Great facts
When sea water freezes, most of the salt is contained in pockets of liquid that does not freeze. Sea ice thus contains between a tenth and a hundredth as much salt as sea water, and it can be melted and drunk like fresh water.
If the reactions in the Sun's core were to be "switched" off now, it would be 10 million years before the solar surface started to cool-and before the Earth felt the effects.
Tornadoes usually spin anticlockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.
Only two flowering plants grow in Antarctica. One is grass and the other a relative of the carnation.
The deepest point in the oceans is 11 022m below sea level. lt lies in the Marianas Trench, southwest of Guam in the Pacific Ocean.
There is enough salt in the oceans to cover all the continents with a layer 150 m thick.
The leaves of the Raphia palm, found in tropical forests in the Americas and Africa, can be 22 m long.
Lord Rutherford, the New Zealand-born physicist who discovered the protons inside the nucleus of the atom, and so opened the way to nuclear weapons and power stations, said in 1933, "The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who looks for a source of power in the transformation of the atom is talking moonshine."
99 % of Antarctica's land mass is covered in ice and that represents nine-tenths of all the ice in the world.
The coldest place in the Earth's lower atmosphere is usually not over the North or South Poles, as you might expect, but over the Equator. The tropopause(the boundary between the two lowest layers of the Atmosphere) varies in height from an average of only 9 km above the two poles to 18 km above the Equator. Air temperature steadily decreases right up to the top of the tropopause. Thus, temperatures often fall as low as -80 degrees Celsius above the Equator, whereas over the North and South Poles they rarely fall below -55 degrees Celsius.
Air is made of gasses, oxygen, nitrogen and argon.
Glass is made from sand, lime and soda.
Water consists out of hydrogen and oxygen.
The first solar system was discovered by the Egyptians.
When common eels lay their eggs, they die.
Tiny plants, that live in the sea, called plankton, produce nearly three quarters of the earth’s oxygen.
Glass is not a solid, but a liquid.
The largest animal in the world is the blue whale.
In clear sky, About 1500 stars are visible at night with the naked eye.
The brain accounts ± 3% of body weight but it uses about 15% of the body's blood supply.
The fastest boat was the Blue Bird driven at 328 mph by Donald Campbell in 1967.It reached this speed on the run in which it crashed-killing its driver.
Animals show a wide difference in the speed at which they can travel. Snail: 1 mm per second Cheetah: 26 m per second Race horse: 18 m per second Man: 11,8 m per second
The planet Mercury and Venus pass in front of the sun and therefore block out the sun's light.This is called a transit, a very rare occurrence.
Some seaweed has a bright colour to warn animals of its nasty taste.
A comet consists mostly of ice mixed with dust.
The dinosaur noises in Jurassic Park come from elephants, geese and horses slowed down.
If someone whispers up against the wall in one part of a gallery the sound is reflected around the wall and can be heard on the other side of the gallery.
A caterpillar has twelve eyes.
The colour of a lobster's blood is blue.
And owl can turn his head 180°.
Flamingoes can swim.
A large kangaroo can jump up to 9 metres at a single bound.
It is very good to eat seaweed because of its high iodine content.
The maximum speed of a human heart is 220 beats per minute.
One ostrich egg is the equivalent of 24 chicken eggs.
Goldfish lose their colour in running water.
Plants do not necessarily look like their parent but they always resemble their grandparents.
Sound moves faster in water then air.
Lightning can have temperatures up to 30 000°C.
A starfish has no head or brain.
Most colour-blind people have difficulty distinguishing between red and green.
Many Egyptians buried mummified mice which their mummified cats.
The Milky Way is in the local cluster of about 30 galaxies. All but one of these is much smaller than the Milky Way; Andromeda is half as big.
If you think of the Milky Way as being the size of the continent of Asia, our solar system would be the size of a penny.
The American astronomer, Edwin Hubble, was the first to discover that the galaxies are moving apart and the universe is getting bigger al the time.
Light travels at nearly 300,000 km (186,000 miles) every second. To get an idea of how big the universe is, light takes one day to cross our Solar System, but it takes about 100,000 years to cross our galaxy, and over 10,000 million years to reach us from the furthest galaxy.
By back tracking from its present calculated size, the Universe is now estimated to be 15,000 million years old.
Galileo was the first scientist to advance science and make new discoveries.
The earth’s atmosphere blurs our view from the Universe. But the Hubble space telescope looks from outside our atmosphere.
The biggest magnet , 10-GEV, in the institute for nuclear research at Dubna near Moscow ,Russia, weights 36,000 tonnes.
Things that you see drifting in the blue sky, known as floaters, are caused by bits of junk drifting in the liquid near your eyes' retina.
In a storage battery, ion flow is created by the immersion of the positive and negative electrode plates in the acid solution.
After Ludwig van Beethoven went deaf, he could still hear his music by resting one end of a stick on the piano and holding the other end in his teeth.
Ancient Egyptians made a puffy white treat out of a honey and the dried, carrot-shaped root of the marsh mallow plant,wich grows in fields and swamps.
The largest existing nugget is known as the Ural Giant and weighs 7,860.5 g it is in custody of the Diamond Foundation in Kremlin, Moscow, Russia.
The greatest power failure on record struck seven north-eastern US states and Ontario Canada 9-10 Nov. 1965 about 30 million people over an area of 207,200km were plunged into darkness only 2 people died.
The average mean temperature recorded at Dallol, Ethiopia between 1960 and 1966 was 34 degrees Celsius
The most active volcano the Kilavea, in Hawaii, USA has erupted continuously since 1983 Lava is discharged at a rate of 5m (7 yd ) per second.
The smallest stars are neutron stars, which may have a mass up to three times that of the sun have a diameter of only 10-30 km (6-19miles)
The tallest bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge which connects San Francisco and Marin Country California, USA, rises to a height of 227m above the water . Completed in 1937 the suspension bridge has an overall length of 2,733m (8, 966ft)
Most earthquakes happen under the sea.
Moles have poor sight but strong senses of hearing, smelling and touching.
A comet consists mostly of ice mixed with dust.
A hen calls her chicks with two different signals, when she clucks the chicks follow her and when she finds food she makes kuk-kuk-kuk-kuk.
Ants are divided into three classes males, workers and queens.
