PINOY EXPATS
WELCOME TO SCIENCE FACTS!
It takes 8 minutes 17 seconds for light to travel from the Sun's surface to the Earth.
October 12th, 1999 was declared "The Day of Six Billion" based on United Nations projections.
10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.
The Earth spins at 1,000 mph but it travels through space at an incredible 67,000 mph.
Every year over one million earthquakes shake the Earth.
When Krakatoa erupted in 1883, its force was so great it could be heard 4,800 kilometres away in Australia.
The largest ever hailstone weighed over 1kg and fell in Bangladesh in 1986.
Every second around 100 lightning bolts strike the Earth.
Every year lightning kills 1000 people.
In October 1999 an Iceberg the size of London broke free from the Antarctic ice shelf .
If you could drive your car straight up you would arrive in space in just over an hour.
Human tapeworms can grow up to 22.9m.
The Earth is 4.56 billion years old...the same age as the Moon and the Sun.
The dinosaurs became extinct before the Rockies or the Alps were formed.
Female black widow spiders eat their males after mating.
When a flea jumps, the rate of acceleration is 20 times that of the space shuttle during launch.
Webhosting.info have estimated that the United States has over 22,000 web hosting companies and over 25 million domain names!
If our Sun were just inch in diameter, the nearest star would be 445 miles away.
The Australian billygoat plum contains 100 times more vitamin C than an orange.
The world's smallest winged insect, the Tanzanian parasitic wasp, is smaller than the eye of a housefly.
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.
It would take over an hour for a heavy object to sink 6.7 miles down to the deepest part of the ocean.
There are more living organisms on the skin of each human than there are humans on the surface of the earth.
The grey whale migrates 12,500 miles from the Artic to Mexico and back every year.
Each rubber molecule is made of 65,000 individual atoms.
Around a million, billion neutrinos from the Sun will pass through your body while you read this sentence. ...and now they are already past the Moon.
Quasars emit more energy than 100 giant galaxies.
Quasars are the most distant objects in the Universe.
The saturn V rocket which carried man to the Moon develops power equivalent to fifty 747 jumbo jets.
Koalas sleep an average of 22 hours a day, two hours more than the sloth.
Light would take .13 seconds to travel around the Earth.
Males produce one thousand sperm cells each second - 86 million each day.
Neutron stars are so dense that a teaspoonful would weigh more than all the people on Earth.
One in every 2000 babies is born with a tooth.
Every hour the Universe expands by a billion miles in all directions.
Somewhere in the flicker of a badly tuned TV set is the background radiation from the Big Bang.
Even travelling at the speed of light it would take 2 million years to reach the nearest large galaxy, Andromeda.
The temperature in Antarctica plummets as low as -35 degrees celsius.
At over 2000 kilometres long The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth.
A thimbleful of a neutron star would weigh over 100 million tons.
The risk of being struck by a falling meteorite for a human is one occurence every 9,300 years.
The driest inhabited place in the world is Aswan, Egypt where the annual average rainfall is .02 inches.
The deepest part of any ocean in the world is the Mariana trench in the Pacific with a depth of 35,797 feet.
The largest meteorite craters in the world are in Sudbury, Ontario, canada and in Vredefort, South Africa.
The largest desert in the world, the Sahara, is 3,500,000 square miles.
The largest dinosaur ever discovered was Seismosaurus who was over 100 feet long and weighed up to 80 tonnes.
The African Elephant gestates for 22 months.
The short-nosed Bandicoot has a gestation period of only 12 days.
The mortality rate if bitten by a Black Mamba snake is over 95%.
In the 14th century the Black Death killed 75,000,000 people. It was carried by fleas on the black rat.
A dog's sense of smell is 1,000 times more sensitive than a humans.
A typical hurricane produces the nergy equivalent to 8,000 one megaton bombs.
90% of those who die from hurricanes die from drowning.
To escape the Earth's gravity a rocket need to travel at 7 miles a second.
If every star in the Milky Way was a grain of salt they would fill an Olympic sized swimming pool.
