Trails leading away from an ant nest always fork at a 60-degree angle, similar to a capital Y. On their way out to pick up food, they take either the left or right branch (30 degrees off their current heading). On their return home, ants need only stay as straight as possible to find their nest.

These tragic events have resulted from consumers rocking or tilting the machines in an attempt to obtain free soda or money. In response, vending machine manufacturers have voluntarily agreed to provide warning labels for the 1.7 million vending machines in the marketplace.

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.

The actual discrepancy between True North and the North you read from a compass is called "magnetic declination" and changes depending on where you are.

It took the ship Titanic approximately 2 hours, 40 minutes to sink. Titanic, the film, runs 3 hours, 14 minutes.

The ship took 3 years to build, approximately the same amount of time it took to make the film.

Honey is effectively regurgitated nectar that has been partially digested by a honeybee. Mmmmm...

Throughout WWII, Hitler was administered daily injections of methamphetamine, an addictive stimulant commonly known today as speed.

Inside a piano, there are roughly 230 wires of varying sizes and tension. When you press a piano key, 1-3 wires are struck by a hammer, causing it to vibrate at a unique frequency. Each of these wires is under 200 pounds of tension or more. These wires are held tight by a large cast iron frame (peek inside a grand piano sometime) which prevents the piano from caving in on itself!

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.

There are gold-plated records flying away from Earth towards aliens on both the NASA Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft (launched in 1977). These contain information on finding our Solar System and planet, images of culture and diversity on Earth, and greetings in a LOT of different languages. How to actually communicate with aliens.

These craft passed Pluto in 1990 and are now roughly 8 billion miles from the sun (90 times farther than the Earth).

However, only 3% of female-owned businesses generate revenue of over 1 million dollars.

CostCo sold 69 million hot dog and soda combos for $1.50 last year!

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

Some 114 million carats of diamonds are produced every year and, with new mines coming onstream and others being expanded, that should rise to about 120 million in 2005. And 80% of the diamonds dug out of the ground end up being used in industry.

The reason they seem scarce is that up until recently, De Beers controlled 80% of the world's supply. Catch-phrases such as “Diamonds are Forever” and adverts insisting men spend two months’ salary on a ring for their fiancée created the myth that diamonds are a scarce, valuable resource.

While sitting down, lift up your right foot and move it around in circles clockwise.

Then with your right hand, try to draw number 6's in the air at the same time. It's impossible!

Using its 94.5-inch primary mirror, Hubble transmits about 120 gigabytes of data every week! This mirror is such a smooth curve that if it was scaled up to the diameter of the Earth, the largest bump would only be 6 inches tall.

Take a look at some of the beautiful pictures Hubble has brought us!

That is enough for 36 million free tickets, at the basic rate of 25,000 miles - or enough to give almost everyone who flew out of Kennedy International Airport last year a free ticket.

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.

More than 20 million plastic pink flamingos have been sold since 1957. Flamingos are pink because of the beta-carotene in the shrimp they eat.

According to Daniel Boorstin in his book "The Discoverers," an assistant to the Roman consul was assigned to notice when the sun crossed the meridian, and to announce it in the Forum, since lawyers had to appear in the courts before noon.

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".

Turns out a gland near their beaks filters the saltwater -- once the gland gets full, a penguin will knock his beak on a rock to empty the salt out.

In the late 1830's and 1840's, the abbreviation fad began with many of the abbreviated expressions being exaggerated misspellings. One predecessor of OK was OW, "oll wright," and there was also KY, "know yuse," KG, "know go," and NS, "nuff said."

With this deal, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple and CEO of Pixar, will also become the largest shareholder of Disney (at 6.6% of shares outstanding)!

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).