Interesting Science Facts

.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)

.The Earth spins at 1,000 mph but it travels through space at an incredible 67,000 mph

.The largest ever hailstone weighed over 1kg and fell in Bangladesh in 1986.

. If you could drive your car straight up you would arrive in space in just over an hour.

.The Earth is 4.56 billion years old…the same age as the Moon and the Sun.

.When a flea jumps, the rate of acceleration is 20 times that of the space shuttle during launch

.Astronauts cannot belch – there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their stomachs.

.One million, million, million, million, millionth of a second after the Big Bang the Universe was the size of a …pea.

.The tallest tree ever was an Australian eucalyptus – In 1872 it was measured at 435 feet tall.

.The wingspan of a Boeing 747 is longer than the Wright brother’s first flight.

.In 5 billion years the Sun will run out of fuel and turn into a Red Giant

.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.

.A pig’s orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.

.Without its lining of mucus your stomach would digest itself.

.An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.

.On the day that Alexander Graham Bell was buried the entire US telephone system was shut down for 1 minute in tribute.

.The low frequency call of the humpback whale is the loudest noise made by a living creature.

.The call of the humpback whale is louder than Concorde and can be heard from 500 miles away.

.Each person sheds 40lbs of skin in his or her lifetime.

.The largest galexies contain a million, million stars.

.The Universe contains over 100 billion galaxies.

.The fastest speed a falling raindrop can hit you is 18mph.

.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.

.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.

.Koalas sleep an average of 22 hours a day, two hours more than the sloth.

.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.

.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 short-nosed Bandicoot has a gestation period of only 12 days.

.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.