The Discovernator : Discovery News

Crazy Amazing Facts Served Up Hot

"Dammit I'm Mad" is a palindrome.
A bee must visit 4,000 flowers in order to make one tablespoon of honey.
A bonobo has been diagnosed with autism.
A camera surgically embedded into the back of the head of artist Wafaa Bilal sends still images every minute to a Qatar art museum.
A cheetah can run at a top speed of 70 mph.
A dog's sense of smell is 1,000 times stronger than humans.
A giant squid's eyes have a diameter of 15 inches -- the largest of any animal.
A light bulb that hasn't been turned off since 1901 still shines at a fire station in Livermore, Calif.
A new dog food TV commercial features sounds only dogs can hear.
A newborn kangaroo is about 1 inch long and weighs less than a gram.
A one-eyed “Cyclops” shark fetus was recently found in a pregnant dusky shark.
A parasite of the order Isopoda eats the tongue of its host fish and then takes the place of the tongue.
A pig, allowed to live in Irish farmhouses in olden days, was once known as "the gentleman that pays the rent."
Abebe Bikila became the first black African to win an Olympic gold medal in 1960 when he won the Marathon -- running barefoot.
About 2,200 pounds of circuit boards can contain 40 to 800 times the amount of gold normally mined from 2,200 pounds of ore.
According to Irish legend, on judgement day Christ will be the judge all nations, but St. Patrick will be the judge of the Irish.
Adolph Hitler was voted Time Magazine's man of the year in 1938.
Adult great white sharks can swim up to 43 miles an hour.
All clams are born as males, but can later turn into a female.
Approximately half of all orangutans have fractured bones, mostly from falling out of trees.
Astronauts Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had to go through US Customs to come back from the moon.
At 100 mph, it would take about 98 days to drive to the moon.
At 2,716 feet tall, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai sways about 10 feet at the top.
At less than 40 feet per million years, Mexico's gypsum crystals are the slowest-growing ever measured.
At the equator the Earth is spinning at almost 1,000 miles per hour.
Babe Ruth wore a cabbage leaf under his baseball cap to keep him cool and changed it every two innings.
Babies are born with more bones than adults have: around 300. Adults have 206.
Bald eagles can swim using a movement of the wings that resembles the butterfly stroke.
Beavers can hold their breath underwater for 45 minutes.
Bill Gates (Software) is the fourth-richest man in American history after John D. Rockefeller (Oil), Andrew Carnegie (Steel) and Cornelius Vanderbilt (Railroads).
Brown beer bottles drive male Australian jeweled beetles so wild that the beetles will try to mate with the bottles, which doesn't work out well for the beetles.
Bubblegum is usually pink because its inventor, Walter Diemer, only had pink food coloring at his factory.
Camels have three eyelids (two with lashes) to protect themselves from blowing sand.
Charles Darwin's wife Emma was also his first cousin.
Dino-era flying reptiles, called pterosaurs, grew as tall as giraffes and had wingspans almost as wide as a school bus.
During a solar eclipse the drift of the moon's shadow across the Earth becomes its own weather front.
During REM sleep the body is paralyzed by a mechanism in the brain.
Each patch on a giraffe contains a set of blood vessels that regulate heat, helpful in the desert.
Eastern diamond rattlesnakes can give birth up to five years after mating.
Eighth President Martin Van Buren created the word "OK." During his campaign, Old Kinderhook (O.K.) clubs from Van Buren's hometown supported the President.
Electric motors have better acceleration than combustible engines. That's why Rimac Automobil's Concept_One can hit 62 miles per hour in 2.8 seconds.
Elephants have the largest brain of any land mammal - nearly 11 pounds on average.
Even though the Voyager 1 spacecraft is traveling at 10 miles per second through space, it would still take it 70,000 years to reach the nearest star.
Fall leaves turn color because the green chlorophyll in them disappears as the tree prepares for winter, revealing the yellows and reds usually masked by green.
Football legend Rosie Grier captured and disarmed Sirhan Sirhan after he assassinated Robert F. Kennedy. Grier was the bodyguard for Kennedy's wife.
For every person there are roughly 170 million insects.
Fragments of NASA's Skylab crashed near the town of Esperance, Australia, in 1979. The U.S. space agency was fined $400 for littering. They never paid.
