Did you know? (warning long post)

Astatine is an element so rare that if you searched the entire planet you?d only find a lump the size of a sugar cube.

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

The maximum speed that raindrops can fall at is around 18mph, depending on their size.

If every star in the Milky Way was a grain of salt they would fill an Olympic sized swimming pool.

12 Astronauts have walked on the moon, between them bringing back 382 kilograms of rocks, pebbles, sand and dust.

Whales talk to each other by making a loud clicking noise. The sound waves travel extremely well underwater and they can hear each other from 100 miles away.

A TV screen shows 24 pictures a second. Because a fly sees 200 images a second, it would see TV as still pictures with darkness in between.

Because of thermal expansion the Eiffel Tower is 15cm taller in summer.

Some people who have two or more different kinds of fillings in their teeth are able to hear high-power AM broadcast stations when located within a few hundred feet of the stations. In such cases, the strong radio waves act upon the teeth fillings in such a way that the electromagnetic oscillations get transformed to mechanical vibrations in the person's head, and these are heard as sound.

The amount of sunlight reaching the earth's surface is 6,000 times the amount of energy used by all human beings worldwide. The total amount of fossil fuel used by humans since the start of civilization is equivalent to less than 30 days of sunshine.

Tree crickets are called the poor man's thermometer because temperature directly affects their rate of activity. Count the number of chirps a cricket makes in 15 seconds, then add 37. The sum will be very close to the outside temperature in farenheit!

The highest temperature ever recorded at the South Pole was minus 13 degrees centigrade.

You weigh less if you stand at the equator than if you stood at the north pole. This is because the equator is actually further away from the centre of the earth, so the force of gravity is less.

Engineers at NASA claim to have made the loudest noise ever: of 210 decibels. This is so loud that it can make holes in solid materials.

The mass of the Earth increases every year because of 3,000 tonnes of meteorite debris that hits its surface from space.

A supernova is the most energetic single event known in the Universe. Material is exploded into space at about 10,000 kilometres per second. All the stars in our galaxy (about 100,000,000,000) would have to shine for six months to produce the amount of energy released by just one supernova.

The planet Venus?s day is longer than its year. It takes 225 ?Earth? days to rotate around the Sun (a Venusian year) and 243 ?Earth? days to rotate on its axis (a Venusian day).

It takes the energy output of at least one power station to keep the traffic lights in the British Isles operating.

One kilogram of butter stores as much energy between its atoms as the same quantity of TNT.

Men are six times more likely to be struck by lightning than women.

IBM's ASCI white supercomputer, the fastest computer in the world, weighs as much as 17 elephants and can do in one second what a calculator would take 10 million years to do.

The Moon is gradually moving away from the Earth and the tides are to blame. Every year, the Moon moves a further 3.82cm from the Earth.

Gold leaf is pure gold, but you can cover large areas with it very cheaply because it is very thin. Gold leaf is less than 0.00008 millimetres thick - which is only about 300 atoms thick.

Every rainbow is unique - each rainbow is formed from light hitting your eye at a very precise angle. Someone standing next to you will see light coming from a slightly different angle than you and therefore see a different rainbow.

A bolt of lightning contains enough energy to toast 160,000 pieces of bread. Unfortunately the bolt only takes 1/10,000 of a second ? so turning the bread over might prove difficult.

If 10 kilograms of matter spontaneously turned into energy there would be enough energy to power a 100 Watt light bulb for 300 million years - a harrowing thought for all weight watchers.

Posted By: dam, Aug 16, 17:45:46