Decibels are measured on a logarithmic scale -- every 3 dB is a doubling of the intensity of sound saves. Restaurant conversation is about 60 dB, a motorcycle (at 25 ft) is 90 dB, airplanes at takeoff are 110 dB.

Our human senses for sound (as well as light) are tuned for a wide range of values, hence the logarithmic scales we use for measurement

Remarkably, there exist simple scaling laws relating animal metabolism to body mass. Larger animals live longer; but they also metabolize slower, as manifested in slower heart rates. These effects cancel out, so that animals from shrews to blue whales have lifespans with just about equal number of heartbeats — about one and a half billion, if you simply must be precise. In that very real sense, all animal species experience “the same amount of time.”

Each tree produces about 40 cubic feet of wood every year.

If such particles did exist, however, Special Relativity implies that they could never be slowed down to velocities below the speed of light. The existence of such particles, called tachyons, has not been totally ruled out, but several experiments have tried, without luck to detect them. If they did exist, and they interacted with ordinary matter, it would give us the means to communicate with the past...

A strand of human DNA, containing every bit of information about you, contains 3 billion base pairs. These base pairs can be A, T, C, or G. Since it takes two bits to represent 4 options, your full DNA sequence would occupy 6 billion bits in a computer -- or 800 megabytes. This is just enough to fit onto a compact disc!

And according to an old fact, with current IP addressing, we could almost give every person on Earth a unique address.

In comparison, the North Pole rests in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, where the surface of floating ice rides only a foot or so above the surrounding sea. The Arctic Ocean also acts as an effective heat reservoir, warming the cold atmosphere in the winter and drawing heat from the atmosphere in the summer.

58-megaton means that the blast was equivalent to exploding 58,000,000 tons of dynamite.

According to Mythbusters, if you fall/jump from 160 feet, your body experiences 285 G's, or 285 times the normal force of gravity, when you hit the water.

To put this in context, the force your body experiences in a normal car crash is 70 G's.

As the temperature drops, the atoms slow down - In 1995, physicists in Boulder, CO, cooled atoms to 20 billionths of a degree above absolute zero, where all motion ceases, creating a Bose-Einstein condensate - a new state of matter that "had never existed anywhere in the universe ever before".

This one pound of highly enriched uranium (~90% Uranium-235 for weapons grade vs. 2% -3% for civilian reactors) has as much energy as a million pounds of gasoline (a cube 50 ft/side).

An inch was the width of a thumb. A foot was the length of a foot. A pace was two marching steps (~5 feet). A mile was a thousand paces (5,280 feet).

If a hurricane is particularly devastating or costly, however, the name can be retired. Atlantic storms can have French, English or Spanish names because those are the languages spoken where the hurricane activity usually is.

According to Princeton geneticist Bonnie Bassler, there are 10^10 bacterial cells in your gut. You only have 10^9 human cells making up your whole body. So there are 10 times more bacterial cells in you, or on you, than human cells. By weight, you are more human than bacteria, because your cells are bigger, but by numbers, it's not even close.

A "knot" is a measure of speed equal to one nautical mile per hour (or about 1.15 mph). The name comes from the knots tied in the log line used with the sand glass. The log line was thrown onto the sea and the knots in the line were counted as they ran out during the sand glass interval.

Before the Industrial Revolution, silver hardly tarnished at all.

There is no fixed air temperature for frosty breath. Exhaled air has relatively high amounts of moisture from our lungs. When this warm, moist air is chilled, the moisture condenses. The exhaled air is chilled below its saturation temperature, or dew point. For big dramatic clouds of frosty breath, it helps to have humid air. Why? This stops the condensation cloud from evaporating too quickly. The water droplets will last longer in moist air, because the air is already fairly saturated.

A cube of it about 2.5 inches on edge can be beaten out to cover an entire football field.

The average lightning flash would power a 100 watt bulb for 3 months.

One lightning casualty occurred for every 86,000 flashes in the United States. There are 20 million flashes in the US per year.

After a knife attack in 2001, Matthew became paralyzed from the neck down. However, he received a brain implant consisting of 100 electrodes implanted a millimeter deep in the motor cortex of his brain that controls movement.

Now, he can think his TV on and off, change channels and alter the volume thanks to the technology and software linked to devices in his home. Read more!

An attosecond is 1 x 10^-18 seconds. To imagine how long this is, if 100 attoseconds is stretched so that it lasts one second, one second would last 300 million years on the same scale. But by using lasers, we may be able to make new clocks that are accurate to one second over a billion years (more accurate than atomic clocks).

As surprising as it is, on a 100-foot course, you soak up more than twice the rain by running instead of walking. By walking, it's really only the top of your head and your shoulders that get wet. When you run, you get the whole front face of your body wet as well.

Do onions bother you? No wonder! The reason that onions cause people to tear up is that onion cells contain a sulfur-containing chemical compound. When your knife slices through that, it triggers a series of chemical reactions. When the new molecules react with the moisture in your eyes, sulfuric acid -- the most widely used of all chemicals and a major component of battery acid and acid rain-- is formed.

But good ol' Texas is keeping its young ladies safe from such worries. The town of Nacogdoches, has a strict onions curfew for "young women." Under no circumstances are they allowed to have any raw onions after 6 p.m.

The average human loses between 3 and 6 liters of water on a typical day. One to two liters rushes out as urine, and another one-tenth liter in defecation. Water lost as vapor when you breathe could fill around 1 to 2 liter water bottles a day-even more in arid locations. Sweat fills up another 1 to 2 liters on an average day, but that amount can reach 1 to 2 liters per hour in an intense workout.

But if you're dehydrated, that super gulp won't give you the quick fix you dream of. The body can only absorb about 1 quart per hour...

But you can not beat the old-fashioned way... having a Stork deliver your baby.

Check out the E=mc² fact from a few weeks ago.

But it can't hurt you because it is only 2 milliamps (i.e. about 12 million billion electrons that fly over to your finger in a flash) compared to 500mA that a 60W bulb uses.

Sick of getting shocked? Here's how to avoid it.

Aluminum is everywhere -- many gemstones, for example ruby and sapphire, are mainly crystalline aluminum oxide (Al₂O₃). In addition, many of the world's top performance vehicles, like the Ferrari 360 Modena and the Audi A8, are 100% aluminum, since it's lighter than steel but at least twice as strong.

Caffeine is an alkaloid that occurs naturally in the leaves, seeds, and fruit of tea, coffee, cacao, and kola trees, and has been prescribed for human use as far back as the 6th century B.C. when the spiritual leader Lao-tzu is said to have recommended tea as an elixir for deciples of his new religion, Taoism.

A windchill temperature is, rather, a calculation of how cold it would have to be to cause the same rate of heat loss from your skin if there were no wind blowing. Wind chill approximates how cold it feels because the rate of heat loss corresponds with skin temperature, and skin temperature is what our nerves sense.

But they use the unusually high skin resistance of the 95th percentile of people to measure wind chill and therefore overestimate how cold it feels.

One molecule of natural rubber is composed of approximately 295,000 atoms (175,000 carbon atoms and 120,000 hydrogen atoms). Damn.

The basic unit of English length is the yard, which was originally taken as the distance between Henry Is (1068-1135) nose and the tip of his outstretched arm.

Laser stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.

Radar stands for Radio Detecting and Ranging.

A "drop" is about 1/60th of a teaspoon.