 1000 people.
9. In October 1999 an Iceberg the size of London broke free from the Antarctic ice shelf .
10. If you could drive your car straight up you would arrive in space in just over an hour.
11. Human tapeworms can grow up to 22.9m.
12. The Earth is 4.56 billion years old…the same age as the Moon and the Sun.
13. The dinosaurs became extinct before the Rockies or the Alps were formed.
14. Female black widow spiders eat their males after mating.
15. When a flea jumps, the rate of acceleration is 20 times that of the space shuttle during launch.
16. If our Sun were just inch in diameter, the nearest star would be 445 miles away.
17. Astronauts cannot belch – there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their stomachs.
18. The air at the summit of Mount Everest, 29,029 feet is only a third as thick as the air at sea level.
19. One million, million, million, million, millionth of a second after the Big Bang the Universe was the size of pea.
20. DNA was first discovered in 1869 by Swiss Friedrich Mieschler.
21. The molecular structure of DNA was first determined by Watson and Crick in 1953.
22. The first synthetic human chromosome was constructed by US scientists in 1997.
23. The thermometer was invented in 1607 by Galileo.
24. Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1866.
25. Wilhelm Rontgen won the first Nobel Prize for physics for discovering X-rays in 1895.
26. The tallest tree ever was an Australian eucalyptus – In 1872 it was measured at 435 feet tall.
27. Christian Barnard performed the first heart transplant in 1967 – the patient lived for 18 days.
28. An electric eel can produce a shock of up to 650 volts.
29. ‘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.
30. The Ebola virus kills 4 out of every 5 humans it infects.
31. In 5 billion years the Sun will run out of fuel and turn into a Red Giant.
32. 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.
33. There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.
34. An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.
35. On the day that Alexander Graham Bell was buried the entire US telephone system was shut down for 1 minute in tribute.
36. The low frequency call of the humpback whale is the loudest noise made by a living creature.
37. A quarter of the world’s plants are threatened with extinction by the year 2010.
38. Each person sheds 40lbs of skin in his or her lifetime.
39. At 15 inches the eyes of giant squids are the largest on the planet.
40. The Universe contains over 100 billion galaxies.
41. Wounds infested with maggots heal quickly and without spread of gangrene or other infection.
42. More germs are transferred shaking hands than kissing.
43. The fastest speed a falling raindrop can hit you is 18mph.
44. It would take over an hour for a heavy object to sink 6.7 miles down to the deepest part of the ocean.
45. Around a million, billion neutrinos from the Sun will pass through your body while you read this sentence.
46. The deepest part of any ocean in the world is the Mariana trench in the Pacific with a depth of 35,797 feet.
47. Every hour the Universe expands by a billion miles in all directions.
48. Somewhere in the flicker of a badly tuned TV set is the background radiation from the Big Bang.
49. Even traveling at the speed of light it would take 2 million years to reach the nearest large galaxy, Andromeda.
50. A thimbleful of a neutron star would weigh over 100 million tons.

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