 Even though dragonflies have six legs, they cannot walk.

[39]
 Gummy bears were originally called "dancing bears
 The bird on the Twitter logo is named "Larry." He was named after the
basketball player Larry Bird, who played for the Boston Celtics.
 The term "coccyx" (also known as your tailbone) is derived from the Greek
word "cuckoo" ("kokkux") because the curved shape of the tailbone resembles
the bird's beak.
 A baby has around 30,000 taste buds. They are not just on the tongue but also
on the sides, back, and roof of the mouth. Adults have about 10,000.
 In one survey, three out of four people admitted to sharing an ice cream cone
with their pet.
 When humans take a breath, they replace only 15% of the air in their lungs
with fresh air. When dolphins take a breath, they replace 90% of the air in their
lungs with fresh air.
 Dolphins usually breathe through their blowhole, but, in 2016, scientists
discovered a dolphin with a damaged bowhole that could breath through its
mouth
 Pablo Picasso would often carry around a pistol loaded with blanks. He would
fire it at people he found boring or anyone who insulted the Post-Impressionist
painter, Paul Cézanne.
 Monarch caterpillars breathe through holes in the sides of their bodies.
 Male lobster’s bladders are in their heads, and when they fight, they squirt
each other in the face with urine.
 The word "oysterhood" means "reclusiveness" or "an overwhelming desire to
stay at home."[16]
 Ancient pagan cultures, such as the Celts, believed that benevolent and
helpful spirits lived in trees. Knocking on tree trunks roused a spirit for
protection, which led to the saying "knock on wood.[6]
 Laughter synchronizes the brains of both speaker and listener so that they
become emotionally attuned.[8]
 Isaac Newton believed he was potentially part of a line of great men to receive
great and ancient wisdom. He even created a special name for himself
"Jehovah Sanctus Unus," or "to Jehovah, the Holy One."[10]
 Hugging your cat has been shown to reduce stress and anxiety, especially for
people who are dealing with illness, depression, PTSD, and other ailments.[2]
 A group of monkeys in Delhi, India reportedly attacked a laboratory assistant
and escaped with several coronavirus blood samples. The monkeys were later
spotted in a tree chewing one of the sample collection kits.[20]
 Bart Simpson's name is an anagram of BRAT. His full name is Bartholomew
Jojo Simpson.[38]
 An oak tree produces about 10 million acorns during its lifetime.[6]
 Oak Tree trivia
 Oak trees symbolize knowledge, strength, and loyalty
 There's enough concrete in the Hoover Dam to build a two-lane highway from
San Francisco to New York City.[38]
 The Muppet vampire, Count von Count from Sesame Street, is based on
actual vampire myth. One way to supposedly deter a vampire is to throw
seeds outside a door. Vampires are compelled to count the seeds, delaying
them until morning.[13]
 The "O" before an Irish name, such as "O'Reilly," means "descendant of."[39]
 Gossip and complaining make up approximately 80% of most people's
conversations.[28]
 Developing a larger vocabulary may help protect you against depression. It
allows you to precisely label--and confront--subtle emotions.[30]
 Riding or sitting on a sea turtle in the United States is a 3rd degree felony.[12]
 Humans shed about 600,000 particles of skin every hour. By age 70, humans
lose an average of 105 pounds of skin.[23]
 Listening to your favorite music for just 15 minutes a day lowers stress levels,
anxiety, sadness, and a depressed mood.[38]
 To make one pound of honey, honey bees must gather nectar from nearly 2
million flowers.[7]
 Bluetooth" technology is named after a 10th century king, King Harald
Bluetooth. Bluetooth united the tribes of Denmark, just like the wireless
technology united cell phones and computers.[16]
 A duel between three people is called a "truel."[16]
 There is a Statue of Liberty in Paris that faces the Statue of Liberty in America,
showing friendship between the two countries.[33]
 Research shows that people who laugh at dark jokes have higher IQs and
report less aggressive tendencies.[8]
 Termite queens live longer than any other insect. Some scientists estimate
that they can live as long as 100 years.[35]
 Termite Queen
 When the termite queen dies, the pheromone she uses to block reproductives
development in other termites is no longer produced, and then a new queen
develops
 Ancient Romans left graffiti on Egyptian pyramids that says, "I didn't like
anything but the sarcophagus," and "I can't read the hieroglyphs."[5]
 The kererū (New Zealand Wood Pigeon) is well-known for getting drunk off
fermented fruit and falling out of trees. Consequently, it has earned the
reputation for being "clumsy, drunk, gluttonous, and glamorous."[3]
 Sweden has a rabbit show jumping competition called Kaninhoppning. The
world record for the highest rabbit jump is 42 inches (106 cm).[38]
 A female chicken will mate with many different males. If she decides later that
she doesn’t want a particular rooster’s offspring, she can eject his sperm. This
happens most often when the male is lower in the pecking order.[3]
 Scientists believe that early human ancestors used to have three eyelids. One
of the eyelids eventually became the small fold in the corner of human eyes
today.[23]
 The space between the eyebrows is called the "glabella," which is derived
from the Latin word "glabellus," meaning "smooth."[23]
 The seagulls in the Alfred Hitchcock movie "The Birds" (1963) were fed a
mixture of wheat and whisky so they would stand around and not fly too much.
[3]
 A pangram is a sentence that contains every letter in the language. For
example, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."[16]
 Isaac Newton was a member of the British parliament for one year. He spoke
only once, and that was to tell someone to please close the window.[10]
 The word "porcupine" means "spiny pig" in French.[16]
 In the 2004 movie "Mean Girls," the “nice girl,” Cady, is named after Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, a 19th-century pioneer in the American women’s rights
movement.[14]
 In 1962, a laughter epidemic broke out in Tanzania. The outbreak began in a
girls' school and spread to other communities, ultimately affecting 1,000
people and causing the temporary closure of 14 schools.[8]
 Gelotophobia is the fear of laughter. Those who suffer from gelotophobia
respond to all laughter as if it is at their expense. Up to 13% of the population
could be afraid of laughter.[8]
 The Wizard of Oz's Full Name is Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman
Henkel Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs. In the book, he explains that he called
"myself O.Z., because the other initials were P-I-N-H-E-A-D."[38]
 Over 80% of people feel more confident approaching an attractive person if
that person has a dog with them.[38]
 Dog trivia
 Need a date? Get a dog!
 A group of 400 trees in Poland's Krzywy Las, or "Crooked Forest," are
mysteriously and identically bent. The J-shaped trunks remain a mystery to
this day.[6]
 The word "queue" sounds the same even if the last four letters are removed.
Before it meant "line," a queue meant the tail of a beast in medieval pictures
and designs.[16]
 A group of penguins in the water is called a “raft," and that a group of
penguins on land is called a “waddle.”[38]
 Capitonyms are words which change their meaning if the first letter is
capitalized. For example: Turkey (the country) and turkey (the bird).[16]
 The fear of running out of something to read is called "abibliophobia."[16]
 Researchers from India recently discovered a new species of green pit vipers.
They named the snake after Salazar Slytherin, one of the founders of the
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the Harry Potter universe.[24]
 When the first consistent phone service was established in 1878, Alexander
Graham Bell suggested answering the phone with “ahoy."[38]
 The closest relative to bears are seals.[38]
 Under Joseph Stalin's regime, "Hamlet" was banned. The official reason:
Hamlet's indecisiveness and depression were incompatible with the new
Soviet spirit of optimism, fortitude, and clarity.[18]
 Beekeepers in France noticed that their bees were producing honey in
unusual shades of green and blue. After investigating, the beekeepers
discovered that the bees had been eating remnants of M&M candy shells from
a nearby factory.[7]
 In the late Middle Ages, books were so valuable that libraries would chain
them to bookcases.[38]
 Hummingbirds can't walk or hop. Their tiny legs are only used for perching and
moving sideways while perched.[3]
 A woman who lost her wedding ring found it 16 years later on a carrot in her
garden. She lost her wedding ring after accidentally throwing it out with the
compost in 1995. In 2012, she found it around a carrot in her garden.[39]
 Smaller animals tend to perceive time as if it is passing in slow motion. Insects
and small birds, for example, can see more information in one second than a
larger animal such as an elephant.[38]
 Killing a dolphin in ancient Greece was considered sacrilegious and was
punishable by death.[21]
 A group of goldfish is called a "troubling."[38]
 A group of goldfish
 Goldfish are the most popular aquarium fish in the world
 A "glisk" is sunlight that is glimpsed through a break in the clouds, a fleeting
glance at a glittering sight, a brief glow of warmth from a fire that's burned low.
It can also mean a sudden flash of hope in the heart.[16]
 Pet owners usually have better self-esteem, are more in shape, and are less
lonely than those who do not own pets.[38]
 Though not commonly used, the day after tomorrow is called
"overmorrow."[16]
 The word “ferret” is from the Latin "fur," meaning “little thief.” Indeed, one of
the ferret’s favorite activities is stealing and hiding things.[16]
 A snail's mouth is no larger than the head of a pin, but it can have over 25,000
teeth.[38]
 Leonardo Da Vinci’s "Mona Lisa" has her own mailbox at the Louvre because
of all the love letters she receives.[38]
 The cartoon character Tweety was originally named Orson. He was also
naked, far more aggressive, and saucy.[38]
 A group of lizards is called a "lounge."[16]
 The name "coronavirus" is derived from the Latin word "corona," meaning
"crown" or "halo." This refers to the appearance of a crown or a solar corona
around the virus particles.[19]
 Tigers cannot purr. When they are happy or feel safe, they squint or close their
eyes.[2]
 According to a Yale study, people who read books live on average 2 years
longer than those who do not read at all.[38]
 Moonflowers unfurl in the evening and stay open until the sun rises. Several
varieties of moonflower also give off a lemon fragrance when its flowers are
open.[15]
 Octopus skin contains the same light-sensitive proteins as octopus eyes. This
means its skin can "see" and respond to light without information from the
eyes or brain.[11]
 Pangolins are the only known mammal with scales. When threatened by
predators, pangolins roll up into a ball, protected by their armor-like coating of
keratin scales.[38]
 To "snirtle" means to laugh with snorts.[16]
 The name "daisy" is thought to come from the Old English "daes eag." "Daes
eag" means "day's eye," after the way in which the delicate flower opens at
dawn.[16]
 Termites chew through wood twice as quickly when they are exposed to rock
music.[35]
 A grasshopper's ears are found not on its head, but rather, on its belly.[35]
 The praying mantis is the only insect that can turn its head.[35]
 The two highest IQ scores in recorded history belong to women.[38]
 An average cumulus (white, puffy) cloud can weigh more than a million
pounds.[38]
 Studies show that bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists because
they are happy just to get a medal at all.[17]
 The word "swan" is derived from the Indo-European root *swen, meaning "to
sound, to sing."[3]
 Kobe Bryant was the youngest player to start an NBA game, at just 18.5 years
old.[29]
 Drivers of expensive cars are less likely to slow down for pedestrians. They
are also more likely to feel a sense of superiority over fellow drivers and to
break traffic regulations.[31]
 Giraffes give birth while standing up. Their babies must drop more than five
feet (1.5 meters) to the ground as they're born.[34]
 Baby Giraffe Fact
 A baby giraffe (or calf) starts life with a 5-foot drop to the ground
 In Ankara, Turkey, sanitation workers created a public library out of books they
found while collecting garbage. It contains over 6,000 books.[27]
 Research shows that most individuals spend 60% of their conversation time
talking about themselves. This number jumps to 80% while conversing on
social media.[28]
 In central Italy, there is a fountain that flows red wine 24-hours a day. It is free
to everyone, except for “drunkards and louts.”[38]
 The word "robot" comes from a Czech word "robota," which means "forced
labor, compulsory service, drudgery."[9]
 Due to Covid-19 lockdowns, deodorant sales declined, and ice cream sales
soared.[36]
 The difference between jelly and jam is that jelly is made with fruit juice, and
jam is made with mashed fruit.[37]
 Afghan poppy farmers have switched to solar power to run their irrigation
systems. This has significantly increased the world's supply of heroin.[32]

 Earth’s non-mythological etymology is unique among planets.

