Fun Facts

Things you might or might not know about:

Humans

• Did you know that there are 206 bones in the adult human body and there are 300 in children (as they grow some of the bones fuse together).
• 5 years ago: The first successful cloning of human embryo.
• Most people blink about 17,000 times a day.
• The human eye blinks an average of 4,200,000 times a year.
• It takes approximately 12 hours for food to entirely digest.
• 40 to 50 percent of body heat can be lost through the head as a result of its extensive circulatory network.
• In your lifetime, you'll shed over 40 pounds of skin.
• 15 million blood cells are produced and destroyed in the human body every second.
• Every minute, 30-40,000 dead skin cells fall from your body.
• The brain uses more than 25% of the oxygen used by the human body.
• If your mouth was completely dry, you would not be able to distinguish the taste of anything.
• Only humans sleep on their backs.
• Everyone's tongue print is different.
• The average person has 100,000 hairs on his/her head. Each hair grows about 5 inches (12.7 cm) every year.
• A sneeze travels out your mouth at over 100 m.p.h!

Animals

• Hummingbirds can't walk.
• Despite the hump, a camel’s spine is straight.
• Cheetah's can accelerate from 0 to 70 km/h in 3 seconds.
• A cockroach can live for several weeks without its head.
• Ants do not sleep.
• Rats multiply so quickly that in 18 months, two rats could have over 1 million descendent's.
  

Space

• An Astronaut can be up to 2 inches taller returning from space. The cartilage disks in the spine expand in the absence of gravity.
• The cosmos contains approximately 50,000,000,000 galaxies.
• There are between 100,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000 stars in a normal galaxy.
• The hottest planet in the solar system is Venus, with an estimated surface temperature of 864 F (462 C).
• Sound travels about 4 times faster in water than in air.
• On average, Elephants sleep for about 2 hours per day.
• Lobsters have blue blood.
• Shark's teeth are literally as hard as steel.
• A mosquito has 47 teeth.

Science

• The only letter not appearing on the Periodic Table is the letter “J”.
• October 10 is National Metric Day.
• Ten minutes of one hurricane contains enough energy to match the nuclear stockpiles of the world.
• A stroke of lightning discharges from 10 to 100 million volts & 30,000 amperes of electricity.
• A bolt of lightning is about 54,000°F (30,000°C); six times hotter than the Sun.
• The temperature can be determined by counting the number of cricket chirps in fourteen seconds and adding 40
• The king of hearts is the only king without a mustache on a standard playing card.

Places

• By raising your legs slowly and laying on your back, you can't sink in quicksand.
• The average ocean floor is 12,000 feet.
• Hawaii is moving toward Japan 4 inches every year.
• Every year in the US, 625 people are struck by lightning.
• The United States consumes 25% of all the world’s energy.
• The largest cave in the world (the Sarawak Chamber in Malaysia) is 2,300 feet (701 meters) long, 980 feet (299 meters) wide, and more than 230 feet (70 meters) high.