Gandhi covered the 1932 Olympic games in Los Angeles as a reporter.
Giraffes and humans have the same number of bones in their necks: seven.
Giraffes' tongues grow to 21 inches in length.
Google's fleet of robotic Toyota Priuses have driven more than 190,000 miles without a driver.
Great white sharks can go as long as three months without eating.
Hello was not always the first thing said over the phone. The first operating phone service was established in 1878 and the formal greeting was "ahoy."
Hens can selectively eject the sperm of undesired mates, often that of lower status males.
Hummingbirds are the only animal that can fly forwards and backwards.
If you put Mt. Everest on the seafloor next to Hawaii's Mauna Kea, Mt. Everest would be less than 10,000 feet above sea level.
In 1897, Bayer, the maker of Aspirin, marketed the drug heroin as a cough medicine.
In 1980, workers in a Las Vegas hospital were suspended because they bet on when patients would die.
In November 2009, a Japanese man named SAL9000 married a digital avatar named Nene Anegasaki on the digital dating simulator Love Plus.
In Scotland you are on the wrong side of the law if you are drunk and in possession of a cow.
In Sweden, moose are known to get drunk on rotting, fermenting apples lying on the ground.
Intense storms on the sun can kill satellites, zap astronauts and, occasionally, knock out entire power grids on the ground.
It took radio broadcasters 38 years to reach an audience of 50 million, television 13 years, and the Internet just four years.
Jimmy Carter was the first U.S. president to have been born in a hospital.
Just 6.5 percent of all people ever born are alive today.
Leonardo da Vinci sketched plans for a humanoid robot in the 15th Century.
Male deep-sea squid are just as likely to mate with other males as with females.
Many plants and animals are shrinking in size as the planet warms.
Margaret Thatcher was part of a scientific team that discovered soft-serve ice cream.
Marijuana, used for hemp, was the primary crop grown by George Washington at Mount Vernon.
Marketed at prices of up to $3,000 per kilo, the White Truffle from Italy is the world's most expensive edible fungus.
Mercury and Venus are the only two planets in the solar system with no moons.
Ninety-seven percent of all U.S. money contains traces of cocaine.
No one has received more U.S. patents than Thomas Edison: 1,093.
Noise pollution is forcing some birds to sing at higher frequencies, making them less attractive.
On Dec. 21, 2012 - “Doomsday” - nothing special is predicted to happen.
On Nov. 30, 1954, a large meteorite crashed through the roof of Ann Hodges' Alabama house and bruised her hip. It was the first recorded instance of a meteorite hitting a person.
One third of the world's population has never made a telephone call.
People who became blind after birth can see images in their dreams.
Peter the Great executed his wife's lover, then forced her to keep her lover's head in a jar of alcohol in her bedroom.
Pink is not an actual color. It is white light without the color green.
Pluto may not be a planet anymore, but it has a whole family of worlds named after it, called "plutoids."
Pucks hit by hockey sticks have reached speeds of up to 150 miles per hour.
Recycling one million laptops saves the energy equivalent of electricity used in 3,657 U.S. homes in one year.
Rogue waves, the huge waves that routinely sink ships at sea, are made of many, many small waves that come together to form a gargantuan wave.
Saccharin is 500 times sweeter than sugar and is made from a compound of toluene, which is a solvent derived from petroleum.
Saturn's moon Enceladus is covered in snow.
Sloths sleep 15 to 20 hours per day.
Spider silk is about five times stronger than steel of the same weight.
Spider webs were used to cure warts during the Middle Ages.
Super-fast maglev trains ride on a cushion of air that's just 1/3 of an inch thick, using the repelling forces of magnets.
T. rex teens grew as fast as 3,950 pounds per year.
The "middle finger" gesture originates back to 423 B.C. in Aristophanes' play, "The Clouds."
The air flowing through a Boeing 767 engine at takeoff power could inflate a Goodyear Blimp in seven seconds.
The Arctic now has an ozone hole too.
The asteroid Vesta has a mountain that's three times higher than Mount Everest.
The average Italian consumes half a pound of bread a day.
The average lifespan of a major league baseball is seven pitches.
The barnacle has the largest penis of any animal, relative to its size.
The best way to get out of quicksand is to relax and float on your back.