 Earth is the only planet in our solar system that doesn’t get its name from
Greek or Roman mythology.

 The word Earth derives from the Old English word eorþe.
 Eorþe means “ground, soil, dry land.” The same term was also used to
differentiate between our domain, the underworld, and the heavens. This was
before our modern conception of planets. The fact that we needed a way to
refer to our planet before we even really figured out what a planet is probably
helps account for the murky history around the word. It’s impossible to say
who first used the word earth, or one of its antecedents, to refer to the
astronomical entity that is the earth. One usage probably just bled into another
as our scientific understanding expanded.

 You are here (astronomically).

 Earth is in the Milky Way galaxy, the third planet from the sun in our solar
system.

 Light from the sun takes some time to travel to Earth.

 According to NASA, it takes about eight minutes for light from the sun to reach
us on Earth.

 Earth is one astronomical unit away from the sun.

 That’s not some great coincidence—historically, an astronomical unit was just
the average distance from the Earth to the sun. It gave scientists a shorthand
for communicating distances. New York to California is about .00003
astronomical units.

 The oldest existing maps of Earth are thousands of years old.

 Maps have been around for a long time. The oldest surviving maps are
thousands of years old; there’s thought to be a map of the stars found in the
Lascaux caves of France that dates back to 14,500 BCE.

 One early map may be carved into a mammoth tusk.

 There also might be a map of local landscape features of what is now the
Czech Republic carved into a mammoth tusk that dates back to 25,000 BCE.
The key is “might be,” because it can be a bit tricky, when looking at millennia-
old carved tusks, to differentiate between abstract drawings and intentionally
plotted maps. But there are proponents of the 27,000-year-old tusk map.

 Jigsaw puzzles were originally just chopped up maps.

 When they were invented around 1760, jigsaw puzzles were used to teach
kids about geography, fitting the various countries together in order to make a
map of the world (or, more commonly, just Europe).

 The oldest surviving world map is the Babylonian World Map.

 The earliest surviving map of the world is the Babylonian World Map, which
dates back to the 6th century BCE. The clay tablet contains a labeled
depiction of the known world, centered around the Euphrates River. It’s
currently housed in the British Museum.

 Mercator projection maps are especially suited for sailing.

 The World on Mercator's Projection, 1902.
 The World on Mercator's Projection, 1902. / Print Collector/Getty Images
 The Babylonian World Map wasn’t very accurate, but even modern maps
aren’t perfect—far from it. The common map we all probably have in our
heads is based on the Mercator projection. This map preserves the shape of
land masses, but stretches the area of regions closer to the poles. It’s been
the standard model of maps for centuries, but it’s mainly beneficial for sailing,
not accurately depicting the relative size of objects.

 Greenland may be considerably smaller than you think.

 Because of the size distortion of Mercator projections, certain countries like
Greenland are depicted as being massive. If you picture Greenland in your
head, it’s probably almost the size of Africa—but in reality, Greenland is about
the size of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. About 14 Greenlands could
fit inside of Africa.
 The Mercator projection inflates the apparent size of Antarctica to such a
degree that most publishers choose to cut it off, which often results in world
maps with Europe near the vertical center. The equator can end up about two-
thirds of the way down the map, even though “being in the middle of the world”
is kind of the equator’s thing.

 Some see political statements in cartographic choices.

 Some see an implicit political statement arising from these distortions. When
Boston public schools decided to stop purchasing Mercator projection maps
for their classrooms, an official framed it as part of an effort to move past what
they said was a “view that is very Eurocentric.”

 A more full-throated criticism comes from Marianne Franklin, professor of

Global Media and Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London, who said that
distorted projections like Mercator’s "underpin the ongoing Anglo-Euro-
American presumption that the world belongs to them, and pivots around
these geo-cultural axes."

 The Gall-Peters projection has its own advantages and drawbacks.

 In the case of the Boston public school system, they decided to start
purchasing maps based on the Gall-Peters projection, which offers a more
accurate depiction of size and area. It has its own drawbacks, though, as it
distorts the shapes of continents. Some cartographic historians, like Professor
Matthew Edney at the University of Southern Maine, favor the Eckert IV
projection, which preserves proportionality without distorting the shape of
continents as much as Gall-Peters. The fact is, there are some basically
insurmountable obstacles when attempting to perfectly represent a three-
dimensional planet in two-dimensional space.

 Crates of Mallus created the first known globe.

 The first known globe is said to have been created in about 150 BCE by a
philosopher named Crates of Mallus in Cilicia. The idea of a spherical Earth
was considered around 500 BCE by Pythagoras, but if anyone thought to
create a globe at the time the evidence has been lost to history.

 Aristotle knew the Earth wasn’t flat.

 A century and change later, the Greek philosopher Aristotle was clear that
Earth wasn’t flat. He wrote about how moving from north to south meant
 seeing different stars in the sky, the result of a changing horizon that wouldn’t
occur on a flat Earth.

 Eratosthenes calculated a rough estimate of Earth’s circumference.

 Eratosthenes used observations of how high the sun rose in two different
Egyptian cities, along with some relatively simple math, to create a rough
estimate of the Earth’s circumference. Despite his rather crude methods, his
estimate was in the right ballpark. That was more than 2000 years ago.

 The oldest surviving globe was created in 1492 by a German astronomer

named Martin Behaim.
 The globe, named Erdapfel (which literally means "Earth apple"), is an
important piece of history that documents our simultaneously broad and
limited understanding of the Earth. It contains myriad errors, including a couple
of mythological islands throughout the Atlantic ocean. But give Behaim a break
—he didn’t have Google Earth to fact check.

 HC SVT DRACONES appeared on the Hunt-Lenox Globe.

 The Hunt-Lenox Globe
 The Hunt-Lenox Globe / New York Public Library Rare Books Division // Public
Domain
 Another of the oldest surviving globes, the Hunt-Lenox globe from around
1510, is also one of the few historical appearances of the phrase HC SVNT
DRACONES, or Here be Dragons. The Latin phrase appears below the
equator off Asia, which might be a reference to the Komodo dragons in the
Indonesian islands.

 Magellan led (most of) the first successful circumnavigation of the globe.
 In 1519, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan departed Spain with five
ships and demonstrated that the globe could be circumnavigated, laying to
rest any lingering doubt about its shape. Magellan died during the voyage, and
of the five ships only one completed the circumnavigation.

 Pocket globes were once in fashion.

 During the 18th and 19th centuries, it was considered somewhat fashionable
for middle-class “men of the world” to carry around a pocket globe, a tiny 2-to-
3-inch globe that fit right alongside a pocket watch.
 The largest globe in the world is called Eartha.
 On the other end of the spectrum, the largest globe in the world is called
Eartha, coming in with a diameter of just over 41 feet. It was developed by the
DeLorme mapping corporation and is now housed in an atrium in Yarmouth,
Maine. Guinness World Records awarded it the title of Largest Revolving
Globe in the world in 1999. Eartha still holds that record today.

 NASA’s Voyager 1 took an iconic photo of Earth.

 Voyager 1's photo of Earth from 4 billion miles away that came to be known as
"The Pale Blue Dot."
 Voyager 1's photo of Earth from 4 billion miles away that came to be known as
"The Pale Blue Dot." / NASA/JPL
 While globes can represent the planet in interesting ways, it’s hard for them to
compare with the majesty of actual photographs of our planet made possible
by advances in technology. On February 14, 1990, NASA’s Voyager 1
spacecraft took a picture of the planet from roughly 4 billion miles away. It
depicts the Earth as little more than a speck in the universe. It was taken at
the behest of Carl Sagan, who later wrote about it as, “[a] mote of dust
suspended in a sunbeam.” He called it the Pale Blue Dot.

 Concern for our planet has inspired many musicians.

 Earth has also proven to be quite the muse for musicians. Marvin Gaye’s 1971
hit, “Mercy, Mercy Me” was about ecological conservation. Joe Walsh made
an entire album, Songs for a Dying Planet, about it. In 2015, Paul McCartney,
Sean Paul, and Natasha Bedingfield, among others, recorded “Love Song to
the Earth,” an all-star composition to raise awareness of climate change.

 Mishka Henner uses satellite images to create artwork.

 Artists have also taken inspiration from the Earth in more high-tech ways—
namely, from Google Earth. Belgian-born artist Mishka Henner uses satellite
images as the basis for works like 51 U.S. Military Outposts, which features
photos of supposedly low-key military installations.

 “Earth art” uses materials like soil, rocks, and sand.

 Not only has Earth been a favorite subject of artists, it’s also been a favorite
art material. A conceptual art movement in the 1960s and '70s brought with it
a style known as Land Art or Earth Art, which used soil, rocks, sand, and other
humble materials to create pieces. One of its major figures was Robert
Smithson, who actually created pieces out in nature like Spiral Jetty, which
was made out of earth and basalt. One of the most spectacular earth artworks
 is Celtic Horse in Slovakia, a 330-foot-by-330-foot geoglyph, otherwise known
as a stone sculpture. The artist, Andrew Rogers, has created over 50
geoglyphs, working in 16 countries and all seven continents.

 Earth has also been a rich source for science fiction.

 Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, which was published in
1864, illustrates the hazards of descending into the Earth, where the book’s
protagonists encounter Jurassic sea monsters.

 and 28. The crust is the outermost layer of the Earth, and it’s composed
mostly of one kind of rock.

 enter89 // iStock via Getty Images Plus

 If we were to make a journey to the core, we’d start at the crust, the outermost
layer of the planet. It's composed mostly of igneous rocks, and contains all life
on Earth.

 The planet is around 4.54 billion years old.

 About 4.5 billion years ago, the Earth was a more-or-less uniform ball of hot
rock. The Earth is thought to be about 4.54 billion years old, plus or minus
about 1 percent. That number is the result of observation, radiometric dating,
and a bit of educated guesswork.

 Rocks at least 3.5 billion years old have been found on every continent.
 Scientists sometimes look for the oldest rocks they can find here on Earth, and
analyze the radioactive isotopes within them to determine their ages. Rocks at
least 3.5 billion years old have been found on every continent, and zircon
crystals in Western Australia can be dated as far back as 4.4 billion years ago.
One problem with this method is that plate tectonics can destroy and recycle
some of the planet’s oldest rocks, making them less useful for aging the
planet.

 Rocks from Earth's satellite have been dated back 4.4 to 4.5 billion years.
 Helpfully, we have a near neighbor, the moon, that hasn't been disturbed by
plate tectonics, and therefore has many more ancient rocks to collect.
Astronauts collected some of these moon rocks back in the '60s and '70s,
some of which were eventually dated to between 4.4 and 4.5 billion years ago.
 A number of data points helps us determine Earth’s age.
 Our current best estimate for the Earth’s birthday comes from synthesizing a
number of different data points. Radiometric dating of meteorites gives us an
idea of when the solar system formed, and analyzing the composition of
different isotopes of lead here on Earth helps researchers determine how
much time would be required to get to these particular compositions. The
resulting estimate—that Earth is 4.54 billion years old—is offered with a
relatively high degree of certainty, but questions remain.

 A 2020 study suggested Earth may have formed in about 5 million years.
 We’re not sure how quickly the Earth formed, for example. A study published
in February 2020 by researchers at the University of Copenhagen suggested
that the Earth formed in about 5 million years, decidedly faster than previous
estimates in the tens of millions of years.

 That conclusion came from an alternate explanation of the planet’s formation.

 The study’s authors suggest that the planet formed through the accretion of
cosmic dust, rather than through a series of random collisions between
celestial bodies. Five million years might still sound like a lot of time, but if you
map the roughly 4.6 billion-year history of the solar system onto a single 24-
hour “cosmic day,” then the Earth’s formation, in the researchers’
understanding, took only about one-and-a-half minutes of that cosmic day.

 The Earth was once approximately 2800°F.

 After about 500 million years, the Earth had heated to the melting point of iron,
about 2800°F.

