Strange 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.

20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Lab Accidents

LSD, gunpowder, Viagra, and the Incredible Hulk all have something in common.



1 - There went our best chance: In the ninth century, a team of Chinese alchemists trying to synthesize an “elixir of immortality” from saltpeter, sulfur, realgar, and dried honey instead invented gunpowder.

2 - German scientist Hennig Brand stored 50 buckets of urine in his cellar for months in 1675, hoping that it would turn into gold. Instead, an obscure mix of alchemy and chemistry yielded a waxy, glowing goo that spontaneously burst into flame—the element now known as phosphorus.

3 - Soldiers supplied the raw material in vast, sloshing quantities until the 1750s, when Swedish chemist Carl Scheele developed an industrial method of producing phosphorus. He discovered eight other elements, including chlorine, oxygen, and nitrogen, and compounds like ammonia, glycerin, and prussic acid.

4 - Scheele was found dead in his lab at age 43, perhaps owing to his propensity for tasting his own toxic chemicals.

5 - Kevlar, superglue, cellophane, Post-it notes, photographs, and the phonograph: They all emerged from laboratory blunders.

6 - The Flash, created in 1940 for All-American Publications, was the first comic book hero to develop superpowers after a lab accident, attaining “super speed” after inhaling “hard water” vapors.

7 - Other beneficiaries of the Freak Lab Mishap include Plastic Man (struck by a falling drum full of acid), the Hulk (irradiated by an experimental bomb), and of course, Spider-Man (bitten by a radioactive spider).
8 In real life, perhaps a bigger risk comes from lab-contracted diseases. The world’s last documented case of smallpox killed photographer Janet Parker in 1978 after the virus escaped from a lab at the University of Birmingham in England.

9 - But sometimes humans strike back: Alexander Fleming, famous for his serendipitous discovery of penicillin, also chanced upon an antibiotic enzyme in nasal mucus when he sneezed onto a bacterial sample and noticed that his snot kept the microbes in check.

10 The lab-accident rate in schools and colleges is 100 to 1,000 times greater than at firms like Dow or DuPont.


11 - In 1938 DuPont chemist Roy Plunkett opened a dud canister of tetrafluoroethylene gas and discovered an amazing, nearly friction-free white powder. He named it Teflon.

12 - Perhaps he should have chucked it out instead: In 2005 the Environmental Protection Agency identified a Teflon ingredient, perfluorooctanoic acid, as a “likely carcinogen.” It is now in the bloodstream of 95 percent of Americans.

13 - After a 1992 drug trial in the Welsh mining town of Merthyr Tydfil, male subjects reported that sildenafil citrate hadn’t done much for their angina, but it did have an unusual side effect on another part of their anatomy. Today the drug is sold as Viagra.

14 - In 1943 Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman inadvertently absorbed a small quantity of lysergic acid through his fingertips and experienced “dizziness . . . visual distortions . . . [a] desire to laugh.” The age of LSD had begun.

15 - Hoffman’s long, strange trip continues. He turned 100 this past January.

16 - Why he’s not the father of the electric chair: While trying to electrocute a turkey, Benjamin Franklin sent a whopping jolt from two Leyden jars into his own body. “The flash was very great and the crack as loud as a Pistol,” he wrote, describing the incident as an “Experiment in Electricity that I desire never to repeat.”

17 - In 1965 astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson scrubbed their Bell Labs radio antenna to rid it of pigeon droppings, which they suspected were causing the instrument’s annoying steady hiss.

18 - That noise turned out to be the microwave echo of the Big Bang.

19 - The world has scores of superpowerful particle accelerators. Last year, a fireball created at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Upton, New York, had the characteristics of a black hole. Physicists are reasonably sure that no such black holes could escape and consume Earth.

20 - Reasonably.