The biggest black hole known to exist lives in the nearby galaxy M87. It's 2,000 times bigger than the Milky Way's supermassive black hole.
The brain of a roach is located inside its body. If it loses its head, it can live up to nine days.
The cesium atom in an atomic clock pulses 9,192,631,770 -- just over 9 billion -- times a second.
The custom of shaking hands with strangers was meant to show both the parties that neither was holding a gun.
The earliest known same-sex ceremony was in 65 A.D. and Nero himself married the couple.
The Earth is traveling around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour or about 18.6 miles per second.
The Euthanasia Coaster, a rollercoaster conceived by a Lithuanian student, produces enough force to kill a person - 10 Gs .
The farthest point from the center of the Earth is on the top of Chimborazo volcano in Ecuador at 20,561 feet.
The fastest car on the planet in 1898 broke the land-speed record with a blistering 39.24 miles per hour.
The fastest known mammal muscles belong to bats, which use the muscles to send out echolocation calls.
The fastest motion of any joint in any athlete is the shoulder rotation in baseball pitching.
The fastest shark is the Shortfin Mako, which can swim up to 60 miles per hour.
The fastest spacecraft ever launched reached a breakneck speed of 44 miles per second! They were the 1974/76 Helios solar probes.
The first drug law in America was in San Francisco and meant to prohibit "Chinese opium dens."
The first novel ever written on a typewriter was "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer."
The first rover to land on Mars only transmitted 15 seconds of data before a storm blew it over.
The first synthetic dye was the color mauve, created when chemist William Perkin, trying to find a cure for malaria, instead created a massive mauve mess.
The great great grandfather of Barack Obama came from Moneygall, County Offaly in Ireland.
The heart of a blue whale weighs about 1,300 pounds and is the size of a small car.
The human brain operates on 10 watts of power, about the same as an old-fashioned Christmas tree light.
The humanoid robot I-Fairy married Tomohiro Shibata and Satoko Inoue in Tokyo on May 16, 2010 in the first-ever robot-led wedding ceremony.
The hummingbird flaps its wings 40 to 90 times per second.
The koala does not need to drink liquids. The majority of their water comes from the leaves they eat.
The largest "killer" solar flare ever observed had the energy of 50 million trillion atomic bombs. It was unleashed by the star II Pegasi.
The largest desert in the world is in Antarctica.
The largest recorded tsunami was a wave 1,720 feet tall – over a quarter mile high. It struck Lituya Bay, Alaska, in 1958.
The largest solar storm in recorded history - the "Carrington Event" in 1859 - was so powerful it caused telegraph cables to spark, electrocuting operators.
The London transportation system called "the tube" is the first and the largest underground system in the world.
The Mayan "Long Count" Calendar never foretold doomsday.
The modern marathon was modeled on a run by a Greek soldier in 490 BCE from Marathon to Athens (about 25 miles) to inform the Athenians the outcome of the battle with invading Persians.
The moon smells (and tastes) like burnt gunpowder. No one is quite sure why.
The Netherlands has more tornadoes by area than any other country in the world.
The number of people who were ever born in the world totals more than 100 billion.
The periodic table was engraved onto a single hair from the head of chemist Martyn Poliakoff as a birthday present to him from colleagues.
The pistol shrimp makes such a loud noise that it can kill fish.
The slowest mammal on earth is the tree sloth. It moves at 6 feet per minute.
The snowbound Donner Party, before perishing in the Sierra Nevada, ate pets, bones, twigs, glue, strings and finally each other.
Three continents – Africa, South America, and Antarctica – have never hosted an Olympics.
To find a hidden triple rainbow after a storm, look towards the sun.
To take an oath, ancient Romans had to put a hand on their testicles.
Triton, Neptune's largest moon, is the only moon in the solar system that orbits in the opposite direction.
Triton, Neptune's largest moon, was probably once a dwarf planet, stolen from the Kuiper Belt.
Uranus is the only planet in the solar system that orbits the sun on its side.
Vice-President Andrew Johnson took his presidential oath while completely drunk. According to the New York Times, he was “glassy-eyed and smelling of whiskey.”
Weighing in at 980 pounds, Paul Mason is currently the world's heaviest man.
Whale milk is 50 percent fat - around 10 times the fat content of human milk.
What became Coca-Cola was intended to be a cure for headaches when Atlanta pharmacist John Pemberton concocted it.