 This high temperature facilitated greater movement of the planet’s molten

material.
 This period of superhot temperatures was kind of like the planet’s
adolescence, a period of volatility that helped it become the Earth we would
eventually know and love. The high temperatures facilitated greater movement
of Earth’s rocky, molten material. Buoyant materials like water, silicon, and
oxygen tended to float to the surface, forming the planet’s early mantle and
crust.

 and 38. There was no atmospheric oxygen on Earth for around 2 billion years
—until cyanobacteria oxygenated the planet through photosynthesis.
 For the first 2 billion years of Earth’s existence, there wasn’t any atmospheric
oxygen to take in. At some point, cyanobacteria used the energy from sunlight
to make sugar out of water and carbon dioxide, a process known as
photosynthesis. Cyanobacteria produced oxygen as a waste product. Science
still isn’t sure why cyanobacteria grew from a single-celled to multicellular
organism and began to produce oxygen in amounts sufficient to fill the
atmosphere, but they did, resulting in what’s been dubbed The Great
Oxidation Event.

 39. Atmospheric oxygen led to the Cambrian Explosion.

 Without The Great Oxidation Event, we wouldn’t have had the Cambrian
Explosion, an evolutionary benchmark that saw a bonanza of life forming,
including chordates, which include vertebrates, and many hard-bodied animals
like brachiopods that lived in shells. It’s known as an explosion even though it
may have taken up to 20 million years.

 40. The crust is divided between continental and oceanic crust.

 Fast forward a few hundred million years to today. The Earth’s exterior has
cooled and is now divided into two different types: continental crust, which
averages between 18 and 30 miles thick, and oceanic crust, which averages 2
to 4.5 miles thick.

 41. Scientists have identified over a million species of plants and animals.
 Scientists have identified about 1.2 million species of plants and animals, but
by some estimates that leaves another 7.5 million species on the planet still to
be discovered. Some predict that we have even more work to do, pegging the
number of total species on the planet in the neighborhood of 1 to 6 billion. That
estimate comes from a group of scientists at the University of Arizona, Tucson,
who published a piece in The Quarterly Review of Biology in 2017 which
suggested that bacteria could make up 70 to 90 percent of species on earth.
When it comes to biodiversity, Earth is still very much an undiscovered
territory.

 42. and 43. Humans and farm animals make up approximately 95 percent of
all vertebrate land animals—and they used up a lot of the planet's natural
resources.
 For all that diversity, it’s estimated that humans and farm animals make up an
astounding 95 percent of all vertebrate land animals, with wild vertebrate land
animals representing just 5 percent of the total.
 That’s one reason why a lot of scientists believe we’re facing an environmental
crisis—we consume a lot of earth’s natural resources. Between 25 and 40
percent of all energy captured by plants is used by humans and livestock.

 44. Over 80 percent of known species are insects.

 There are many insects on Earth, including ants.
 There are many insects on Earth, including ants. / Adisak Mitrprayoon // iStock
via Getty Images Plus
 Humans might be the dominant species on the planet in terms of resources,
but in terms of sheer numbers, over 80 percent of known species—or over 1
million—are insects. If you’ve ever had ants invade your living space, you’re
probably not surprised.

 45. Collembolans exhibit extraordinary population density.

 Ants, however, don’t bring the numbers when it comes to sheer population
density. The Collembolans, or shrimp-like springtails, are an insect relative
and a very tiny .25 to 10 mm in size. Roughly 10,000 of them can be found in
just a cubic meter of soil. Depending on the location, that number can grow to
200,000. Chances are that the next time you’re standing on solid ground that’s
not paved over, you’re standing over a lot of springtails.

 46. There is a great diversity of beetle species.

 If you want variation in species, consider the beetles. Scientists have named
over 400,000 species of the insects so far, with more certainly on the way.
That means between one in three or one in five described life forms on the
planet is a beetle.

 47. There are three types of biodiversity.

 Genetic diversity is the different genes in individuals; species diversity speaks
to the differences between populations of species and between different
species; and ecosystem diversity is the variety of habitats and processes
occurring in a given setting.

 48. Earth's biodiversity has led to new medications.

 The next time you pop a prescription or over-the-counter drug to alleviate a
headache or other malady, consider raising your glass of water to biodiversity.
Most of the drugs developed in the past century were derived from plants,
bacteria, and fungi. Willow bark gave us aspirin, and in 2018 there were
 reports about a potential new antibiotic from the soil of a churchyard in Ireland,
which according to the BBC has long been a folk remedy.

 49. Four crops are responsible for two-thirds of the world’s food supply.
 Wheat.
 Wheat. / eclipse_images // iStock via Getty Images Plus
 Just four crops—wheat, maize, rice, and soybean—are responsible for two-
thirds of the world’s food supply. To reduce carbon footprints, researchers are
hoping to rely more on the 7000 other crops that humanity has farmed in the
past. Maybe one day you’ll be making pancakes with moringa leaves instead
of flour.

 50. Colombia may be the world’s most biodiverse country by area.

 Colombia is thought to be the most biodiverse country on the planet by area,
with one in every 10 species of flora and fauna found there, including more
species of birds and orchids than anywhere else. Its many ecosystems enable
this diversity. In fact, you could hike from a desert to a tundra in Colombia in
just a few days.

 51. Earth has five major oceans.

 They're the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, and Southern oceans. Most
countries now recognize the Southern (or Antarctic) Ocean as a unique, major
ocean basin, but it’s still pretty common for some sources to only recognize
the first three or four; there are even some who only recognize one “world
ocean.”

 52. There are roughly 20 million tons of gold in the ocean.

 Either way, the oceans are truly Earth’s treasure ... literally. It’s estimated that
there are roughly 20 million tons of gold in ocean waters. And not buried in a
sunken pirate ship, either—literally in the water. The tiny gold particles, when
added all together, would have a value of roughly 1.1 quadrillion dollars. You
can’t reasonably sift for it, unfortunately, because one liter of water contains
about 13 billionths of a gram of gold.

 53. The Atlantic Ocean is home to the biggest waterfall in the world.
 The Denmark Strait is home to a waterfall below the Atlantic that has a drop of
over 11,500 feet. The cold water coming from the east is more dense than the
warm water from the west, so when they meet, the cold water drops down,
creating a massive waterfall.
 54. It’s also home to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
 This massive mostly-underwater mountain range spans around 10,000 miles.
For context, the Andes are about 4300 miles long.

 55. Point Nemo is the most remote place on Earth.

 The most remote place in the world is in the Pacific Ocean. Known as Point
Nemo, it is the place that is farthest away from any land. The closest islands
are over 1600 miles away. It’s so remote that, at certain times, the closest
humans to this point are astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

 56. Twenty-eight thousand rubber duckies were once dumped into the Pacific
Ocean.
 In 1992, over 28,000 rubber duckies were accidentally dumped into the Pacific
Ocean. Oceanographers turned lemons into lemonade by tracking where the
ducks wound up to better understand the water currents. The duck sightings
continued through the mid-2000s.

 57. The Indian Ocean has gone by a number of names over the years.
 It landed near its current name in the 16th century, when it went by Oceanus
Orientalis Indicus, or Indian Eastern Ocean. It was also known as the Western
Ocean by Chinese explorers.

 58. The Kerguelen Plateau is found in the Indian Ocean.

 There’s an almost-entirely-submerged continent hiding in the Indian Ocean.
The Kerguelen plateau is about 1800 miles to the southwest of Australia and is
a result of the Kerguelen volcanic hotspot, which probably formed around 130
million years ago.

 59. The Arctic Ocean is the smallest of the oceans.

 The Arctic Ocean is the smallest of the oceans, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy
to explore. The first scientific expedition to the central Arctic didn’t occur until
the 1890s, thanks to a Norwegian explorer named Fridtjof Nansen who,
incidentally, would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922 for his work
with refugees.

 60. Walruses are primarily native to the Arctic Ocean.

 KenCanning // iStock via Getty Images Plus
 They’re also found in the Atlantic and Pacific. Their tusks seem to serve a
mostly social purpose in mating displays and shows of dominance, but they
have also been known to use the ivory protuberances to, in the words of the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “haul their heavy bodies up
onto the ice.”

 61. Not all organizations recognize the Southern Ocean.

 The Southern Ocean is recognized by many governing powers. It is not,
however, recognized by the National Geographic Society, which has the
Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans extending to Antarctica.

 62. A great variety of wildlife calls the Southern Ocean home.

 Despite being a pretty cold and uninviting place, the Southern Ocean is home
to a bounty of wildlife. Penguins, whales, orcas, seals, and colossal squids call
this place home.

 63. and 64. Below the Earth's crust is the mantle, and what happens there
plays a key role in plate tectonics.
 Even deep oceans are found on the Earth’s crust, but if we go a bit deeper, we
hit the mantle. It’s solid, like the crust, but also contains softer rocks that can
move over the course of millions of years. According to National Geographic,
"Activity in the mantle drives plate tectonics, contributing to volcanoes,
seafloor spreading, earthquakes, and orogeny (mountain-building)."

 65. and 66. The mantle gets increasingly hotter at greater depths, and the
term geothermal gradient describes this rate of change.
 The temperature in the mantle can range from around 1000°C to 3700°C. As
you might expect, it generally gets hotter the deeper you go. There’s even a
term for this change: geothermal gradient. Basically, each kilometer you drop
in the crust, the average temperature will rise about 25°C (an increase of
roughly 1°F for every 70 feet down). It’s slower in the mantle, rising around
half a degree Celsius per kilometer, until you get near the core, when the rate
of increase picks up again.

 67. The core is about 3000 kilometers from the Earth’s surface.
 You have to descend about 3000 kilometers from the Earth’s surface to end
up in the core, about the distance between London and the Norwegian
 archipelago Svalbard, home to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault—we’re really
not that far from our planet’s super-hot core.

 68. The center of the Earth is about the same temperature as the sun’s
surface.
 Caltech geochemist Paul Asimow told Popular Mechanics, “Within uncertainty,
the temperature at the center of the Earth is the same as the temperature at
the surface of the sun.” That’s roughly 10,000°F.

 69. Direct observation of the Earth’s core is impossible.

 Given the temperatures and pressures involved, direct observation of the
Earth’s core is impossible. So how do geologists make inferences about it? Dr.
Ken Rubin, professor in the department of Earth sciences at the University of
Hawaii, addressed precisely that question on the website Ask An Earth
Scientist. Dr. Rubin’s explanation provides us with some more cool Earth
facts. First, he says, “we know the overall density and mass of the Earth based
on measurements of how the Earth perturbs the orbits of other planets and the
moon.” Basically, you can’t put the Earth on a scale to get its mass, but you
can use our understanding of gravity to come up with a pretty good estimate
(with hat tips to Isaac Newton for his law of gravity and Henry Cavendish for
determining the “universal gravitational constant”).

 70., 71., and 72. We know the Earth's mass, its volume, and around how
many Earths could fit inside the sun.
 The Earth has a mass of roughly 6 sextillion metric tonnes, and its volume is
around 1 trillion cubic kilometers.

 That sounds pretty big, but it all depends on what you’re comparing it to.
Around a million Earths, for example, could fit inside the sun.

 73. Chondrites help us estimate the chemical composition of Earth.

 Dr. Rubin explains that some other pieces of evidence help tell us about the
overall chemical composition of materials on Earth, such as analyzing
chondrites. Chondrites are a type of meteorite thought to be essentially
unchanged since their formation at the beginning of the solar system. Rubin
explains that we can look at information like this to create what is essentially a
“balance sheet of materials” of all elements that should be found on Earth,
then observe which chemical elements aren’t in the crust or mantle. By
 process of elimination, geologists reason that these elements must be found in
the core.

 74. The planet’s magnetic field gives us insight into Earth’s core.
 Additionally, the existence of Earth’s magnetic field tells us there must be a
high concentration of metal in Earth’s core—specifically, metal that can remain
liquid even under very high pressures. The available evidence and common-
sense inferences allow us to assume Earth’s core is primarily iron, with a
smaller amount of nickel alongside a lighter element such as oxygen or sulfur.

