50 Interesting Science Facts 1 – The speed of light is - TopicsExpress



          

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 a …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.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 13:50:09 +0000

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