Male ants develop from unfertilized eggs. Queen and worker ants are developed from fertilized eggs.
When a human baby is crawling, he balances on three feet.
There are 600 million bacteria in and out the human body.
Plankton is made up of small zooplankton and plants.
Male birds sing to keep other males away from territory chosen as nest site and to attract females.
Dinosaurs were the largest animals lived on land.
The first pocket television is invented by Japanese firm Matsushita.
The Imax projection system was first demonstrated in Japan in 1970.
In 1969 the first man landed on the moon.
In 1954 the first transistor radio appears in the USA
In 1928 sound is recorded onto the film itself.
In 1643 air pressure discovered and measure by Italian Galileo Evangelista.
In1960 the first laser built by American Theodore Miaman.
In1950 colour televisions system is develop by the American company CBS
In1960-61 all transistor televisions appeared for the first time in the USA
In 1895 X rays was discovered.
Did you know ? A baby giraffe falls about two metres before it lands on the ground.
The average person takes about two and a half million steps a year.
A mosquito has 47 teeth.
The bells in a marriage are bad luck.
The horse's sweat is white.
The biggest shark is the whale shark.
A python is not poisonous.
The average persons’ skin weighs about 27kg.
A whisper has an intensity of 20 decibels.
The planet Pluto orbits the sun every 165 years.
The largest forest, occurring in Northern Russia, is 1.1 billion ha.
60 000 species of bugs disappear every year as result of the destruction of rain forests. Seven species a day. If the same rate were applied to mammals, all would be extinct by 24 days.
By seven months, a female aphid would have 100,000,000,000,000 living descendants. Laid end to end, they would reach to the sun and back.
An octopus can do quite complex puzzles and even undo the top of a screw-top jar.
The largest telescope mirror is 10m. The Keck telescope on Hawaii.
A giant squid has eyes the size of footballs, weighs 1 ton, is 18 metres long and is the biggest bug in the world.
A termite produces 400,000,000 babies in her life.
Without insects, there would be no flowers.
A cat has three eyelids to each eye.
The tallest tree is a Mandioca Tree, found in Montgomery State Park, California, USA It is 112,061 metres high.
A hippopotamus's teeth can be 60 cm long and can weigh up to 4 kg.
When a hippopotamus yawn will a small man be able to fit in his mouth.
A dwarf hippopotamus is as big as a pig.
A swan female carry's her baby's like a boot it's passenger's
All sharks lager than 2m can be danger to swimmers.
Leonardo was the inventor of the diving suit and the flippers.
It takes about 7 years for a real pearl to form.
The first pocket television set was invented by Japanese firm Matsushia. It is no bigger than a video cassette.
Many people consider that the first modern scientist was Galileo who lived in Italy from 1564 to 1642.
The Italian scientist Evangelista Torricelli invented the first barometer.
The first working pendulum clock was made by Christiaan Huygens in Holland in 1657.
No single person invented the kind of microscope we use today, which has two or more lenses.It was developed by several scientists in Holland.
People realized long ago that rainbows form when rain is lit up by sun.The raindrops change the sunlight into colours.Isaac Newton proved this by putting a glass prism in a beam of sunlight.It produced a rainbow pattern of colours.
The first battery was invented by an Italian scientist.
The first successful colour film for cameras was introduced in 1935.
The mineral that the human body has in the greatest abundance, is calcium.
Giraffes in Africa have the same number of vertebrae in their neck as human beings - seven.
Giraffes sleep standing up and they never kneel.
Desert snacks swallow their prey whole because they get all the water they need from their food.
The water opossum live in burrows by the water edge. Its long tail and webbed back help him to swim though the water.
A supersonic aircraft can fly faster than the speed op sound.
Sound is a form of energy.
Crystals are substances like salt and sugar.
Spectacles were first worn in Italy in about 1285
Usually a bird's feathers weight more than its skeleton.
The Bream, a fresh water fish, hatches its eggs in its mouth.
The extinct elephant bird’s egg had a volume of about 8 litres.
The bird that builds the biggest nest is the eagle.
There are more than 800 bird species in South Africa.
There are more than 208 bones in humans body.
A group of rhinos are called a crash.
The left drumstick of a chicken is softer than its right drumstick.
The most biggest animal is about 6,5 t.
The smallest animal on earth weighs 0kg.
Whenever you wash your hands after going to the toilet, bacteria take a drive down the plug hole.
Bacteria rejoice at being launched by a sneeze -until they find themselves netted in a handkerchief.
When placed in the fridge to chill out, bacteria hiding in fresh and cooked have to put plans for increasing their numbers on hold.
Cooking at the right temperature for the correct length of time kills off any harmful bacteria in your food.
The only way to get rid of bacteria on your teeth is by brushing regularly.
Bacteria are grouped into four basic shapes - spirilla, comma-like vibrios, ball-shaped cocci, rod-like bacilli.
In 1995 scientists got down to 170 billionths of a degree above absolute zero. A hundred years ago they had only just managed to liquefy nitrogen at 77 Kelvin.
Frozen carbon dioxide is called dry ice and is used for portable refrigeration and to creat swirling fog on theatre stages or movie sets.
Molten salt conducts electricity.
Hard water can be either temporary or permanent.
Hydrogen gas burns with a colourless flame and at a high temperature, and tends to melt the glass around the end of the tude as it burns.
Tin-plating is not the ideal way of protecting food.
Chromium was used as a decorative finish in many of the world's older classic car's.
A calcium hydroxide is a strong base and can be used to neutralise acids.
The smallest bird in the world is the bee hummingbird of Cuba, witch is only 6,3cm from bill tip to tail tip.
The surface temperature on Venus is the hottest of all planets, nearly 477°C.
Jupiter is the largest of the planets?
That the American Ice bear can swim for days on the cold see far away from the land.
The owl is family to the Babonidae and there is more than 12 kinds in South Africa.
The night owl is not family to the owls.
The Japanese salamander can produce oxygen through his lungs and can go 1,5 metres under water.
There are earth worms that can show blue-green light when you dig them out at night.
The smallest dog is as big as a match box.
The lion can run as fast as 50 miles per hour.
A pig can run as fast as 10 to 12 miles per hour.
Ski`s were first used for military mobility in Norway.