 75. and 76. The Earth’s magnetic field can flip—and approximately 170
polarity reversals have occurred in the last 76 million years.
 Here’s an interesting fact about the Earth’s magnetic field: It can flip. If you
could stand in the same location, facing the same direction, hundreds of
thousands of years apart, a compass would actually tell you you’re facing
north at one time and south at another. In fact, geologic evidence suggests
that about 170 of these polarity reversals have occurred over the last 76
million years.

 77. Polarity reversals may happen faster than once thought.

 A recent study published in the journal Nature Communications suggests that
these polarity reversals can happen considerably faster than once thought,
though “considerably faster” is obviously a relative term. You’re still talking
tens of thousands of years.

 78 and 79. The Earth is not a sphere—and a number of things warp its shape.
 Its shape is more accurately—if still imperfectly—described as an oblate
spheroid. That just means it’s a bit squashed at the poles and bulges at the
center. A variety of forces, from plate tectonics to tides to weird anomalies in
gravity, mean the planet isn’t a perfect oblate spheroid. But the phrase does
indicate a warping in shape compared to a sphere that gives us a much better
picture of reality.

 This warping in shape is due to the rotation of the Earth and the centrifugal
force it creates. Geologist Vic Baker at the University of Arizona in Tucson
compares it to spinning a ball of silly putty, though he notes that “Earth's
plasticity is much, much less than that of the silicone plastic clay so familiar to
children."
 80. You’re closer to the center of the Earth at the poles, compared to the
equator.
 The less-than-perfectly-spherical shape of the Earth means that, when
standing at sea level, you’re actually closer to the center of the Earth at the
poles, compared to the equator. About 21 kilometers closer, in fact.

 81. You weigh a bit less in Ecuador than in Antarctica.

 The greater the distance between the center of mass of two objects, the lower
the gravitational force between the objects. Alongside the forces that are
bulging the planet, this means that the force of gravity on an object is generally
greater at the Earth’s poles than at the equator. So you’d actually weigh a
teeny bit less in Ecuador than you would in Antarctica. It’s worth pointing out
that your mass would stay the same. We’re referring specifically to weight,
which is basically a way of saying the force of gravity on an object.

 82. Factors like altitude can also affect your weight.

 There are other factors that come into play, though. Higher altitudes bring you
farther from the center of the Earth, so your weight decreases a little bit in a
high-flying airplane, for example.

 83. The Earth underneath you can also affect the force of gravity.
 The altitude you gain from being on a mountain has a more complicated
relationship to gravity. Yes, the altitude brings you farther from the center of
the Earth, but the mountain itself provides an additional source of gravity. And
the density of the Earth’s crust in a given location plays its own role in your
weight, mountaintop or otherwise.

 84. and 85. Canada’s Hudson Bay region is a gravitational anomaly—and two
potential factors might explain it.
 Gravity actually varies across the planet for a number of reasons. One of the
biggest variations is observed in Canada’s Hudson Bay region, where the
average resident weighs about a tenth of an ounce less than they would in an
area with a more typical gravitational force.

 GRACE, a joint research project of NASA and the German Aerospace Center,
offered an explanation for the relative paucity of gravity in Hudson Bay,
identifying two contributing factors. Tens of thousands of years ago, a giant ice
sheet covered the area, depressing the Earth’s crust and forcing mass away
from the depression. This means that there’s less mass underneath you in
 Hudson Bay, and therefore less gravitational force. Additionally, convection
100 to 200 kilometers beneath the surface of the Earth likely plays its own
role. It’s thought that convection currents drag the continents down, and lower
the gravitational force of the area. The GRACE researchers estimated that the
impact of the ice sheet could account for 25 to 45 percent of the drop in gravity
at Hudson Bay, with the rest attributable to convection currents and tectonic
movement.

 86. and 87. The movement of tectonic plates can create islands—and
earthquakes.
 Lava pouring into the ocean in Kilauea, Hawaii.
 Lava pouring into the ocean in Kilauea, Hawaii. / Justinreznick // iStock via
Getty Images Plus
 The constant, if quite slow, movement of tectonic plates has far-ranging effects
on the planet. They can give rise to entire islands, like Hawaii, which is
actually a series of volcanoes.

 Plate tectonics can also cause earthquakes. For instance: when two plates
collide, pressure builds up. When the plates eventually break loose, the pent-
up pressure can result in tremors that are undetectable without
instrumentation or in a massive natural disaster.

 88. The largest known earthquake happened in Chile.

 The largest earthquake ever recorded with reliable instrumentation is 1960’s
Valdivia earthquake in southern Chile. It was measured as a 9.5 on the
moment magnitude scale. The moment magnitude scale is logarithmic,
meaning the massive Chilean quake released almost 8000 times more energy
than San Francisco's devastating 1989 earthquake, which registered a 6.9.

 89. Weather and climate are not the same thing.

 Think of weather as a single data point, telling you about a moment in time,
and climate as a collection of data points. Climate is the trend of weather
patterns. Spoiler alert for planet Earth: The trends aren’t great.

 90. A tornado once carried a check hundreds of miles.

 Earth’s weather phenomena, though, can be truly fascinating. In 1991, a
tornado carried a cancelled personal check from Stockton, Kansas, to
Winnetoon, Nebraska—a distance of about 223 miles.
 91. Lightning can form a bouncing ball.
 It’s not a well understood process, but science historians believe that mentions
of phenomena that sound like ball lightning emerged as early as 1557.

 92. Humans are basically at the mercy of weather, but that hasn’t stopped us
from trying to gain the upper hand.
 From ancient Greek mythology to modern religious prayers, summoning
specific weather patterns has been a recurring goal for some human beings.
For example, the Berwick witches of Scotland attempted to use black magic to
sink the ship of King James VI of Scotland by summoning storms. Or, at least
that’s what they were accused of.

 93. Cloud seeding is a modern attempt to influence the weather.

 There are some modern attempts to control the weather, the most common
being cloud seeding, a process that tries to change precipitation in clouds.
This is done either to promote rainfall or to suppress fog at airports, for
instance. Seeding clouds often uses chemicals such as silver iodide or dry ice,
but its effectiveness is debatable.

 94. Operation Popeye tried to weaponize weather.

 Unfortunately, modern attempts to modify the weather have been used for
dark purposes as well. For example, Operation Popeye was an American
military tactic to promote rainfall in Vietnam. The hope was that cloud seeding
would prolong the monsoon season and therefore disrupt supply lines, and
though the operation was carried out, as Popular Science notes, “Its stated
objective—to ensure Americans won the Vietnam War—was never realized.”
Since then, “weather warfare” has been banned by the UN under the
Environmental Modification Convention.

 95. The troposphere is the lowest layer of our atmosphere.

 Earth’s atmosphere is a complex and beautifully layered shield from the
nightmare that is outer space. The troposphere is the lowest layer of Earth’s
atmosphere, extending from the surface to, on average, about 12 kilometers
above the surface. Although it is the shortest layer, it contains about 80
percent of the mass of the atmosphere.

 96. The stratosphere comes next.

 The stratosphere extends to about 50 kilometers above the surface, and it’s
home to the ozone layer.
 97. Ozone is trioxygen (O₃).
 While “ozone” might sound like a Power Rangers villain, it’s actually just
trioxygen, or O₃, a molecule of oxygen with three atoms instead of two. Ozone
has been described as smelling like chlorine, a burning wire, or an electrical
spark.

 98. The middle layer, called the mesosphere, extends to about 80 to 85

kilometers above sea level.
 The top of the mesosphere is known as the mesopause, which is the coldest
natural place on Earth. The average temperature is about -120°F (-85°C).

 99. The International Space Station is located in the thermosphere.

 The International Space Station.
 The International Space Station. / Paolo Nespoli, ESA/NASA via Getty Images
 Next up is the thermosphere, which has an altitude range of anywhere from
500 to 1000 kilometers. Changes in solar activity can affect this altitude
greatly. It’s also home to the International Space Station.

 100. The exosphere is where Earth ends and “space” begins.

 And finally, we have the exosphere. This layer extends to about 10,000
kilometers above sea level, though some peg that number as high as 190,000
kilometers, or about half the distance to the moon—after all, it’s kind of hard to
say where Earth ends and “space” begins. The density of molecules is so low
in the exosphere that atoms can travel hundreds of miles before colliding with
one another.

 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).

 It takes 8 minutes 17 seconds for light to travel from the Sun’s surface to the
Earth.

 October 12th, 1999 was declared “The Day of Six Billion” based on United
Nations projections.
 10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.

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

 Every year over one million earthquakes shake the Earth.

 When Krakatoa erupted in 1883, its force was so great it could be heard 4,800
kilometres away in Australia.

 The largest ever hailstone weighed over 1kg and fell in Bangladesh in 1986.

 Every second around 100 lightning bolts strike the Earth.

 Every year lightning kills 1000 people.

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

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

 Human tapeworms can grow up to 22.9m.

 The Earth is 4.56 billion years old…the same age as the Moon and the Sun.

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

 Female black widow spiders eat their males after mating.

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

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

 The Australian billygoat plum contains 100 times more vitamin C than an
orange.

 Astronauts cannot belch – there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in

their stomachs.

 The air at the summit of Mount Everest, 29,029 feet is only a third as thick as
the air at sea level.

 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.

 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.

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

 ‘Wireless’ communications took a giant leap forward in 1962 with the launch of
Telstar, the first satellite capable of relaying telephone and satellite TV signals.

 The earliest wine makers lived in Egypt around 2300 BC.

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

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

 Giraffes often sleep for only 20 minutes in any 24 hours. They may sleep up to
2 hours (in spurts – not all at once), but this is rare. They never lie down.

 A pig’s orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.

 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.

 Utopia ia 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.

 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.

 The grey whale migrates 12,500 miles from the Artic to Mexico and back every
year.

 Each rubber molecule is made of 65,000 individual atoms.

 Around a million, billion neutrinos from the Sun will pass through your body
while you read this sentence.

 68/…and now they are already past the Moon.

 Quasars emit more energy than 100 giant galaxies.

 Quasars are the most distant objects in the Universe.

 The saturn V rocket which carried man to the Moon develops power equivalent
to fifty 747 jumbo jets.

 Koalas sleep an average of 22 hours a day, two hours more than the sloth.

 Light would take .13 seconds to travel around the Earth.

 Males produce one thousand sperm cells each second – 86 million each day.

 Neutron stars are so dense that a teaspoonful would weigh more than all the
people on Earth.

 One in every 2000 babies is born with a tooth.

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

 Somewhere in the flicker of a badly tuned TV set is the background radiation

from the Big Bang.

 Even travelling at the speed of light it would take 2 million years to reach the
nearest large galaxy, Andromeda.

 The temperature in Antarctica plummets as low as -35 degrees celsius.

 At over 2000 kilometres long The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living
structure on Earth.

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

 The risk of being struck by a falling meteorite for a human is one occurence
every 9,300 years.

 The driest inhabited place in the world is Aswan, Egypt where the annual
average rainfall is .02 inches.

 The deepest part of any ocean in the world is the Mariana trench in the Pacific
with a depth of 35,797 feet.

 The largest meteorite craters in the world are in Sudbury, Ontario, canada and
in Vredefort, South Africa.

 The largest desert in the world, the Sahara, is 3,500,000 square miles.

 The largest dinosaur ever discovered was Seismosaurus who was over 100
feet long and weighed up to 80 tonnes.

 The African Elephant gestates for 22 months.

 The short-nosed Bandicoot has a gestation period of only 12 days.

 The mortality rate if bitten by a Black Mamba snake is over 95%.

 In the 14th century the Black Death killed 75,000,000 people. It was carried by
fleas on the black rat.

 A dog’s sense of smell is 1,000 times more sensitive than a humans.

 A typical hurricane produces the nergy equivalent to 8,000 one megaton

bombs.
 90% of those who die from hurricanes die from drowning.

 To escape the Earth’s gravity a rocket need to travel at 7 miles a second.

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

 Microbial life can survive on the cooling rods of a nuclear reactor.

 Micro-organisms have been brought back to life after being frozen in perma-
frost for three million years.

 Our oldest radio broadcasts of the 1930s have already travelled past 100,000
stars.

 probably) didn’t know!

