~Science Facts~

• The star Sirius B is so dense that a piece of it the size of a sugar cube would weigh several hundred tons.
• The speed of light, at 670 million mph, sounds very fast. But a light ray, at this speed, would take about 26 billion years to cross the visible universe.
• The universe is apparently infinite in extent. If you could travel a distance in light-years of one thousand trillion digits, you might find another planet identical to Earth with identical people. 
• There are 62,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body – laid end to end they would circle the earth 2.5 times.
• At over 2000 kilometers long, The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth.
• The risk of being struck by a falling meteorite for a human is one occurrence every 9,300 years.
• A thimbleful of a neutron star would weigh over 100 million tons.
• A typical hurricane produces the energy equivalent of 8,000 one megaton bombs.
• The safety match was invented by Gustaf Erik Pasch (in the year 1844). It was later improved by Johan Edvard Lundstrom.
• Cartography is the science of making maps.
• Cobalt-60 is an artificial radioactive isotope of cobalt used for sterilizing surgical instruments.
• Photoelectric effect was discovered by Heinrich Hertz and Wilhelm Hallwachs in the year 1887.
• Sheep can recognize individual human and sheep faces, and remember them for years.
• There are more atoms in a bucketful of water than there are bucketfuls of water in the Atlantic Ocean.
• Every day nearly 3,000 earthquakes shake our planet.
• Carbon monoxide, notorious as a poison, is invaluable in the chemical industry for purifying metals.
• If Everest, our highest mountain, were placed at the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean, its peak would be more than a mile beneath the surface.
• About 70 per cent of the Earth's surface is water. By coincidence, 70 per cent of the human body is also water.
• The world's fastest supercomputer could take about 7,000 trillion years to find the two prime numbers that make up a 300-digit prime product. But a quantum computer could do the same sum in a few days.
• The oceans contain enough salt to cover all the continents to a depth of nearly 500 feet.
• The interstellar gas cloud Sagittarius B contains a billion, billion, billion liters of alcohol.
• Polar Bears can run at 25 miles an hour and jump over 6 feet in the air.
• 60-65 million years ago dolphins and humans shared a common ancestor.
• Polar Bears are nearly undetectable by infrared cameras, due to their transparent fur.
• Silumin is an alloy of aluminium and silicon used for casting purposes.
• Molten lava is up to 100,000 times as viscous as water.
• An acre of rich fertile farmland may contain up to 1,750,000 earthworms.
• The first colour photograph was created by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, with the help of the English photographer Thomas Sutton, in the year 1861.
• Capybara is the largest living rodent in the world.
•   The average person accidentally eats 430 bugs each year of their life.
• The temperature on the surface of Mercury exceeds 430 degrees C during the day, and, at night, plummets to minus 180 degrees centigrade.
• The evaporation from a large oak or beech tree is from ten to twenty-five gallons in twenty-four hours