The first academy awards were awarded in 1928.
The index finger is the most sensitive finger on a person’s hand.
The Christmas tree was first used in Germany.
A person that walks in his sleep, is called a SOMNAMBULIST.
A Doberman dog gets his name from a German tax collector.
The first person to walk in space, was Alexei Leonov.
A parrot can live up to 80 years.
That a red tree frog is only as big as a 20c piece.
The Marmezet ape specie only have one partner in a lifetime.
The South African record for the longest Steenbokhoorn is six and a half inches.
The heart beats once from the left and once from the right-hand side in separate beat motions.
The spinal cord is an extension of the brain.
A human being can live without a spleen but not a liver.
The patterns on the fur of the Cape Hunting dogs differ from one another.
There are one way to find how old is a fish, by counting its scales.
Sound moves through air, water and many other substances. Air travels 1km in 3sek.
Before the snail's hatches they have a round shell that coils around itself. It grows until the snail is adult.
At any given moment, there are about 1800 thunder storms raging around the world
There are about 67 500 kinds of bugs in the world.
A Hippopotamus can weigh up to 5000kg.
An animal that eat nuts is called a nucivorous animal.
Some spiders can make hiss and ticking sounds.
The plant, called Venis Flycatcher, eat insects. The plant catches them and then digest them.
A large ant-eater can eat up to 30 000 ants a day.
An insect doesn't close its eyes when sleeping.
The average person's skin weighs about 2,7kg.
The only land mammal with more than 44 teeth is the Opossum.
Some scorpions can squirt their venom like snakes.
The fear of a feather is called Pteronophobia.
Dinosaurs dominated the earth for 140 million years.
Women have shorter vocal chords than a man.
A clam has 35 eyes and they are all blue.
The tailless Manx cat specie can produce a litter which includes kittens with tails.
Tuna may grow up to weigh 200 kg.
The largest seabird is the Albatross.
The first people to write music where the Greeks .
Sir Edmund Hillary who climbed Mount Everest first was a bee-farmer .
The male sea-horse looks after the eggs before they hatch .
The earliest known alphabet is from Palestine, about 1700 BC .
The average bulb lasts for 750-to 1000hours .
The largest land animal is the African bush elephant weighs up to 5,6t .
The fastest land animal over short distance is the cheetah - 101km /h
The hottest planet is Venus with a surface temp. of 462 C .
The largest of all antelope is the rave giant eland -907 kg .
The longest sausage ever made was 8.91 km .
The longest pizza pie ever baked was 80 ft .
The largest meat pie ever baked weight 5,75t
The longest traffic jam ever reported was 176km long .
The heaviest Easter egg made was 3430 km .
Inside a cell is a jelly-like substance called cytoplasm.
Green plants make their own food by process called photosynthesis.
Some kinds of fungi are parasites. Fungi can grow on both plants and animals and can cause serious diseases.
Among the thousand of different kinds of vertebrates, there are some which look strange and others which behave in unusaul ways.
The long-nosed bandicoot has a backward facing pouch.
There are about 67 500 kinds of bugs in the world.
All animals produce electrical waves from their brain.
If the animal is dreaming the pattern changes again.
Alexander Graham Bell did not only invent the telephone, but also the microphone.
That the planet Pluto sees the sun every 48 years.
The average person takes about two and a half million steps in a year.
It is very good to eat seaweed because of its high iodine content.
A hagfish has four ears, no stomach and three eyes out of which he can't see.
The brain accounts for 3% of body weight but it uses about 15% of the body's blood supply.
Animal diseases caught by man are called a zoonosis.
A caterpillar has twelve eyes.
The colour of a lobster's blood is blue.
The planet Venus is also known as both the morning star and the evening star.
The blue whale's heart is as big as a small car.
Of the five senses, smell normally dims first.
Red iron oxide is more commonly known as rust.
The average person takes about 7 minutes to fall asleep.
The maximum speed of the human heart is 220 beats per minute.
A hedgehog is relatively immune to snake bites.
A cow has no upper front teeth.
When the female spider dies, she is eaten by her babies.
The male duck-billed platypus has an extra claw which can discharge poison.
When light enters a block of glass it is bent as it goes in.
A white light is actually made up out of different colours.
Bees dance to communicate.
A rocket works by shooting hot gasses out of the tail by using an explosive powder or liquid oxygen to lift it right away from earth against the force of gravity.
Marsupials are mammals which have a pouch, eg. kangaroo.
There are nearly 1000 different types of bats in the world.
A light is the distance travelled by a ray of light in one year at the speed of 300 000 km/sec.
The human tongue has about 3000 taste buds?
Steel is made by adding just the right amount of carbon to iron?
The earliest life forms were plants in the ocean.They released oxygen as a waste product.
Aluminium alloys are commonly used for racing bicycles to give strength and light weight?
Gasses and dusts are collected in special hoods attached to each electrolytic cell.
Gas masks contain filter pads of activated carbon.These absorb the tear or poison gas.
Ice has an open structure that makes it less dense than liquid water?
Spider webs are held together by hydrogen bonding?
Citrus fruits contain citric acid, a weak acid which give these fruits their sour taste.
Helium almost has the same lifting power as hydrogen, but it cannot catch fire.
A spider has eight legs.
A bat is sometimes referred to as a flying dog.
A cat sleeps up to 14 hours a day.
The earliest forms of Jazz were called Dixieland and swing.
Today the demand for water, is 35 times more than 300 years ago.
A shoal of piranhas can reduce a 45kg animal to a skeleton in less than 60 seconds.
A right -handed persons left thumb nail Grows the slowest of all his nails and vice versa.
An average cow produces 5000 litres of milk in a year.
No matter how tall you are in the morning, by evening you will be about 1 cm shorter. You regain your original height while sleeping.
The Romans called the hours before noon Ante Meridiem and the hours after noon is called Post Meridiem.
A piece of buttered toast contains about 315 kilojoules: With that energy you could run a car for 1 min at the speed of 60 km/h.
When you run only about 25% of chemical energy in your muscles changes into Kinetic energy. The rest changes into Heat energy.
It has taken millions of years for the seas to become salty. The water from rain and melting snow. That has gradually dissolved salt from rocks, and the salt has build up in the seas.
