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.