You can determine the temperature outside by counting cricket chirps.
Your mobile phone could be more than 400 times more powerful than the computers that helped NASA astronauts land on the moon in 1969.
The first moon colonists will likely live in lunar caves.
A pinhead-sized amount of neutron star material would weigh a million tons.
A pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star that blasts radiation from its poles.
Methane exists in Mars' atmosphere, but scientists aren't sure where it comes from -- living things or volcanoes.
Solar storms can knock out satellites, turning them into satellites that are dead but still move: "zombiesats."
Space station astronauts see 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every day.
The Hubble Space Telescope has carried out over a million scientific observations and adds more all the time.
The Milky Way is thought to contain up to 400 billion stars.
Our galaxy may contain over 50 billion alien worlds, according to calculations.
It takes light 100,000 years to travel from one end of the Milky Way galaxy to the other.
The oldest star discovered in our galaxy is 13.2 billion years old.
There's enough water on the moon to fulfill Seattle's water needs for three years.
The POOP SCOOP Robot walks your dog and picks up its poop for the low cost of $400,000.
123456 is the most common password hacked. Change your password.
Steve Jobs's biological half-sister is Mona Simpson, the author.
Giant amoebas called xenophyophores live in the ocean 6.6 miles down, in the crushing depths of the Mariana Trench.
A Roman-era couple, buried together, has been holding hands for 1,500 years.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart may have died from a lack of Vitamin D.
High-flying fleas get airborne by pushing off with their toes rather than with their knees.
More than 200 million tons of human waste goes untreated every year.
In developing nations, up to 20% of girls drop out of school because they have no place to go to the bathroom.
There is 25 times more solar energy available every year than the Earth's total coal reserves.
The 62 trillion SPAM emails sent each year produce as many CO2 emissions as 1.6 million cars.
Nearly 80 percent of land-dwelling species disappeared 252 million years ago.
Of all animals, only humans blush, and we begin to blush at about three years old.
Our hair and nails do not continue to grow after we die. They just appear to as our other body parts dry out and contract.
A healthy human hair is almost as strong as copper wire of the same diameter.
Round hair follicles produce straight hair, oval follicles curly hair.
Rigor mortis begins within six hours of death, starting with the eyelids.
The spider has more than 3,000 sensors embedded in its exoskeleton – the better to track you.
Women sprinters are more likely to get away with false starts because of their lighter weight.
Bacteria in your gut can affect your weight and even your behavior.
There has been only one documented case since 1974 of a deadly Halloween treat killing a child. His father did it.
In its shell, the cashew nut is surrounded by a caustic oil that can burn the skin.
Earthworms are an invasive species in North America, first introduced by early European settlers.
The Apollo astronauts were quarantined for 21 days after their moon mission in case they were infected with an alien virus.
The dinosaur called Apatosaurus had its nostrils on top of its head. No one knows why.
There were no flying dinosaurs or swimming dinosaurs. All dinosaurs lived on land.
Most insects are edible. Even bees and scorpions can be eaten (remove stingers).
Black holes aren't black. They glow slightly, giving off what's called Hawking Radiation.
Leonardo da Vinci conceived of a flying machine 400 years before humans actually flew.
The American tradition of red barns came from a 17th-century wood-preserving paint made of milk, lime, red iron oxide and linseed oil.
Chickens lay their eggs with a coating, called a bloom, that preserves the eggs for up to two weeks.
A species of ant smells like fresh coconut when smashed.
The 7 billionth human was born on October 31, 2011.
A 200-foot-tall clock that runs for 10,000 years will be buried in a remote West Texas cave by the Long Now Foundation.
Future computers will run on DNA.
Gecko lizards are the only vertebrates that can walk upside across a glass ceiling.
A special net designed to capture mountain fog can collect 2,500 quarts of drinking water day.
Dogs walked by men are four times more likely to threaten other dogs.
Human baby cries are nearly identical in structure to lion and tiger roars, which are simply at a lower pitch.
Mars' moons, Phobos and Deimos, may actually be asteroids captured by Martian gravity.
Life may have crash-landed on Earth in the form of alien bacteria hitchhiking inside meteorites.
The Saturn moon Hyperion resembles a sea sponge.