The seas rise and fall at regular intervals called tides. They are caused by the Moons gravity which pulls the seas directly below it.
When pilots, loop the loop, the centripetal force turning them can be so strong that they feel about 4 times heavier than normal.
In the dead sea the water is so salty that people can float in it without swimming. They can even sit in the water and read a book.
Atoms and molecules are so tiny that there are about as many atoms in a grain of sand as there are grains of sand on the beach.
The largest hailstone ever found was in Kansas, USA. It was 19 cm wide and weighed 758 g the size of a melon.
The world’s most powerful power station is on the Parana river in South America. It’s 18 turbines produce 12,600 million watts.
10 of the highest volcanoes are in the Andes mountains.
An ostrich is the biggest bird
Kangaroos can jump up to 2 metres.
Giraffes have the longest neck between animals.
The silk that spiders produce to weave webs, is the strongest known natural fibre.
A rat that leaves a ship before it sails it consider it dangerous.
The lightest adult dog alive is 780 g.
The tallest red male kangaroo is 7 ft. tall.
The smallest monkey is the Pygmy Marmoset and lives in the Amazon forest.
The oldest bat is about 30 years old.
The blue wale is the biggest wale in the sea.
A horse can eat 6 boils per day.
A giraffe has the longest neck in the world. Yet, it only has nine vertebrae in its neck.
A snake can eat one goat per day.
An springbok can jump 1 m.
A donkey is stronger than a horse.
A horse can run faster than a donkey .
If different spacecrafts go into space, their times are different.
Acid is one of a class of sour-tasting chemicals which react with a Base to form salt.
Fungi are ancient organisms, dating back more than 1,000 million years.
Monotremes all live in Australia or on a nearby island. There are three species - one specie is the duck-billed platypus.
Monotremes are mammals that aren’t born like mammals - they hatch out of eggs.
A sundew plant uses the sticky liquid on its leaves to trap insects. It uses the hairs on its leaves to hold the insect.
There are more than a hundred acupuncture points on each ear.
That breathing and respiration are not the same.
Artificial hearts are made of class fibre.
That herb the one type of plant that can cure some diseases.
The first stethoscopes enabled doctors to listen closely to the human heart.
That oranges, lemons and limes can prevent the illness scurvy.
That artificial skin was invented to treat very bad burns.
No one realised that microscopic parasites carry disease.
Most lizards replace their tails within a month after losing them.
A waterbuck live in troops of 10-20 near water.
The human vertebra-column rest on the basin and carry the head.
A normal vertebra-column is not a straight bar, but a trio bend.
The wild-dog hunts in groups of 5-20 dogs.
A fly beat its wings 200 times a second.
That the greatest scientist was an English man Sir Izaac Newton.
That a Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1866.
That Zacharias Janssen a was Hollander who invented the microscope .
That a Frenchman Louis Braille invented Braille in 1829.
That Ernest Rutherford split the first atom in 1919 .
That LASER stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation .
That an electron microscope can enlarge an object up to a million times .
That Joseph Niepce, a French inventor took the first photo in 1826 .
Giraffes are very shy, quiet and harmless animals .
When seahorses want to stay in one place, they wrap their tails around some seaweed .
The Australian moloch, or thorny devil, has a body completely covered from head to tail in short, thorn-like spines .
When the prickly puffer fish is frightened, it can blow itself up to twice its normal size .
A dormouse can sleep in its nest for almost six months.
The tiger’s stripes help it to blend with the tall grass of its hunting ground.
The first transatlantic live broadcast was in 1962.
A blonde beard grows faster than any other colour beard.
The world’s largest lake, lake Volta, Ghana, had filled an area of square 8,482 km.
Americans watch the most TV in the world, they watch about 9 years worth in 65 years.
The worst air crash killed 583 people when 2 Boeing 747`s collided.
The most deaths on 1 ship killed 7700 people.
The world’s tallest tree was measured at 112,014 m.
The world’s largest litter of pigs was 37 piglets.
The world’s oldest duck was 25 years old.
At least 75% of all the freshwater on Earth is deep-frozen inside glaciers.
The Amazon discharges an average of 200 000 to 340 000 cubic metres of water into the Atlantic Ocean.
The aorta, largest of the body’s arteries, has a diameter of 3 centimetre where it leaves the heart.
The humans nerve cells, motor neurons, are 1.3m long.
The human eye is so sensitive that it can see a lighted candle positioned 1.6km away in the dark.
There are nearly 6 x 1024 atoms in a gram of hydrogen.
The sun’s light lifetime is only 109 years.
To escape from elephants, tigers hide in the water.
When starlight passes a heavy planet, the star appears to be in a different position than is really the case.
It takes an entire forest - more than half a million trees - to supply Americans with their Sunday newspapers every week.
Periodically, a crab’s outer shell is cast to allow for growth.
Armadillos feed on insects, snakes and fruit carron.
Layer of the earth, the crust, has an average depth of 24 km.
A hedgehog is relatively immune to snake bites.
Raindrops fall in the form of hamburger rolls.
A typical chicken will lay +- 19 dozen eggs a year.
There's no difference between a Guinea-Fowl and a Guinea-Hen.
The Pekinese, a Chinese breed of dog, was bred to look like a lion.
Bees do not have ears.
One tree snake tries to swallow another when it’s fighting.
Some scorpions can squirt their venom like snakes.
You can hear a rock concert on the radio a split second before the audience, because the signals reach your radio by the speed of light and them by the speed of sound.
The nearest a human has ever been to the centre of the Earth is 3,5km down leaving another 6 374,5km to go.
The estimated temperature at the centre of the Earth is around 4 100°C.
Forces acting on your hip joints can reach four to six times your body weight during activities such as running, jumping and hopping.
The greatest height an unmanned balloon has ever reached was 51,8m
Carbon melts at a high temperature of 3 550°C.
The smallest flowering plant is one seventy-millionth of the size of the largest.
An anaconda can swallow a pig.
You can find an insect, known as the Ceylonese, that looks exactly like a leaf.
Did you know calor therapist use different colors for the treatment for stress.
The Pacific Ocean, the largest ocean, is three times bigger than Asia, the largest continent.
There is enough water in the atmosphere, that if it all fell at the same time as rain, it will cover the entire surface of the earth with 2,5cm (1in).
