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JOURNYS Science Fun Facts

Your daily science fun fact- brought to you by Journys.

1The 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).

2It takes 8 minutes 17 seconds for light to travel from the Suns surface to the Earth.

310 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.

4The Earth spins at 1,000 mph but it travels through space at an incredible 67,000 mph.

5Every year, over one million earthquakes shake the Earth.

6When Krakatoa erupted in 1883, its force was so great it could be heard 4,800 kilometers

away in Australia.

7Every second around 100 lightning bolts strike the Earth.

8Every year lightning kills 1000 people.

9In October 1999 an Iceberg the size of London broke free from the Antarctic ice shelf .

10If you could drive your car straight up you would arrive in space in just over an hour.

11Human tapeworms can grow up to 22.9m.

12The Earth is 4.56 billion years oldthe same age as the Moon and the Sun.

13The dinosaurs became extinct before the Rockies or the Alps were formed.

14Female black widow spiders eat their males after mating.

15When a flea jumps, the rate of acceleration is 20 times that of the space shuttle during

launch.

16If our Sun were just inch in diameter, the nearest star would be 445 miles away.

17Astronauts cannot belchthere is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their stomachs.

18The air at the summit of Mount Everest, 29,029 feet is only a third as thick as the air at sealevel.

19One million, million, million, million, millionth of a second after the Big Bang the Universewas the size of a pea.

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20DNA was first discovered in 1869 by Swiss Friedrich Mieschler.

21The molecular structure of DNA was first determined by Watson and Crick in 1953.

22The first synthetic human chromosome was constructed by US scientists in 1997.

23The thermometer was invented in 1607 by Galileo.

24Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1866.

25Wilhelm Rontgen won the first Nobel Prize for physics for discovering X-rays in 1895.

26The tallest tree ever was an Australian eucalyptusIn 1872 it was measured at 435 feet tall.

27Christian Barnard performed the first heart transplant in 1967the patient lived for 18

days.

28An electric eel can produce a shock of up to 650 volts.

29Wireless communications took a giant leap forward in 1962 with the launch of Telstar, the

first satellite capable of relaying telephone and satellite TV signals.

30The Ebola virus kills 4 out of every 5 humans it infects.

31In 5 billion years the Sun will run out of fuel and turn into a Red Giant.

32Giraffes often sleep for only 20 minutes in any 24 hours. They may sleep up to 2 hours (in

spurtsnot all at once), but this is rare. They never lie down.

33There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.

34An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.

35On the day that Alexander Graham Bell was buried the entire US telephone system was shutdown for 1 minute in tribute.

36The low frequency call of the humpback whale is the loudest noise made by a living

creature.

37A quarter of the worlds plants are threatened with extinction by the year 2010.

38Each person sheds 40lbs of skin in his or her lifetime.

39At 15 inches the eyes of giant squids are the largest on the planet.

40The Universe contains over 100 billion galaxies.

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41Wounds infested with maggots heal quickly and without spread of gangrene or other

infection.

42More germs are transferred shaking hands than kissing.

43The fastest speed a falling raindrop can hit you is 18mph.

44It would take over an hour for a heavy object to sink 6.7 miles down to the deepest part of

the ocean.

45The world's largest amphibian is the giant salamander. It can grow up to 5 ft. in length.

46The deepest part of any ocean in the world is the Mariana trench in the Pacific with a depth

of 35,797 feet.

47Every hour the Universe expands by a billion miles in all directions.

48Somewhere in the flicker of a badly tuned TV set is the background radiation from the Big

Bang.

49Even traveling at the speed of light it would take 2 million years to reach the nearest largegalaxy, Andromeda.

50A thimbleful of a neutron star would weigh over 100 million tons.

51-The Earth's average velocity orbiting the sun is 107,220 km per hour.

52- There is a high and low tide because of our moon and the Sun.

53-The Atlantic Giant Squid's eye can be as large as 15.75 inches (40 centimeters) wide.

54-Armadillos, opossums, and sloth's spend about 80% of their lives sleeping.

55-The blue whale can produce sounds up to 188 decibels. This is the loudest sound produced bya living animal and has been detected as far away as 530 miles.

56- It takes approximately 12 hours for food to entirely digest.

57-Human jaw muscles can generate a force of 200 pounds on the molars.

58-Sound travels about 4 times faster in water than in air.

59-Scientists have discovered that copper pollution of the atmosphere occurred about 2500 years

ago. The pollution in Greenland ice cores was attributed to the Romans who used copper for

military purposes and coins.

60-The cosmos contains approximately 50 trillion galaxies.