Microbial life can survive on the cooling rods of a nuclear reactor.
Micro-organisms have been brought back to life after being frozen in perma-frost for three million years.
Our oldest radio broadcasts of the 1930s have already travelled past 100,000 stars.
Space debris travels through space at over 18,000 mph.
The International Space Station weighs about 500 tons and is the same size as a football field.
Astronauts brought back about 800 pounds of lunar rock to Earth. Most of it has not been analysed.
Tuberculosis is the biggest global killer of women.
One third of Asian women are infected with TB.
Each domestic cpw emits about 105 pounds of methane a year.
Hummingbirds consume half of their body weight in food every day.
The larva of the polyphemus moth consumes 86,000 times its birth weight in its first 56 days.
Blood sucking hookworms inhabit 700 million piople worldwide.
Some species of bamboo grow at a rate of 3ft per day.
A total of 148 tornadoes swept the south and mid-west of the US in April 1974.
A lunar eclipse of 1 hour 47 minutes occured on the 16th July 2000.
Saturn would float if you could find an ocean big enough.
A pinhead-sized piece of a neutron star weighs 1 million tonnes.
A neutron star is 15 miles across and weighs more than the Sun.
The highest recorded train speed is 320.2 mph by the TGV train in France.
The highest speed ever achieved on a bicycle is 166.94 mph by Fred Rompelburg.
The research spacecraft Helios B came within a record 27 million miles of the Sun.
65 million years ago the impact of an asteroid is estimated to have had the power of 10 million H-Bombs.
The temperature at the centre of the Earth is estimated to be 5500 degrees Celsius.
There are now more than 4000 satellites orbiting the globe.
Between 1895 and 1905, the millionaire Andrew Carnegie spent 25 million dollars on fossil collecting trips in the USA.
Giraffes can clean their ears with their half metre long tongue.
We are about 1/4 inch taller whilst sleeping at night than in the day.
There are 1.25 billion rats in the US.
A 5 month year old female foetus has seven million eggs in her ovaries. By puberty only 300,000 remain.
Human males produce up to 100 million sperm every day.
A lightning bolt has enough energy to light 2 1/2 million homes.
The chances of being struck by lightning are three million to one.
Camels can go for 17 days without water in extreme heat.
Tornadoes can reach speeds of over 300mph.
Tornado Alley in the US is struck by around 1000 tornadoes every year.
A single lightning bolt can unleash 1 million volts of electricity.
The ten highest mountains in the world are all in the Himalayas.
In 1862, English chemist Alexander Parkes created the first plastic.
The human body contains over 1000 different enzymes.
In 1811, Amaeo Avogadro first distinguished molecules from atoms.
Each speck of dust contains a million, million atoms.
Protons are 1,836 times heavier than electrons.
Mercury can only be seen from the Earth at twilight.
The Atlantic Ocean increases in width by 3cms each year.
A cat flea can reach a height of 13.4 inches in a single jump.
An adult Colombian poison-arrow frog has enough poison to kill 1,000 humans.
Spiders may live for weeks without food.
Earthworms have five pairs of hearts, close to the fronts of their bodies.
In a lifetime, a human heart pumps enough blood to fill 100 swimming pools.
A dragonfly can spot an insect moving 33ft away.
The first credit card was issued in 1951 when Diners Club issued the card to 200 customers who could use it in 27 restaurants in New York.
The first television weather chart was broadcast in Britain on 11th Nov 1936.
Venus shines brightly because its thick cloud layer reflects sunlight.
A conifer grows male and female cones.
The Tallipot palm takes 100 years to flower and then dies.
The giant African land snail can grow up to 15.4 inches from head to tail.
Hydroelectricity supplies 3% of the world's energy needs.
Britain's Millennium Dome is more than double the size of any other dome.
3 planets orbit the star Upsilon Andromedae, 44 light years away.
A wolf can run at 40mph in short bursts.
Grey wolves became extinct in England in 1486.
By 85 a human will have walked at least 100,000 miles.
Men's bones stop growing around age 21.