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.
Soda vending machines have been responsible for at least 37 deaths and 113 injuries since 1978.
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.
Magnetic North is actually a thousand miles away from the North Pole ("True North"). The North Pole is technically is located at 90° N (& any longitude), but magnetic north is currently at 73° N, 100° W -- halfway between the US border and Alaska!
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.
A hive of bees must pollinate 2 million flowers to collect the nectar to make one pound of honey. For this they must fly a total distance of approximately 55,000 miles -- or more than twice around the globe.
Honey is effectively regurgitated nectar that has been partially digested by a honeybee. Mmmmm...
A grand piano has about 20 tons of force trying to sandwich it in half.
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!
What makes the South Pole so much colder than the North Pole is that it sits on top of a very thick ice sheet, which itself sits on a continent. The surface of the ice sheet at the South Pole is more than 9,000 feet in elevation --more than a mile and a half above sea level. Antarctica is by far the highest continent on the earth.
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).
In 1961, the Soviets detonated the largest
single explosion by the human species - a 58-megaton thermonuclear
weapon on Novaya Zemlya, an island in the Arctic Sea.
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.
At a cost of $1.5B and the size of a school bus, the Hubble Space telescope was launched in 1990.
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!
Passengers in the United States are sitting on more than nine trillion frequent-flier miles, 50 percent more than just 5 years ago, according to WebFlyer.com.
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.
A.M. stands for Ante Meridiem which means "before noon", while P.M. stands for Post Meridiem, or "after noon".
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.
The atoms in the air around us are flying around at about 1,000 miles per hour (for normal room temperature).
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".
The universe is so vast in relation to the
matter it contains that it can be compared with a building twenty
miles long, twenty miles wide, and twenty miles high that contains
only a single grain of sand.
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."
In a 10-megaton nuclear bomb explosion (as big as they get), all the energy is produced from less than 1 pound of matter, in accordance with Einstein's formula E=mc2.
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).