 The Firefox logo isn’t a fox.


 There is a common misbelief that because the browser is named Firefox, the
logo must be a fox.
 Surprisingly, the cute furry creature in the logo is actually a red panda!
 The first Apple logo isn’t what you would think.


 Originally, it featured Sir Isaac Newton sitting beneath a tree, with an apple

about to fall on his head.
 It was designed back in 1976 and featured a phrase around the border that
read “Newton…A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought…
alone”.
 Seems kind of dark!
 Google rents out goats.

 You read that right, instead of mowing their lawn, Google rents goats to eat
the grass at their Mountain View headquarters.
 A herder will bring 200 goats which are herded by a border collie named Jen.
 The name for “robot” has dark origins.

 If you look into the etymology of “robot,” it comes from the Czech word
“robota” which translates to forced labor or work.
 The word was first used to refer to a fictional humanoid in a play in 1920.
 The first-ever VCR was the size of a piano.


 When the first VCR (Video Camera Recorder) was made in 1956, it was the
size of a piano.
 Way bigger than I would have guessed!
 Samsung is 38 years and 1 month older than Apple.


 Samsung was founded as a grocery store on March 1, 1938, by Lee Byung-

Chull.
 Apple Founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created Apple Computer Inc.
on April 1, 1976.
 A Petabyte is a lot of data.

 We all know 1 GB is the same as 1024 MB, but did you know that
1 petabyte (PB) is equivalent to 1024 terabytes (TB)?
 To give an example of how big this is, a 1 PB hard drive could hold 13.3 years
of HD-TV video.
 A 50 PB hard drive could hold the entire written works of mankind, from the
beginning of recorded history, in all languages.
 Domain name registration used to be free.


 Way back when people didn’t realize how huge the internet would be,
registering a domain name was free until 1995.
 When a fee was introduced, it was high! Prices were typically $100 for two
years of registration.
 Megabytes used to weigh hundreds of pounds.


 More specifically, 5 megabytes of data weighed one ton.

 In 1956, the first computer had something similar to a hard drive.
 At the time, it was a huge leap in storage capabilities, but the cabinet that
contained the hard drive weighed over 2,200 pounds and could hold 5 MBs of
data.
 The Radio took 38 years to reach an audience of 50 million.

 You would think the invention of the radio would be a big deal, but it took 38
years for the radio to reach an audience of 50 million.
 Meanwhile, the iPod only took 3 years to reach the same milestone!
 The first camera needed an incredibly long exposure.

 The first photograph ever taken in 1826 took 8 hours to expose!

 The creator of that camera, Louis Daguerre, was able to lower that time
drastically to just 15 minutes in 1839.
 Credit card chips have been around for a LONG time.

 To many, credit card chips are a relatively new fad. However, chip technology
has been around since 1986!
 It was first used in France, followed shortly after by Germany.
 Alexa is always listening to your conversations.


 This probably isn’t new to you. Siri has been doing it forever.

 Alexa stores your dialogue history to its cloud to help improve your Alexa
experience.
 But, you can review and delete these recordings, either in bulk, or individually.
 People read faster or slower depending on what they read from.


 Not only do you blink less when you’re on a computer, but reading from a
screen also slows you down.
 On average, people read 10% slower from a screen than from paper!
 As for the blinking part, did you know that during everyday life, people
normally blink at a rate of twenty times per minute?
 But put them in front of a computer, and that number drops way down to seven
times per minute!

 GPS is free… for some.


 Even though it is free to use GPS globally, it costs $2 million dollars to operate
every day.
 This money comes from American tax revenue.
 There are Amish computers.

 There are computers specially designed without internet, video, or music

capabilities, just for the Amish.
 The features include word processing, drawing, accounting, spreadsheets,
and more – but not much more.
 Mac computers were named after the apple.

 It’s not a coincidence that “Macintosh” is similar to the apples called

“mcintosh”.
 The name was misspelled on purpose to avoid conflict with a manufacturer
called “McIntosh Laboratory”.
 The first computer mouse wasn’t made from plastic.


 Back in 1964, Doug Engelbart invented the first-ever computer mouse! Back
then, it was made out of wood.
 It was rectangular and featured a little button on the top right.
 He called it a mouse because the cord coming out of the back reminded him of
the tiny rodents.
 Which came first, Spam mail or Spam meat?

 Spam mail was named after the canned meat! In a Monty Python skit, they
said Spam meat was “horrible and being ubiquitous and inescapable”.
 Sounds pretty accurate to the annoying junk mail I get!
 Also, did you know that On average, for every spam email sent, they only get
one reply for every twelve million spam emails sent?
 Is it even worth it at that point?
 The original Xbox had sound snippets of real space missions.


 The original Xbox contained edited sound bites from actual transmissions from
the Apollo missions.
 If you left the Xbox on the home screen, eventually you’ll hear whispers of
conversation – actual chatter from the Apollo mission.
 The majority of the people plug in their USB wrong.


 86% of people try to plug in their USB devices upside down.

 That makes me feel a lot better about getting it wrong every time!
 Steve Jobs used sleight of hand at the first iPhone presentation.


 The first iPhone presentation happened six months before the iPhone was set
to hit the market.
 At that time, the phone was too buggy to use, so Steve Jobs often had to
switch phones behind his desk.
 Otherwise, it would run out of RAM and crash.
 The first alarm clock could only ring at one time.

 Literally, one time! The first mechanical alarm clock could only ring at 4 a.m.
invented by Levi Hutchins in 1787.
 It wasn’t until 1876 that a wind-up alarm clock was made that could be set for
any time.
 Computer Security Day is celebrated on November 30 th.

 It was started in 1988 to help raise awareness of computer-related security
issues.
 To celebrate Computer Security Day is easy, and important – check your
privacy settings on Facebook, change your passwords to something stronger.
 You can also read the latest technology facts and make sure your data stored
on your phone, or in the cloud is secure.
 You may also like this infographic on The Importance Of Having A Secure
Password.

 The government used PlayStation 3’s… but not for gaming.



 In 2010, the United States Air Force used 1,760 PlayStation 3 consoles to
build a supercomputer for the Department of Defense.
 They used PS3’s because it was more cost-efficient and “green.”
 The first online gaming was before the year 2000.


 Sega Dreamcast was the first 128-bit console to hit the market.

 Released in 1999, it was the first console that allowed real-time online play.
 Unfortunately, it was a little too early for its time, as back then, most internet
connections were not reliable enough.
 The first product scanned was a packet of chewing gum in 1974.




 Norman Joseph Woodland invented the barcode and received a patent

in October 1952.
 It wasn’t until 22 years later when he was employed by IBM that the barcode
was developed to be used for product labeling.
 Known as the Universal Product Code (UPC), a system that is still used today.
 You’re in good hands if your surgeon was a gamer.


 Oddly enough, surgeons that grew up playing video games more than 3 hours

per week make 37% fewer errors!
 Not only that, but they also had a 42% faster completion rate when it comes to
performing laparoscopic surgery, as well as suturing.
 iTunes has unusual Terms & Conditions.


 When agree to the Terms & Conditions for iTunes, you are agreeing to not use
it to make nuclear weapons.
 The clause states, “You also agree that you will not use these products
for….the development, design, manufacture, or production of nuclear, missile,
or chemical or biological weapons.”
 Nintendo didn’t start as a video games company.


 Founded in 1889, Nintendo was around long before computers! So what did

they sell?
 From 1889-1956, Nintendo was a playing card company.
 They still manufacture playing cards in Japan, and even have a bridge
tournament called the “Nintendo Cup”.
 Apollo 11 astronauts couldn’t afford insurance.

 Life insurance for a space mission cost a fortune because the risks were
extremely high back then.
 So instead, the astronauts of Apollo 11 signed hundreds of covers that their
families could sell in case anything went wrong.
 People are still using dial-up.


 As of 2017, 2.1 million people still use AOL’s dial-up service.

 Mainly, these customers live in rural America where it can be expensive and
unreliable to get high-speed internet.
 Meanwhile, dial-up is only $20 per month.
 You can spell your email in Morse code.


 In 2004, the @ symbol became the first new character to be added to Morse
code for the first time in many decades.
 The character is called a “Commat,” and consists of the signals for A and C
with no break in between.
 Yahoo’s original name was a mouthful.


 The original URL for Yahoo was akebono.standford.edu.

 The name Yahoo was selected because it was derived from Gulliver’s Travels
slang, “Yahoo” which was a fictional race of beings in the book.
 Bonus Fact: Amazon wasn’t always Amazon either! Originally named
“Cadabra.com,” Cadabra was an online bookstore only.
 CEO Jeff Bezos explored other options in the ’90s, some of which still
redirects to Amazon, like Relentless.com.

 Amazon was registered in 1994 and has grown into the monolith that it is
today.
 Bonus Bonus Fact: When Snapchat first launched in 2011, it was named
Picaboo.
 It wasn’t renamed to what we know as Snapchat until 2012.
 Everyone uses Google as a spellchecker.


 Most everyone, anyway! 97% of people type in words to Google just to see if
they spelled it right.
 I know I’m definitely among that 97%!
 The first word to ever be auto-corrected was “teh.”

 Back in the day, autocorrect wasn’t as efficient as it is now.
 In order to auto-correct “teh” to “the,” you had to press the left arrow and F3.

 The Nintendo Game Boy went to space.


 In 1993, a Soviet cosmonaut brought his Nintendo Game Boy to space on the
TM-17 space mission.
 It is said to have orbited Earth 3,000 times and was later auctioned for $1,220.

 PlayStation 1 had Scratch and Sniff discs.


 In 1999, Gran Turismo 2, the 2-disc edition of the game, the blue disc featured
the smell of fuel and burning rubber.
 When FIFA 2001 was released in 2000, they used Scratch and Sniff
technology on their discs so it smelled like football stadium turf.
 “Android” is gender-specific.


 The word “Android” literally means a human with a male robot appearance.
 The female equivalent of this word is a “Gynoid.”
 Google searches hit the billions every month.


 There are over 35 billion Google searches each month.

 In May 2019, the top three most Googled words were “Facebook” at 233
million searches, “youtube” with 194 million searches, and “amazon” with 103
million searches.
 There’s a name for when you feel your phone vibrate… but it doesn’t.


 This is my favorite tech fact on this list!

 “Phantom Vibration Syndrome” is the name for when someone thinks their
phone is vibrating, but it isn’t.
 Research suggests the cause for this is someone being over-involved with
their phone.
 Smoking will void your Apple warranty.


 Apple has a “smoking” ban on their computers, meaning if you smoke while

using any Apple computer, the warranty becomes void.
 Technology is now influencing baby names.


 In 2012, at least six girls were named Apple, 49 boys were named Mac, and at
least 17 girls were named Siri.
 However, the number of babies named Alexa in the U.S has dropped from
6,050 in 2015 (the year Amazon’s Alexa became available) to 3,053 in 2018.
 Alexa was the 32nd most popular name for girls born in 2015 but dropped to
90th place in 2018.
 Blind people can use cell phones.


 There is special Braille technology and accessories for blind people to use cell
phones.
 It uses special pins that go up and down so the user can touch and read the
info.
 Google’s first tweet was gibberish.


 To a normal human, Google’s first-ever tweet on Twitter was nonsense!

 It reads, “I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110
01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001
00001010”.
 Translated from binary to English, this tweet says “I’m feeling lucky.”
 The first cell phone call was in New York City.


 In 1973, the first-ever mobile phone call was made by Martin Cooper, an
employee of Motorola, made from the streets of New York City.
 It wasn’t until 19 years later when Neil Papworth sent the first SMS message,
which brings us to our next tech fact:
 The first commercial text message was sent in 1992.

 On December 3, 1992, a software architect, Sema Group, used a computer to
text “Merry Christmas” to a Vodafone employee who was using an Orbitel 901
handset.
 These days, over six billion texts are sent per day!
 Over 6,000 new computer viruses are created and released every month.


 This number has drastically risen since 1990, at which point there were only
50 known computer viruses.
 Today, 90% of emails contain some form of malware and most people don’t
know about it.
 There are more likes than photos on Facebook.


