Interesting science facts

? In October 1999 an Iceberg the size of London broke free from the Antarctic ice shelf .
? The Earth spins at 1,000 mph but it travels through space at an incredible 67,000 mph.
? October 12th, 1999 was declared “The Day of Six Billion” based on United Nations projections.
? It takes 8 minutes 17 seconds for light to travel from the Sun’s surface to the Earth.
? 10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.
? 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).
? One million, million, million, million, millionth of a second after the Big Bang the Universe was the size of a …pea.
? DNA was first discovered in 1869 by Swiss Friedrich Mieschler.
? The molecular structure of DNA was first determined by Watson and Crick in 1953.
? The first synthetic human chromosome was constructed by US scientists in 1997.
? The thermometer was invented in 1607 by Galileo.
? Englishman Roger Bacon invented the magnifying glass in 1250.
? Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1866.
? Wilhelm Rontgen won the first Nobel Prize for physics for discovering X-rays in 1895.
? Utopia is a large, smooth lying area of Mars.
? 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.
? A quarter of the world’s plants are threatened with extinction by the year 2010.
? Each person sheds 40lbs of skin in his or her lifetime.
? At 15 inches the eyes of giant squids are the largest on the planet.
? The largest galexies contain a million, million stars.
? The Universe contains over 100 billion galaxies.
? Wounds infested with maggots heal quickly and without spread of gangrene or other infection.
? More germs are transferred shaking hands than kissing.
? The longest glacier in Antarctica, the Almbert glacier, is 250 miles long and 40 miles wide.
? The fastest speed a falling raindrop can hit you is 18mph.
? A healthy person has 6,000 million, million, million haemoglobin molecules.
? A salmon-rich, low cholesterol diet means that Inuits rarely suffer from heart disease.
? Inbreeding causes 3 out of every 10 Dalmation dogs to suffer from hearing disability.
? 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.
? The tallest tree ever was an Australian eucalyptus - In 1872 it was measured at 435 feet tall.
? Christian Barnard performed the first heart transplant in 1967 - the patient lived for 18 days.
? The wingspan of a Boeing 747 is longer than the Wright brother’s first flight.
? Without its lining of mucus your stomach would digest itself.
? Humans have 46 chromosomes, peas have 14 and crayfish have 200.
? There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.
? An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.
? 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.