Slow motion in a movie is obtained by letting the camera run faster.
If the reactions in the Sun's core were to be "switched" off now, it would be 10 million years before the solar surface started to cool-and before the Earth felt the effects.
Tornadoes usually spin anticlockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.
Only two flowering plants grow in Antarctica. One is grass and the other a relative of the carnation.
The deepest point in the oceans is 11 022m below sea level. lt lies in the Marianas Trench, southwest of Guam in the Pacific Ocean.
There is enough salt in the oceans to cover all the continents with a layer 150 m thick.
The leaves of the Raphia palm, found in tropical forests in the Americas and Africa, can be 22 m long.
Lord Rutherford, the New Zealand-born physicist who discovered the protons inside the nucleus of the atom, and so opened the way to nuclear weapons and power stations, said in 1933, "The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who looks for a source of power in the transformation of the atom is talking moonshine."
99 % of Antarctica's land mass is covered in ice and that represents nine-tenths of all the ice in the world.
The coldest place in the Earth's lower atmosphere is usually not over the North or South Poles, as you might expect, but over the Equator. The tropopause(the boundary between the two lowest layers of the Atmosphere) varies in height from an average of only 9 km above the two poles to 18 km above the Equator. Air temperature steadily decreases right up to the top of the tropopause. Thus, temperatures often fall as low as -80 degrees Celsius above the Equator, whereas over the North and South Poles they rarely fall below -55 degrees Celsius.
Air is made of gasses, oxygen, nitrogen and argon.
Glass is made from sand, lime and soda.
Water consists out of hydrogen and oxygen.
The first solar system was discovered by the Egyptians.
When common eels lay their eggs, they die.
Tiny plants, that live in the sea, called plankton, produce nearly three quarters of the earth’s oxygen.
Glass is not a solid, but a liquid.
The largest animal in the world is the blue whale.
In clear sky, About 1500 stars are visible at night with the naked eye.
The brain accounts ± 3% of body weight but it uses about 15% of the body's blood supply.
The fastest boat was the Blue Bird driven at 328 mph by Donald Campbell in 1967.It reached this speed on the run in which it crashed-killing its driver.
Animals show a wide difference in the speed at which they can travel. Snail: 1 mm per second Cheetah: 26 m per second Race horse: 18 m per second Man: 11,8 m per second
The planet Mercury and Venus pass in front of the sun and therefore block out the sun's light.This is called a transit, a very rare occurrence.
Some seaweed has a bright colour to warn animals of its nasty taste.
A comet consists mostly of ice mixed with dust.
The dinosaur noises in Jurassic Park come from elephants, geese and horses slowed down.
If someone whispers up against the wall in one part of a gallery the sound is reflected around the wall and can be heard on the other side of the gallery.
A caterpillar has twelve eyes.
The colour of a lobster's blood is blue.
And owl can turn his head 180°.
Flamingoes can swim.
A large kangaroo can jump up to 9 metres at a single bound.
It is very good to eat seaweed because of its high iodine content.
The maximum speed of a human heart is 220 beats per minute.
One ostrich egg is the equivalent of 24 chicken eggs.
Goldfish lose their colour in running water.
Plants do not necessarily look like their parent but they always resemble their grandparents.
Sound moves faster in water then air.
Lightning can have temperatures up to 30 000°C.
A starfish has no head or brain.
Most colour-blind people have difficulty distinguishing between red and green.
Many Egyptians buried mummified mice which their mummified cats.
The Milky Way is in the local cluster of about 30 galaxies. All but one of these is much smaller than the Milky Way; Andromeda is half as big.
If you think of the Milky Way as being the size of the continent of Asia, our solar system would be the size of a penny.
The American astronomer, Edwin Hubble, was the first to discover that the galaxies are moving apart and the universe is getting bigger al the time.
Light travels at nearly 300,000 km (186,000 miles) every second. To get an idea of how big the universe is, light takes one day to cross our Solar System, but it takes about 100,000 years to cross our galaxy, and over 10,000 million years to reach us from the furthest galaxy.
By back tracking from its present calculated size, the Universe is now estimated to be 15,000 million years old.
Galileo was the first scientist to advance science and make new discoveries.
The earth’s atmosphere blurs our view from the Universe. But the Hubble space telescope looks from outside our atmosphere.
The biggest magnet , 10-GEV, in the institute for nuclear research at Dubna near Moscow ,Russia, weights 36,000 tonnes.
Things that you see drifting in the blue sky, known as floaters, are caused by bits of junk drifting in the liquid near your eyes' retina.
In a storage battery, ion flow is created by the immersion of the positive and negative electrode plates in the acid solution.
After Ludwig van Beethoven went deaf, he could still hear his music by resting one end of a stick on the piano and holding the other end in his teeth.
Ancient Egyptians made a puffy white treat out of a honey and the dried, carrot-shaped root of the marsh mallow plant,wich grows in fields and swamps.
The largest existing nugget is known as the Ural Giant and weighs 7,860.5 g it is in custody of the Diamond Foundation in Kremlin, Moscow, Russia.
The greatest power failure on record struck seven north-eastern US states and Ontario Canada 9-10 Nov. 1965 about 30 million people over an area of 207,200km were plunged into darkness only 2 people died.
The average mean temperature recorded at Dallol, Ethiopia between 1960 and 1966 was 34 degrees Celsius
The most active volcano the Kilavea, in Hawaii, USA has erupted continuously since 1983 Lava is discharged at a rate of 5m (7 yd ) per second.
The smallest stars are neutron stars, which may have a mass up to three times that of the sun have a diameter of only 10-30 km (6-19miles)
The tallest bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge which connects San Francisco and Marin Country California, USA, rises to a height of 227m above the water . Completed in 1937 the suspension bridge has an overall length of 2,733m (8, 966ft)
Most earthquakes happen under the sea.
Moles have poor sight but strong senses of hearing, smelling and touching.
A comet consists mostly of ice mixed with dust.
A hen calls her chicks with two different signals, when she clucks the chicks follow her and when she finds food she makes kuk-kuk-kuk-kuk.
Ants are divided into three classes males, workers and queens.
Male ants develop from unfertilized eggs. Queen and worker ants are developed from fertilized eggs.
When a human baby is crawling, he balances on three feet.