 Every day, over 300 million photos are uploaded to Facebook, while 800
million likes are given out per day.
 By contrast, there are only 175 million “love” reactions each day.
 iPhones were almost in the shape of an apple.


 The original design for an iPhone was in the shape of a literal apple.
 It was initially designed as a flip phone with a push keypad. When closed, it
looked like the Apple logo.
 Comic Sans is the most hated font in the world.


 Comic Sans was designed to be an unserious, handwritten style font to use in

comic books.
 Although everyone loves to hate on this tasteless font (including myself!) it is
actually very useful for dyslexic people.
 Because of its asymmetrical style, the letters are much easier to discern.
 NASA’s internet speed is 91 GB per second.


 The average household internet speeds are roughly 25 MB per second.

 That’s usually fast enough to watch Netflix with no buffer time
 And let’s face the fact, if there’s any tech company that would actually make
good use of them internet speeds, it’s NASA.
 Nokia is the largest company from Finland.


 So much so, it is viewed as a national pride by Finns!

 And while we often think Nokia is just a cell phone company, this famous
brand was originally a paper manufacturer in 1865.
 Nokia branched out into technology in the 1980s.
 More people have cell phones than toilets.


 Out of all the 7.7 billion people in the world, over 6 billion of those have access
to a cell phone.
 Meanwhile, only 4.5 billion have access to working toilets!
 The Apple Lisa was the first commercial computer with a Graphical User
Interface (GUI) and a mouse.


 Before The Apple Lisa, all computers were text-based, meaning you had to
type out commands from a keyboard.
 The name “Lisa” stands for “Logical Integrated Software Architecture”.
 Lisa was also the name of Steve Job’s daughter.
 Some people are afraid of technology.


 People have all kinds of weird fears and phobias out there, and technology is
no exception!
 Aptly named technophobia, this fear stemmed from the Industrial Revolution
and workers being afraid that machines would take their jobs.
 It applies in a similar way to today’s society, as well as people being scared of
technology getting too advanced, such as artificial intelligence technology.
 Let’s just hope this phobia doesn’t stop them from reading these technology
facts!

 The most expensive phone number cost millions.



 Back in 2006, Qatar Telecom hosted a charity auction where they sold the
phone number 666-6666.
 It sold for $2.75 million, bought by an anonymous bidder.
 Mark Zuckerberg is color blind.


 The founder of Facebook purposely chose a blue color scheme because he

has red-green color blindness!
 To him, blue is the richest and most prominent color that he can see.
 40% of American couples meet online.


 Online dating is hugely popular these days, and apparently it seems to work!
 40% of couples who got together in 2017 met online.
 Looking at a larger scale, meeting through friends declined by 13% from 1995
to 2017.
 Music content makes up 5% of YouTube.


 Even though 5% seems like a low number, it is the most engaged type of
video on YouTube.
 They count for 20% of YouTube’s total views!
 Finding a security bug in Facebook’s code will pay off.


 To be exact, Facebook pays $500 for reporting any vulnerability in their

security.
 Even better, $500 is just the minimum that it starts at, so you could potentially
earn more!
 Kids that are on social media for 1 hour a day have less chance of being
happy.


 This is probably not much of a surprise, but studies have shown that the more
time kids spend on social media, the less likely they are to be happy with their
overall life by 14%.
 By comparison, this is three times higher than the effects of living in a single-
parent household.
 MySpace lost all of its content before 2016.

 Due to a faulty server migration, every photo, song, and video that was
uploaded to this one popular social network, all of it was accidentally deleted.
 That accounts for 50 million songs from 14 million artists like Lily Allen and
Arctic Monkeys.
 Of course, many of these have backups that are probably on Spotify by now,
but those that didn’t are now lost forever.
 Nearly one third of divorces are because of Facebook.


 33% of divorced couples have stated Facebook was a reason for the break up.
 Some of these more specific reasons are things like inappropriate messages
to other people, it causes couples to fight, secret social media accounts, and
doubting the relationship.
 Using a thinner font can save printer ink.


 To a standard user, this difference isn’t big enough to care about.

 But if you use a lighter font with thinner lines, you’ll use slightly less ink.
 This is all based on inkjet printers that use old style cartridges.
 Overall, it will only save you about 10% of your ink by using a lighter font.
 The QWERTY keyboard was originally designed to slow you down.


 When typewriters were introduced, typing too fast would jam the keys.
 Using a QWERTY keyboard spaced out commonly used characters to slow
typists down and prevent jamming.
 If you wanted to learn a more efficient keyboard, Dvorak is made for speed.
 While we’re on the subject of keyboards and typing, did you know that on a
typical work day, a typists’ fingers will “travel” about 12.6 miles.
 The first webpage is still running.


 In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee was working on developing the World Wide Web.
 That page is still up and functioning at info.cern.ch though don’t expect much.
 There’s no graphics and no background, just plain text and links on how to use
the internet!
 Some countries skipped the era of landlines.


 Nigeria, Ghana, and Bangladesh went from zero to 100. Due to lack of
resources, it was too costly to adapt to using landlines.
 Less than 1% of residents in these countries have a landline, but over 85%
have access to cell phones.
 The passwords for the nuclear missiles were just a string of zero’s.


 Although the Air Force denies this, one Air Force launch officer, Bruce Blair,
says they’re lying.
 And what government would want to admit to something that silly?
 For 20 years, the password was eight zero’s all in a row – and it was written
down so nobody forgot.
 Over 90% of the world’s currency is digital.


 I don’t know about you, but I almost never have cash!

 Between credit cards, debit cards, direct deposit, and online purchases, that
leaves only about 8% of global currency to be physical money.
 Millions of hours of TV and movies are watched every day on Netflix.


 Of course Netflix is a massively popular company, so it’s not that big of a

surprise.
 The world spends about 164 million hours every day streaming Netflix, which
is equivalent to 18,812 years’ worth of TV and movies every 24 hours.
 Now my binge-watching habits don’t seem so bad!
 If you’re enjoying these technology facts so far, you may also like to know
about the Netflix & Chill button.
 Technical degrees are almost useless by the time you graduate.


 A degree looks good on paper, but in fact, technology is advancing faster than
ever.
 The amount of technical information doubles every two years.
 So, if you start a four year degree, then half of what you learn by the time you
finish will be obsolete.
 There’s a term for old people who use the internet.

 Seniors who are over 50 and use the internet on a regular basis are rare these
days.
 So rare in fact, there’s a term for it – Silver Surfers.
 Tech companies often test their products in New Zealand.


 New Zealand is such a diverse country with English speaking residents, it’s a
great place for testing.
 But the main reason, is that since it’s somewhat isolated, news about a
product failing won’t spread very fast.
 There are fake Apple stores in China.


 Some of the fake Apple stores are so convincing, that even the employees
thought they were working for Apple.
 They are usually selling real Apple products, and the employees even wear
the same shirts that actual Apple associates wear.
 Sometimes the stores are shut down, but when that happens, more just pop
up!
 Until 2010, carrier pigeons were faster than the internet.


 When comparing upload speeds, a test was done to fly a carrier pigeon with a
USB stick 50 miles to an internet provider, while racing against an internet
upload.
 The pigeon made it in just over an hour, while the upload took over two hours.
 The first photo ever uploaded to the internet was a comedy band.


 A four piece all-female parody pop group lays claim to being in the first photo
to ever be uploaded to the internet.
 The group, called “Les Horribles Cernettes,” were colleagues with Tim
Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web.
 He asked them for some scanned photos of their band so he could publish
them online, and history was made!
 Every advertisement for iPhone’s have 9:41 set as the time.


 This is because in 2007, Steve Jobs first announced the iPhone at that time.
 The 41 minute presentation leading up to the reveal of the first iPhone was
planned perfectly.
 And the first photo of the iPhone showed the time 9:41, at exactly 9:41am.
 A “jiffy” is a real measurement.


 If you’ve ever said “I’ll be back in a jiffy,” you were actually saying, “I’ll be back
in 10 milliseconds.”
 A jiffy is an actual measurement of time, referring to the length of one cycle of
the computer’s system clock – about 10 milliseconds.
 When used in physics, it stands for the amount of time that it takes light to
travel one centimeter.
 An average 21 year old has spent 5,000 hours playing video games.


 These days, by 21 you’ll have also sent 250,000 emails and texts, and spent
10,000 hours in a cell phone.
 That’s a lot of time!
 Most of today’s successful companies started in garages.


 That’s right, aside from just Apple, other huge name companies started with
humble beginnings.
 HP, Google, and Microsoft all were started in a garage.
 Most internet traffic isn’t from real humans.


 About 51% of internet traffic is non-human. Over 30% is from hacking

programs, spammers, and phishing.
 Be careful with your computer security!
 CAPTCHA is a long acronym.


 It stands for “Completely Automatic Public Turning Test to Tell Computers and
Humans Apart”.
 Even though some artificial intelligence can get through CATCHPA, it’s still
useful in blocking some bots.
 The three most common passwords are also the weakest.


 The top three most used passwords are 123456, password, and 12345.
 Definitely don’t use any of those next time you need a password change!
 There wasn’t an app store in the first iPhone.


 This probably isn’t that surprising, seeing as the first of any tech has some
things to work out.
 But the only apps that were on the first iPhone in 2007 were all only Apple’s
apps.
 These days, there are over 1.4 million apps for iPhone.
 We only keep 1 out of every 10 apps we try.


 It is estimated that about 80-90 percent of the apps we install are deleted in
the long term.
 It seems users are picky with what they want to use their limited storage for!
 Digital music sales surpassed physical sales in 2014.


 Since mp3 players arrived, the digital music sales have been slowly rising.
 Once Spotify came out in 2008, it seemed the age of physical music was over.
 In 2014, the download sales and subscriptions made $6.85 billion, while
physical sales were just barely under it at $6.82 billion.
 Also, did you know that people are listening to music now more than ever?
 In 2015, the average American spent about 24 hours per week listening to
music.
 As of 2017, that number rose to an average of 32 hours per week.
 The @ symbol was chosen kind of randomly.


 The man who was writing email programs had to determine how to determine
the user and the machine that the user was on.
 He chose the symbol because it means “at” and it wasn’t used as much as
other symbols.
 There is a machine that can predict heart attacks.


 Researchers “trained” a machine-learning algorithm which was able to predict

heart attacks.
 It can predict heart attacks up to four hours before they happened – with 80%
accuracy.
 There is also artificial intelligence than can predict epidemics.


 An artificial intelligence was created (with 87% accuracy) in determining

disease outbreaks, such as dengue fever.
 There are hopes to use this tech to predict outbreaks for more serious
diseases like Ebola and Zika.
 The Amazon’s robot workers skyrocketed in less than five years.


 Back in 2013, there were only 1,000 robots working in an Amazon warehouse.
 In 2017, they had 45,000 robots across 20 warehouses.
 Digital tech is good for the environment.


 It is estimated that digital technology could reduce global carbon emissions by

20% by 2030.
 That’s equal to getting rid of 100% of China’s emissions, plus an additional 1.5
billion tons!
 The average Facebook user has less than 200 friends.

 Slightly over 40% of people on Facebook have between 0-200 friends.
 The close second clocks in at 38% of Facebook users having 200-500 friends.
 Even less, 20% of users have over 500 friends on Facebook.
 Google uses the same amount of energy as 200,000 homes.


 It’s no surprise this tech powerhouse needs a lot of power!

 That accounts for about 0.013% of the entire world’s energy use.
 And while not all of their energy is from wind and solar, they purchase carbon
offsets which leaves them with no carbon footprint!
 The first computer virus was harmless.


 In 1971, the first ever computer virus was developed. Named Creeper, it was
made as an experiment just to see how it spread between computers.
 The virus simply displayed the message: “I’m the creeper, catch me if you
can!”
 The first virus ever released into the wild was called Brain, which also wasn’t
harmful.
 However it was the very first IBM PC virus.
 There are only 21 million Bitcoins that can be mined in total.


