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