There are 600 million bacteria in and out the human body.
Plankton is made up of small zooplankton and plants.
Male birds sing to keep other males away from territory chosen as nest site and to attract females.
Dinosaurs were the largest animals lived on land.
The first pocket television is invented by Japanese firm Matsushita.
The Imax projection system was first demonstrated in Japan in 1970.
In 1969 the first man landed on the moon.
In 1954 the first transistor radio appears in the USA
In 1928 sound is recorded onto the film itself.
In 1643 air pressure discovered and measure by Italian Galileo Evangelista.
In1960 the first laser built by American Theodore Miaman.
In1950 colour televisions system is develop by the American company CBS
In1960-61 all transistor televisions appeared for the first time in the USA
In 1895 X rays was discovered.
Did you know ? A baby giraffe falls about two metres before it lands on the ground.
The average person takes about two and a half million steps a year.
A mosquito has 47 teeth.
The bells in a marriage are bad luck.
The horse's sweat is white.
The biggest shark is the whale shark.
A python is not poisonous.
The average persons’ skin weighs about 27kg.
A whisper has an intensity of 20 decibels.
The planet Pluto orbits the sun every 165 years.
The largest forest, occurring in Northern Russia, is 1.1 billion ha.
60 000 species of bugs disappear every year as result of the destruction of rain forests. Seven species a day. If the same rate were applied to mammals, all would be extinct by 24 days.
By seven months, a female aphid would have 100,000,000,000,000 living descendants. Laid end to end, they would reach to the sun and back.
An octopus can do quite complex puzzles and even undo the top of a screw-top jar.
The largest telescope mirror is 10m. The Keck telescope on Hawaii.
A giant squid has eyes the size of footballs, weighs 1 ton, is 18 metres long and is the biggest bug in the world.
A termite produces 400,000,000 babies in her life.
Without insects, there would be no flowers.
A cat has three eyelids to each eye.
The tallest tree is a Mandioca Tree, found in Montgomery State Park, California, USA It is 112,061 metres high.
A hippopotamus's teeth can be 60 cm long and can weigh up to 4 kg.
When a hippopotamus yawn will a small man be able to fit in his mouth.
A dwarf hippopotamus is as big as a pig.
A swan female carry's her baby's like a boot it's passenger's
All sharks lager than 2m can be danger to swimmers.
Leonardo was the inventor of the diving suit and the flippers.
It takes about 7 years for a real pearl to form.
The first pocket television set was invented by Japanese firm Matsushia. It is no bigger than a video cassette.
Many people consider that the first modern scientist was Galileo who lived in Italy from 1564 to 1642.
The Italian scientist Evangelista Torricelli invented the first barometer.
The first working pendulum clock was made by Christiaan Huygens in Holland in 1657.
No single person invented the kind of microscope we use today, which has two or more lenses.It was developed by several scientists in Holland.
People realized long ago that rainbows form when rain is lit up by sun.The raindrops change the sunlight into colours.Isaac Newton proved this by putting a glass prism in a beam of sunlight.It produced a rainbow pattern of colours.
The first battery was invented by an Italian scientist.
The first successful colour film for cameras was introduced in 1935.
The mineral that the human body has in the greatest abundance, is calcium.
Giraffes in Africa have the same number of vertebrae in their neck as human beings - seven.
Giraffes sleep standing up and they never kneel.
Desert snacks swallow their prey whole because they get all the water they need from their food.
The water opossum live in burrows by the water edge. Its long tail and webbed back help him to swim though the water.
A supersonic aircraft can fly faster than the speed op sound.
Sound is a form of energy.
Crystals are substances like salt and sugar.
Spectacles were first worn in Italy in about 1285
Usually a bird's feathers weight more than its skeleton.
The Bream, a fresh water fish, hatches its eggs in its mouth.
The extinct elephant bird’s egg had a volume of about 8 litres.
The bird that builds the biggest nest is the eagle.
There are more than 800 bird species in South Africa.
There are more than 208 bones in humans body.
A group of rhinos are called a crash.
The left drumstick of a chicken is softer than its right drumstick.
The most biggest animal is about 6,5 t.
The smallest animal on earth weighs 0kg.
Whenever you wash your hands after going to the toilet, bacteria take a drive down the plug hole.
Bacteria rejoice at being launched by a sneeze -until they find themselves netted in a handkerchief.
When placed in the fridge to chill out, bacteria hiding in fresh and cooked have to put plans for increasing their numbers on hold.
Cooking at the right temperature for the correct length of time kills off any harmful bacteria in your food.
The only way to get rid of bacteria on your teeth is by brushing regularly.
Bacteria are grouped into four basic shapes - spirilla, comma-like vibrios, ball-shaped cocci, rod-like bacilli.
In 1995 scientists got down to 170 billionths of a degree above absolute zero. A hundred years ago they had only just managed to liquefy nitrogen at 77 Kelvin.
Frozen carbon dioxide is called dry ice and is used for portable refrigeration and to creat swirling fog on theatre stages or movie sets.
Molten salt conducts electricity.
Hard water can be either temporary or permanent.
Hydrogen gas burns with a colourless flame and at a high temperature, and tends to melt the glass around the end of the tude as it burns.
Tin-plating is not the ideal way of protecting food.
Chromium was used as a decorative finish in many of the world's older classic car's.
A calcium hydroxide is a strong base and can be used to neutralise acids.
The smallest bird in the world is the bee hummingbird of Cuba, witch is only 6,3cm from bill tip to tail tip.
The surface temperature on Venus is the hottest of all planets, nearly 477°C.
Jupiter is the largest of the planets?
That the American Ice bear can swim for days on the cold see far away from the land.
The owl is family to the Babonidae and there is more than 12 kinds in South Africa.
The night owl is not family to the owls.
The Japanese salamander can produce oxygen through his lungs and can go 1,5 metres under water.
There are earth worms that can show blue-green light when you dig them out at night.
The smallest dog is as big as a match box.
The lion can run as fast as 50 miles per hour.
A pig can run as fast as 10 to 12 miles per hour.
Ski`s were first used for military mobility in Norway.
The first academy awards were awarded in 1928.
The index finger is the most sensitive finger on a person’s hand.
The Christmas tree was first used in Germany.