 You’d think as it’s a digital currency, the amount of bitcoins available would be

unlimited.
 However if this was the case, that would devalue the currency and render it
worthless.
 Filipinos use social media more than Americans.

 Between adult users in the Philippines, 93% use social networking sites, which
is quite higher than the 74% that use it in the U.S.
 They mostly use it to talk about music and movies, and slightly fewer use it to
talk about sports.
 Most of the purchases in China are done with mobile phones.


 Chinese people love online shopping, apparently!

 Around 70% of online purchases are made with mobile phones.
 Meanwhile, only 46% of online purchases in the U.S. are done with a cell
phone.
 Robot laws are being put into place.


 The European Union is suggesting laws that implement an emergency kill

switch into all robots.
 Additionally, they will be required to be programmed to never harm a human.
 Millions of tons of technology are thrown out each year.


 Specifically, 220 million tons of old computers, along with other devices, are
thrown away every year in the U.S. alone.

 We’ve come to the end of these 100 technology facts, did you learn something
new? We certainly did!
 If you’d like to learn more facts about technology, you can see more over on
our tech category.

 Do you have any other technology facts that have blown your mind?
 What’s your favorite tech fact in this list? Let us know in the comments!
 Apple, Computers & Internet, Google, Long Reads, Microsoft, Top 100
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 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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 MICHELLE GABRIEL
 Michelle Gabriel is a freelance writer and blogger and currently loving it! Her
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 ithout further ado, let’s launch right into these 100 crazy facts about space!
 Mercury & Venus are the only 2 planets in our solar system that have no
moons.


 In total, there are 176 confirmed moons that orbit the planets in our solar
system, with some of them being bigger than Mercury itself!
 If a star passes too close to a black hole, it can be torn apart.


 For 20 years, a team of astronomers observed a star at the center of our

galaxy orbiting a black hole.
 The star has now got close enough to the black hole for “gravitational redshift”
to occur which is where the star’s light loses energy as the black hole’s gravity
intensified.
 The hottest planet in our solar system is Venus.


 Most people think that this would be Mercury, as it is the closest planet to the
sun.
 However, Venus has a lot of gasses in its atmosphere which creates a
“Greenhouse Effect” that causes a constant temperature of 864° Fahrenheit
(462° Celsius) everywhere on the plant’s surface.
 Our solar system is 4.57 billion years old.


 Well, give or take 30 million years(ish). Accurately speaking, it is 4.571 billion

years old.
 Scientists estimate that in about 5 billion years, our Sun will expand becoming
a Red Giant.
 In about 7.5 billion years its expanding surface will swallow up and engulf the
Earth.
 Enceladus, one of Saturn’s smaller moons, reflects 90% of the Sun’s
light.

 Because Enceladus’ icy surface reflects sunlight rather than absorbing it,
temperatures reach as low as -394° Fahrenheit (-201° Celsius).
 The highest mountain discovered is the Olympus Mons, which is located
on Mars.


 Its peak is 16 miles (25 km) high, making it nearly 3 times higher than Mount
Everest.
 And not only is it tall, but it’s also 374,015 ft² (114,000 m²) wide – that’s an
area the size of Arizona!
 The Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) was the first celestial object identified as
being spiral.


 The grand, spiraling arms of the Whirlpool Galaxy are made up of long lanes
of stars and gas, sprinkled with lots of space dust.
 These arms act as star formation factories, compressing hydrogen gas and
creating clusters of new stars.
 A light-year is the distance covered by light in a single year.


 Light moves at the velocity of about 186,411 miles (300,000 km) a second.
 So one light-year equates to roughly 5,903,026,326,255 miles!
 The Milky Way galaxy is 105,700 light-years wide.


 It would take a modern spacecraft 450,000,000 years to travel to the center of

our galaxy!
 You can read more unbelievable space facts with this list of Milky Way facts!
 The Sun weighs about 330,000 times more than Earth.


 It is about 109 times the diameter of Earth and is so large the Earth could fit
inside the sun about 1,300,000 times over!
 In fact, the sun is so gigantic that it contains 99.85% of all mass in our solar
system.
 Footprints left on the Moon won’t disappear as there is no wind.


 But wait a minute… if there’s no wind to blow them away then why is the flag
blowing? Well, it actually wasn’t blowing.

 That rippling you see is because of a stubborn telescopic horizontal rod that
the astronauts were struggling to remove from the flag’s upper hem.
 Still unsure whether we’ve walked on the Moon? Here are 5 common Moon
landing myths debunked.
 Because of lower gravity, a person who weighs 220 lbs on Earth would
weigh 84 lbs on Mars.


 When sending droids to the surface of Mars, this is something scientists plan
for, being able to load the droid up with more equipment and build it from more
robust materials.
 There are 79 known moons orbiting Jupiter.


 Jupiter is the planet in our solar system with the most moons, and it also has
the largest moon in our solar system.
 That moon is called Ganymede and is 33,279 miles (5,262 km) in diameter –
that’s bigger than Mercury and it is visible with just a pair of binoculars!
 The Martian day is 24 hours 39 minutes and 35 seconds long.


 So you’d therefore assume there are less days in a year on Mars than Earth,
right? Wrong!

 Because Mars orbits the sun slower than the Earth, there are actually 687
Martian days in a Martian year!
 NASA’s Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) found
evidence of water on the Earth’s Moon.

 Whilst water cannot exist on the Moon’s surface under its current conditions,
scientists believe water ice could survive within the cold, permanently
shadowed crates at the Moon’s two poles.
 The Sun makes a full rotation once every 25 – 35 days.


 So for us on Earth, one full rotation equals one full day. However, our
gargantuan sun takes 25 – 35 Earth days to make one full rotation!

 Want to learn more space facts? Check out these 40 fiery facts about the Sun!
 Earth is the only planet not named after a God.


 Nobody knows how the Earth got its name; all we know is that it is derived
from an amalgamation of both the Old English and Old Germanic words for
“ground”.

 Due to the Sun and Moon’s gravitational pull, we have tides.



 This is because the Moon’s tidal force causes the Earth – and the water on it –
to bulge out on the side closest to the Moon.
 These bulges are what cause the world’s high tides.
 Pluto is smaller than the United States.


 If you were to walk around the equator of Pluto it would be the same distance
as walking from London to Denver (well, give or take 56 miles).
 According to mathematics, white holes are possible, although as of yet
we have found none.


 A white hole is a hypothetical region of space-time which can’t be entered from

the outside, although matter and light can escape from within.
 Basically, it’s the reverse of a black hole.
 There are more volcanoes on Venus than any other planet in our solar
system.


 There are more than 1,600 major volcanoes across the surface of Venus,
including a 5 mile (8 km) high volcano called Maat Mons.
 However, none of these volcanoes are known to be erupting at present and
most are probably long extinct.
 Uranus’ blue glow is due to the gases in its atmosphere.

 Uranus’ atmosphere is made up of hydrogen, helium and methane.
 The methane in Uranus’ upper atmosphere filters out all the red light from the
Sun but reflects the Sun’s blue light back into space, giving it its blue
appearance.
 Enjoying our space facts? If you’re interested in learning more, we have more
interesting facts about Uranus.
 In our solar system that are 4 planets known as gas giants: Jupiter,
Saturn, Uranus & Neptune.


 A gas giant is a large planet that is made up mostly gases like hydrogen and
helium, and has only a relatively small rocky core.
 Uranus has 27 moons that have been discovered so far.

 It has 5 large moons, and 22 small moons. Titania is the largest of Uranus’
moons and is the eighth largest moon in our solar system with an average
diameter of 980.5 miles (1,578 kilometers).
 Because of its unique tilt, a season on Uranus is equivalent to 21 Earth
years.


 Also the 97.77 degrees tilt on Uranus’ axis means that a day there only last 17
hours, 14 minutes and 24 seconds.
 Neptune’s moon, Triton, orbits the planet backwards.


 Triton is the only large moon of any of the planets that does this.
 This is known as a retrograde orbit and astronomers are unsure as to why
Triton orbits Neptune this way.
 Triton is gradually getting closer to the planet it orbits.


 Scientists believe that when Triton eventually gets too close to Neptune, it will
be torn apart by the planet’s gravity and could potentially create another ring
around Neptune – giving it more rings than Saturn.
 There are more stars in space than there are grains of sand in the world.


 There are 10 times more stars in the night sky than grains of sand on the
Earth, with 70 sextillion stars being visible from Earth through a telescope.
 To put that in numbers, 70 sextillion is this: 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
 Neptune takes nearly 165 Earth years to make one orbit of the Sun.


 That’s equivalent to 60,190 Earth days to orbit the sun once! Neptune has a
very slow orbital speed of 3.37 miles per second (5.43 km/s).
 This means that since it was discovered in 1846, it has only completed just
one orbit!
 You may also like these interesting facts about Neptune that are outta this
world!
 Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, is half the size of Pluto.

 The same surfaces of Charon and Pluto always face each other, which is
known as mutual tidal locking.
 The International Space Station is the largest manned object ever sent
into space.


 At 119 yards (109 meters) long, the International Space Station (ISS) sits
roughly 250 miles (400 km) above the Earth and is the third-brightest object in
the night sky.
 A day on Pluto is lasts for 153.6 hours long.


 This equates to 6 days 9 hours and 36 minutes. A day on Pluto lasts so long
because of its slow rotation rate.
 Check out these other interesting space facts about the Dwarf Planet, Pluto.
 Saturn is the second largest planet in our solar system.


 It has a radius of 36,184 miles (58,232 km) – nine times that of Earth.

 However, due to its low density it only has a weight roughly one-eighth of
Earth.
 Any free-moving liquid in outer space will form itself into a sphere.


 This is because of something called surface tension, which is an imbalance of

intermolecular attractive forces.
 This can also occur in low Earth orbit.

 Mercury, Venus, Earth & Mars are known as the “Inner Planets”.


 They are named the Inner Planets because they orbit closest to the Sun.
 An inner planet is classified as a planet located within the asteroid belt.
 We know more about Mars and our Moon than we do about our oceans.


 We have fully mapped 100% of the surface of Mars and Earth’s Moon,
whereas we have only been able to map roughly 5% of the ocean floor.
 The Black Arrow is the only British satellite to be launched using a
British rocket.


 Black Arrow was developed during the 1960’s and was used for four launches
between 1969 and 1971.
 In 2019 it was retrieved from its crash landing site in the Australian outback
and put on a display Penicuik, Scotland.
 Only 5% of the universe is visible from Earth.


 68% of the universe is dark energy and 27% is dark matter. Both of these are
invisible, even with a telescope, which means we are only able to see 5% of
the universe.
 Light travels from the Sun to the Earth in less than 10 minutes.


 The Photons emitted from the Sun’s surface travel across the vacuum of
space at the speed of light to reach our eyes in only 8 minutes and 20
seconds.
 At any given moment, there are at least 2,000 thunderstorms happening
on Earth.


 Worldwide, there are an estimated 16 million thunderstorms each year.

 Roughly 100,000 of these thunderstorms happen in the U.S. alone.
 You can read more strange facts about thunder and lightning here.
 The Earth’s rotation is slowing slightly as time goes on.

 This means that days were shorter in the past. This is because of the tidal
effects the Moon has on the Earth’s rotation.
 If you were driving at 75 miles per hour, it would take 258 days to drive
around Saturn’s rings.


 Saturn’s rings are roughly 175,000 miles long, although they are only about
3,200 feet thick.
 You can find out more interesting facts about Saturn’s rings here!
 Outer Space is only 62 miles away.

 Although there is no official solid boundary for where space begins, the
Kármán line sits at 62 miles above sea-level and is conventionally used as the
start of outer space in space treaties or for aerospace records keeping.
 The International Space Station circles Earth every 92 minutes.


 The speed of the ISS as it orbits Earth is roughly 17,150 miles per hour – that
equates to 5 miles a second!
 Stars twinkle because of the way light is disrupted as it passes through
Earth’s atmosphere.


 Starlight is affected by the winds in our atmosphere as it enters, as well as

being affected by different areas and temperatures.
 This causes the light from each star to twinkle as we look at them.
 We always see the same side of the Moon, no matter where we stand on
Earth.