A person that walks in his sleep, is called a SOMNAMBULIST.
A Doberman dog gets his name from a German tax collector.
The first person to walk in space, was Alexei Leonov.
A parrot can live up to 80 years.
That a red tree frog is only as big as a 20c piece.
The Marmezet ape specie only have one partner in a lifetime.
The South African record for the longest Steenbokhoorn is six and a half inches.
The heart beats once from the left and once from the right-hand side in separate beat motions.
The spinal cord is an extension of the brain.
A human being can live without a spleen but not a liver.
The patterns on the fur of the Cape Hunting dogs differ from one another.
There are one way to find how old is a fish, by counting its scales.
Sound moves through air, water and many other substances. Air travels 1km in 3sek.
Before the snail's hatches they have a round shell that coils around itself. It grows until the snail is adult.
At any given moment, there are about 1800 thunder storms raging around the world
There are about 67 500 kinds of bugs in the world.
A Hippopotamus can weigh up to 5000kg.
An animal that eat nuts is called a nucivorous animal.
Some spiders can make hiss and ticking sounds.
The plant, called Venis Flycatcher, eat insects. The plant catches them and then digest them.
A large ant-eater can eat up to 30 000 ants a day.
An insect doesn't close its eyes when sleeping.
The average person's skin weighs about 2,7kg.
The only land mammal with more than 44 teeth is the Opossum.
Some scorpions can squirt their venom like snakes.
The fear of a feather is called Pteronophobia.
Dinosaurs dominated the earth for 140 million years.
Women have shorter vocal chords than a man.
A clam has 35 eyes and they are all blue.
The tailless Manx cat specie can produce a litter which includes kittens with tails.
Tuna may grow up to weigh 200 kg.
The largest seabird is the Albatross.
The first people to write music where the Greeks .
Sir Edmund Hillary who climbed Mount Everest first was a bee-farmer .
The male sea-horse looks after the eggs before they hatch .
The earliest known alphabet is from Palestine, about 1700 BC .
The average bulb lasts for 750-to 1000hours .
The largest land animal is the African bush elephant weighs up to 5,6t .
The fastest land animal over short distance is the cheetah - 101km /h
The hottest planet is Venus with a surface temp. of 462 C .
The largest of all antelope is the rave giant eland -907 kg .
The longest sausage ever made was 8.91 km .
The longest pizza pie ever baked was 80 ft .
The largest meat pie ever baked weight 5,75t
The longest traffic jam ever reported was 176km long .
The heaviest Easter egg made was 3430 km .
Inside a cell is a jelly-like substance called cytoplasm.
Green plants make their own food by process called photosynthesis.
Some kinds of fungi are parasites. Fungi can grow on both plants and animals and can cause serious diseases.
Among the thousand of different kinds of vertebrates, there are some which look strange and others which behave in unusaul ways.
The long-nosed bandicoot has a backward facing pouch.
There are about 67 500 kinds of bugs in the world.
All animals produce electrical waves from their brain.
If the animal is dreaming the pattern changes again.
Alexander Graham Bell did not only invent the telephone, but also the microphone.
That the planet Pluto sees the sun every 48 years.
The average person takes about two and a half million steps in a year.
It is very good to eat seaweed because of its high iodine content.
A hagfish has four ears, no stomach and three eyes out of which he can't see.
The brain accounts for 3% of body weight but it uses about 15% of the body's blood supply.
Animal diseases caught by man are called a zoonosis.
A caterpillar has twelve eyes.
The colour of a lobster's blood is blue.
The planet Venus is also known as both the morning star and the evening star.
The blue whale's heart is as big as a small car.
Of the five senses, smell normally dims first.
Red iron oxide is more commonly known as rust.
The average person takes about 7 minutes to fall asleep.
The maximum speed of the human heart is 220 beats per minute.
A hedgehog is relatively immune to snake bites.
A cow has no upper front teeth.
When the female spider dies, she is eaten by her babies.
The male duck-billed platypus has an extra claw which can discharge poison.
When light enters a block of glass it is bent as it goes in.
A white light is actually made up out of different colours.
Bees dance to communicate.
A rocket works by shooting hot gasses out of the tail by using an explosive powder or liquid oxygen to lift it right away from earth against the force of gravity.
Marsupials are mammals which have a pouch, eg. kangaroo.
There are nearly 1000 different types of bats in the world.
A light is the distance travelled by a ray of light in one year at the speed of 300 000 km/sec.
The human tongue has about 3000 taste buds?
Steel is made by adding just the right amount of carbon to iron?
The earliest life forms were plants in the ocean.They released oxygen as a waste product.
Aluminium alloys are commonly used for racing bicycles to give strength and light weight?
Gasses and dusts are collected in special hoods attached to each electrolytic cell.
Gas masks contain filter pads of activated carbon.These absorb the tear or poison gas.
Ice has an open structure that makes it less dense than liquid water?
Spider webs are held together by hydrogen bonding?
Citrus fruits contain citric acid, a weak acid which give these fruits their sour taste.
Helium almost has the same lifting power as hydrogen, but it cannot catch fire.
A spider has eight legs.
A bat is sometimes referred to as a flying dog.
A cat sleeps up to 14 hours a day.
The earliest forms of Jazz were called Dixieland and swing.
Today the demand for water, is 35 times more than 300 years ago.
A shoal of piranhas can reduce a 45kg animal to a skeleton in less than 60 seconds.
A right -handed persons left thumb nail Grows the slowest of all his nails and vice versa.
An average cow produces 5000 litres of milk in a year.
No matter how tall you are in the morning, by evening you will be about 1 cm shorter. You regain your original height while sleeping.
The Romans called the hours before noon Ante Meridiem and the hours after noon is called Post Meridiem.
A piece of buttered toast contains about 315 kilojoules: With that energy you could run a car for 1 min at the speed of 60 km/h.
When you run only about 25% of chemical energy in your muscles changes into Kinetic energy. The rest changes into Heat energy.
It has taken millions of years for the seas to become salty. The water from rain and melting snow. That has gradually dissolved salt from rocks, and the salt has build up in the seas.
The seas rise and fall at regular intervals called tides. They are caused by the Moons gravity which pulls the seas directly below it.