 This is because the Moon rotates on its axis at the same rate that it rotates the
Earth. It’s known as synchronous rotation or tidal locking.
 There are three main types of galaxies: elliptical, spiral & irregular.


 The Milky Way galaxy, the one that our solar system resides in, is classified as
a spiral galaxy.

 There are approximately 100 thousand million stars in the Milky Way.


 Out of all the known galaxies, the Milky Way is the one that contains the most
stars.
 Using the naked eye, you can see 3 – 7 different galaxies from Earth.


 You can see the Andromeda Galaxy (M-31), both Magellanic Clouds, our own
Milky Way galaxy, the Triangulum Galaxy (M-33), the Omega Centauri and the
Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy.
 In 2016, scientists detected a radio signal from a source 5 billion light-
years away.


 This means that when the signal started its journey, Earth didn’t even exist.
 The detected signals were located using the Very Large Array (VLA) of the
National Radio Astronomy Observatory in New Mexico.
 The closest galaxy to us is the Andromeda Galaxy – it’s estimated at 2.5
million light-years away.


 Before the discovery of the Andromeda Galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud
was believed to be the closest galaxy to us.
 The first Supernovae observed outside of our own galaxy was in 1885.

 This supernova was called the S Andromedae, located in the Andromeda
galaxy.
 This was observed by Ernst Hartwig in Estonia and was only made possible
due to the recent invention of the telescope.
 The first-ever black hole photographed is 3 million times the size of
Earth.


 The photo was released in April 2019 and shows a halo of dust and gas 310
million trillion miles from Earth.
 It was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope, a network of eight linked
telescopes, and was also captured due to the algorithm of programmer Katie
Bouman.
 The distance between the Sun & Earth is defined as an Astronomical
Unit.


 An Astronomical Unit (AU) equates to roughly 93 million miles or 150 million

kilometers.
 The second man on the moon was Buzz Aldrin. “Moon” was Aldrin’s
mother’s maiden name.


 She was born Marion Moon and later married Edwin Eugene Aldrin.
 Buzz Aldrin’s birth name was Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr.


 He got the nickname “Buzz” from his sister’s mispronunciation of the word
“brother”, which became “buzzer”.
 In 1988, he legally changed his first name to “Buzz”.
 On Venus, it snows metal and rains sulfuric acid.


 This is because Venus is a scorching planet choked with sulfuric acid, which
causes the planet’s metals to become gas and then liquid in the atmosphere,
 before raining down to the ground after the freezing temperatures turn it into a
solid.
 The Mariner 10 was the first spacecraft that visited Mercury in 1974.


 It was launched at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in 1973 and flew by Venus
3 months later. It then crossed into Mercury’s orbit managing to photograph
45% of Mercury’s surface.
 The second spacecraft to visit Mercury was the “Messenger”, which completed
mapping of 100% of Mercury’s surface in 2013.
 Space is completely silent.

 This is because there is no air in space, and air is needed to carry the sound
vibrations.
 So if you shouted to someone next to you in space they wouldn’t be able to
hear you. How’s that for a fun space fact!?
 Coca-Cola was the first commercial soft drink that was ever consumed in
space.


 The first food ever eaten in space was applesauce and was eaten by John
Glenn in space during the Friendship 7 mission in 1962.
 Astronauts can grow approximately two inches (5 cm) in height when in
space.


 This is due to the lack of gravity in space causes the discs between the
vertebrae to expand a little.
 However, this extra height is lost when re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere and
being subjected to the Earth’s gravity again.
 The Kuiper Belt is a region of the Solar System beyond the orbit of
Neptune.


 The Kuiper Belt is a ring of icy bodies and is where Pluto is located.
 The first woman in space was a Russian called Valentina Tereshkova.


 She launched into both history and space during the Vostok 6 mission on June
16, 1963.
 She spent almost three days in space and orbited the Earth 48 times in her
space capsule before returning to Earth.

 If Saturn’s rings were 3 feet long, they would be 10,000 times thinner
than a razor blade.


 The rings around Saturn are so thin because they are made up of pieces of
dusty water ice ranging in size from dust grains to boulders.
 The Hubble Space Telescope is one of the most productive scientific
instruments ever built.


 Astronomers using Hubble data have published more than 15,000 scientific
papers. Those papers have been cited in other papers 738,000 times.

 We have more facts about space & The Hubble Space Telescope here!

 The first artificial satellite in space was called “Sputnik”.

 It was launched by the Soviet Union into an elliptical low Earth orbit
on October 4, 1957.
 Exoplanets are planets that orbit around other stars.


 All of the planets in our solar system orbit around the Sun. But what about
other solar systems?
 In 2009, NASA launched a spacecraft called Kepler to look for exoplanets, and
has discovered thousands since its launch.
 The center of the Milky Way smells like rum & tastes like raspberries.

 This was discovered by the IRAM radio telescope zeroed in on a gas cloud
called Sagittarius B2 at the center of the our galaxy.
 The IRAM detected a chemical called ethyl formate which gives rum its distinct
smell and raspberries their distinct flavor.
 You can read more about this fascinating space fact here – The Milky Way
Smells Like Rum & Tastes Like Raspberries
 Our moon is moving away from Earth at a rate of 1.6 inch (4 cm) per
year!


 Scientists do believe that eventually the Moon will move out of the field of
Earth’s gravity; however this won’t happen for billions of years to come.
 Pluto is named after the Roman god of the underworld, not the Disney
Dog.


 The name for the planet was suggested by Venetia Burney, an eleven-year old
British schoolgirl, to the planet’s discoverer Clyde Tombaugh.
 Spacesuit helmets have a Velcro patch, to help astronauts itch.


 This is the Velcro patch’s one and only purpose.

 The ISS is visible to more than 90% of the Earth’s population.


 When you see the International Space Station (ISS) in the night sky it appears
as a fast-moving star crossing from horizon to horizon.
 Saturn is the only planet that could float in water.


 Although Saturn is the second largest planet in our solar system, it is also the
lightest planet.
 Saturn could float in water because it is mostly made of gas – although the
real fact here is that you would need a giant bath tub!
 Asteroids are the byproducts of formations in the solar system, more
than 4 billion years ago.


 The birth of Jupiter in our solar system prevented any planetary bodies
forming between Mars and Jupiter, causing the small objects that were there
to collide with each other and fragment into asteroids.
 Astronauts can’t burp in space.

 This is because the lack of gravity in space means the air in astronaut’s
stomach doesn’t separate and rise up from ingested food.
 Uranus was originally called “George’s Star”.


 This name was in honor of discoverer William Hershel’s new patron, King
George III.

 The name “Uranus” was proposed in 1782, one year after its discovery, but
wasn’t officially used until 1850.
 You may like these facts about when the planets in our solar system were
discovered.
 A sunset on Mars is blue.


 Mars has less than 1% of the Earth’s atmosphere.

 So the sunsets on Mars appear as blue due to the way the blue light from the
Sun is captured within the atmosphere of Mars.
 The Earth weighs about 81 times more than the Moon.


 The Moon’s gravity, much like other planets, differs depending on where you
are on its surface.
 The first living mammal to go into space was a dog named “Laika” from
Russia.


 Laika was a stray mongrel from the streets of Moscow and was launched into
space on the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2 on November 3, 1957.

 Sadly, Laika died 5-7 hours into the flight due to overheating and stress. Poor
doggo.
 The word “astronaut” means “star sailor” in its origins.


 It is derived from the Greek words “astron”, meaning “star”, and “nautes”,
which means “sailor”.

 So, the word astronaut literally means “star sailor”.

 “NASA” stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration.


 It is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government and was

established in 1958.
 NASA discovers new facts about space every day, check out these NASA
facts if you want to learn more!
 Gennady Padalka has spent more time in space than anyone else.


 He is an RKA cosmonaut and has spent 879 days in space

 He has worked on both Mir and the International Space Station.

 Mercury has no atmosphere, which means there is no wind or weather.



 Instead of an atmosphere, Mercury possesses a thin exosphere made up of

atoms blasted off the surface by the solar wind and striking meteoroids.
 In China, the Milky Way is known as the “Silver River”.


 In Japan and Korea “Silver River” means galaxies in general, not just the Milky
Way.
 Red Dwarf stars that are low in mass can burn continually for up to 10
trillion years!


 A Red Dwarf is a small and cool star in a later stage of its life and has a
surface temperature of less than 7,200k degrees Fahrenheit.
 Scientists once believed that the same side of Mercury always faced the
Sun.


 However, in 1965 astronomers discovered that the planet rotates three times
during every two orbits it makes.
 Jupiter’s Red Spot is shrinking.

 Jupiter’s red spot is a huge swirling hurricane-like storm that used to be three
times the size of Earth! However, the storm is shrinking over time, but even as
it shrinks it gets taller.
 Scientists are still stumped as to what’s causing this although they believe it
may be to do with jet streams on Jupiter changing location or direction.
 A large percentage of asteroids are pulled in by Jupiter’s gravity.


 For this reason, Jupiter is known as the dumping grounds for our solar system.
 Many of the asteroids that are potentially harmful to Earth, the long period
comets, tend to be sucked into Jupiter’s gravity field.
 Thanks Jupiter!
 A day on Mercury is equivalent to 58 Earth days.


 This is because Mercury rotates on its axis very slowly compared to Earth.

 As space has no gravity, pens won’t work.


 Normal pens work by gravity pulling the ink towards the pen’s nib (the writing
part) – as you hold the pen in your hand writing part facing downwards.
 As there’s no gravity in space, the ink doesn’t get pulled to the nib.
 However, special pens have been made that work in zero gravity.
 On average it takes the light only 1.3 seconds to travel from the Moon to
Earth.


 The distance between the Earth and the Moon is only 238,855 miles (384,400
kilometers).
 There are 88 recognized star constellations in our night sky.


 These 88 constellations cover the Earth’s night sky and can be observed from
the southern and northern hemispheres.
 The center of a comet is called a “nucleus”.


 The streams of dust that streak behind comets are known as a “coma” or a
“tail”.
 Space facts aren’t just about the planets! Here are some cool facts
about comets.
 As early as 240BC the Chinese began to document the appearance of
Halley’s Comet.


 After 164BC there was a continuous recording of the comet each time it was
visible.
 In 2006, the International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto as a
dwarf planet.


 This is because Pluto does not gravitationally dominate the neighborhood

around its orbit.
 There are 5 Dwarf Planets recognized in our Solar System.


 The Dwarf Planets are Ceres, Makemake, Haumea, Eris and Pluto.
 The dwarf planet Ceres is also the largest asteroid in our solar system, and
resides in the asteroid belt, making it the only dwarf planet to not inhabit the
outer solar system.
 Mars is the most likely planet in our solar system to be hospitable to life.


 In 1986, NASA found what they believe may be fossils of microscopic living
organisms in a rock recovered from the surface of Mars.
 Halley’s Comet will pass over Earth again on July 26, 2061.

 This space fact is one for kids to look forward to!
 The famous comet was last seen on February 9, 1986, and only orbits the
Earth once every 75 – 76 years.
 There is a planet half the radius of the Earth with a surface made up of
diamonds.


 55 Cancri e has a mass eight times that of Earth’s despite having half the
radius, and may very well have a surface made up of graphite and diamonds.
 It is only 40 light-years away and visible to the naked eye under the
constellation of Cancer.
 Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story has actually been to outer space!


 Buzz Lightyear spent 15 months onboard the International Space Station and

returned to Earth on September 11, 2009.
 To infinity, and beyond!
 We told you #100 would make you smile!
 Space, for many, is a weird & wonderful thing. The great unknown is
something mankind has always observed and tried to learn from – by
understanding our galaxy we may be able to understand our place in it, and
how this world came to be.
 We hope these 100 cool space facts helped the mystery of space to
become… well, less mysterious!
 If you enjoyed these unusual facts about space, we have plenty more space
facts for you to enjoy over at our Space category.
 All these fun space facts were accurate at the time of writing, although we’ll
update these facts about space regularly – so please let us know if something
here is incorrect!

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