When pilots, loop the loop, the centripetal force turning them can be so strong that they feel about 4 times heavier than normal.
In the dead sea the water is so salty that people can float in it without swimming. They can even sit in the water and read a book.
Atoms and molecules are so tiny that there are about as many atoms in a grain of sand as there are grains of sand on the beach.
The largest hailstone ever found was in Kansas, USA. It was 19 cm wide and weighed 758 g the size of a melon.
The world’s most powerful power station is on the Parana river in South America. It’s 18 turbines produce 12,600 million watts.
10 of the highest volcanoes are in the Andes mountains.
An ostrich is the biggest bird
Kangaroos can jump up to 2 metres.
Giraffes have the longest neck between animals.
The silk that spiders produce to weave webs, is the strongest known natural fibre.
A rat that leaves a ship before it sails it consider it dangerous.
The lightest adult dog alive is 780 g.
The tallest red male kangaroo is 7 ft. tall.
The smallest monkey is the Pygmy Marmoset and lives in the Amazon forest.
The oldest bat is about 30 years old.
The blue wale is the biggest wale in the sea.
A horse can eat 6 boils per day.
A giraffe has the longest neck in the world. Yet, it only has nine vertebrae in its neck.
A snake can eat one goat per day.
An springbok can jump 1 m.
A donkey is stronger than a horse.
A horse can run faster than a donkey .
If different spacecrafts go into space, their times are different.
Acid is one of a class of sour-tasting chemicals which react with a Base to form salt.
Fungi are ancient organisms, dating back more than 1,000 million years.
Monotremes all live in Australia or on a nearby island. There are three species - one specie is the duck-billed platypus.
Monotremes are mammals that aren’t born like mammals - they hatch out of eggs.
A sundew plant uses the sticky liquid on its leaves to trap insects. It uses the hairs on its leaves to hold the insect.
There are more than a hundred acupuncture points on each ear.
That breathing and respiration are not the same.
Artificial hearts are made of class fibre.
That herb the one type of plant that can cure some diseases.
The first stethoscopes enabled doctors to listen closely to the human heart.
That oranges, lemons and limes can prevent the illness scurvy.
That artificial skin was invented to treat very bad burns.
No one realised that microscopic parasites carry disease.
Most lizards replace their tails within a month after losing them.
A waterbuck live in troops of 10-20 near water.
The human vertebra-column rest on the basin and carry the head.
A normal vertebra-column is not a straight bar, but a trio bend.
The wild-dog hunts in groups of 5-20 dogs.
A fly beat its wings 200 times a second.
That the greatest scientist was an English man Sir Izaac Newton.
That a Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1866.
That Zacharias Janssen a was Hollander who invented the microscope .
That a Frenchman Louis Braille invented Braille in 1829.
That Ernest Rutherford split the first atom in 1919 .
That LASER stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation .
That an electron microscope can enlarge an object up to a million times .
That Joseph Niepce, a French inventor took the first photo in 1826 .
Giraffes are very shy, quiet and harmless animals .
When seahorses want to stay in one place, they wrap their tails around some seaweed .
The Australian moloch, or thorny devil, has a body completely covered from head to tail in short, thorn-like spines .
When the prickly puffer fish is frightened, it can blow itself up to twice its normal size .
A dormouse can sleep in its nest for almost six months.
The tiger’s stripes help it to blend with the tall grass of its hunting ground.
The first transatlantic live broadcast was in 1962.
A blonde beard grows faster than any other colour beard.
The world’s largest lake, lake Volta, Ghana, had filled an area of square 8,482 km.
Americans watch the most TV in the world, they watch about 9 years worth in 65 years.
The worst air crash killed 583 people when 2 Boeing 747`s collided.
The most deaths on 1 ship killed 7700 people.
The world’s tallest tree was measured at 112,014 m.
The world’s largest litter of pigs was 37 piglets.
The world’s oldest duck was 25 years old.
At least 75% of all the freshwater on Earth is deep-frozen inside glaciers.
The Amazon discharges an average of 200 000 to 340 000 cubic metres of water into the Atlantic Ocean.
The aorta, largest of the body’s arteries, has a diameter of 3 centimetre where it leaves the heart.
The humans nerve cells, motor neurons, are 1.3m long.
The human eye is so sensitive that it can see a lighted candle positioned 1.6km away in the dark.
There are nearly 6 x 1024 atoms in a gram of hydrogen.
The sun’s light lifetime is only 109 years.
To escape from elephants, tigers hide in the water.
When starlight passes a heavy planet, the star appears to be in a different position than is really the case.
It takes an entire forest - more than half a million trees - to supply Americans with their Sunday newspapers every week.
Periodically, a crab’s outer shell is cast to allow for growth.
Armadillos feed on insects, snakes and fruit carron.
Layer of the earth, the crust, has an average depth of 24 km.
A hedgehog is relatively immune to snake bites.
Raindrops fall in the form of hamburger rolls.
A typical chicken will lay +- 19 dozen eggs a year.
There's no difference between a Guinea-Fowl and a Guinea-Hen.
The Pekinese, a Chinese breed of dog, was bred to look like a lion.
Bees do not have ears.
One tree snake tries to swallow another when it’s fighting.
Some scorpions can squirt their venom like snakes.
You can hear a rock concert on the radio a split second before the audience, because the signals reach your radio by the speed of light and them by the speed of sound.
The nearest a human has ever been to the centre of the Earth is 3,5km down leaving another 6 374,5km to go.
The estimated temperature at the centre of the Earth is around 4 100°C.
Forces acting on your hip joints can reach four to six times your body weight during activities such as running, jumping and hopping.
The greatest height an unmanned balloon has ever reached was 51,8m
Carbon melts at a high temperature of 3 550°C.
The smallest flowering plant is one seventy-millionth of the size of the largest.
An anaconda can swallow a pig.
You can find an insect, known as the Ceylonese, that looks exactly like a leaf.
Did you know calor therapist use different colors for the treatment for stress.
The Pacific Ocean, the largest ocean, is three times bigger than Asia, the largest continent.
There is enough water in the atmosphere, that if it all fell at the same time as rain, it will cover the entire surface of the earth with 2,5cm (1in).
Slow motion in a movie is obtained by letting the camera run faster.
posted by Smartseenu @ Thursday, March 10, 2005
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