Libyan rebels dug up a photo album completely filled with pictures of former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Moammar Gadhafi's abandoned compound in Tripoli.
The earliest Europeans shared turf with Neanderthals around 45,000 years ago.
To promote the passing game in football, NFL bosses changed the shape of the football in 1934. They made the ball longer and skinnier.
An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
Charles de Gaulle's final words were, "It hurts."
Steve Jobs's last words were "OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW."
Space is not empty; it's thought to be buzzing with "virtual particles" popping in and out of existence.
A powerful laser capable of ripping holes in spacetime is planned for construction in Europe.
A Fermilab scientist is building a "holometer," designed to investigate whether we live in a hologram.
Until 1875 we had no proof that horses at a gallop took all four feet off the ground. Eadweard Muybridge invented high-speed photography to prove it.
The oldest surviving tree species evolved 160 million years ago during the Jurassic era. Ichou trees are still grown in Japan today.
Antarctica has more than 300 lakes under the ice that might host microbial life. But no one has broken through to find out for sure ... yet.
Up to 90 percent of the species living in the waters off southwestern Australia are found nowhere else on Earth.
A giant iceberg, larger in area than New York City, could break away from Antarctica by 2012.
A glacier crack that's growing in Antarctica is currently deep enough to fit the Statue of Liberty.
Kayaking or paddling in polluted rivers can make you sick, even if you don't fall in.
Red in fall leaves comes from a pigment that the leaves make only in the fall - scientists don't know why.
The deepest hole ever dug was 7.5 miles (12.262 kilometers) deep, less than a third of the way through the Earth's crust.
Polar bears have black skin.
Polar bear fur isn't white. It's translucent. It looks white because of the way it reflects light.
Polar bear hairs are hollow, so they can trap air and help keep the bear warm.
The longest recorded swim for a polar bear was 232 consecutive hours. That's 9 days and 16 hours!
Polar bear males can weigh more than 1,500 lbs. But when they are born, they weigh only 2 lbs.
It takes the Earth 1 year and 6 hours to orbit the sun. To account for this, an extra day is added to the calendar every 4th year (leap year).
A single fungi under the ground can be as big as 30 acres.
The sound you hear when you crack your knuckles is the sound of gas bubbles between the knuckles bursting.
Human can live unprotected in space for about 30 seconds - if they don't hold their breath.
In 1386, a pig in France was executed by public hanging for the murder of a child.
A Brazilian man who held his breath underwater for 20 minutes 21 seconds holds the world record.
The first email was sent in 1971 over the ARPANET between two computers that sat side by side.
The first sound ever recorded was a woman singing Claire de Lune in 1860.
In 1895, the first portable motion picture camera could capture, develop and project a film.
In average density, the sun is thicker than water on Earth.
The sun rotates on its axis like Earth does. But one "day" on the sun's equator equals about 25 Earth days.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 will be the first man-made object to leave the solar system.
Voyager 1 will pass another planetary system in the year 40,272 AD.
Due to their high metabolism, hummingbirds must eat twice their body weight every day.
Rodents in the shrew family must eat 3.3 times their own weight every 24 hours to avoid starvation.
The lungfish can go more than four years without a meal.
Usain Bolt ran the 100 meter dash in Berlin in 2009 with 41 strides in 9.58 seconds. He holds the world record in that event.
In 1988, Yannis Kouros ran 1,000 miles in 10 days, 10 hours, 30 minutes and 35 seconds, breaking the world record by over 34 hours.
The world's smallest seahorse is smaller than a postage stamp.
If you removed all of the space between the atoms and molecules that make up the Empire State Building, the building would be reduced to the size of a grain of rice.
New York and London are moving apart about two centimeters a year.
Parrotfish create much of the sand around coral reefs by eating chunks of coral and pooping it out as sand.
Some female kinds of fish, like parrotfish, can spontaneously change into males.
The smallest car in the world measures approximately 4 x 2 nanometers, about one billion times smaller than a VW Golf.
Water can exist in all three states of matter -- solid, liquid and gas -- at the same time.
The highest structures in Arizona are the stacks from the the Navajo Generating Station coal burning power plant.
Complex lifeforms, like jellyfish, might survive in the protected sub-surface ocean on Jupiter's moon Europa.
Our sun spins at 2 kilometers per second at its equator. But the fastest-spinning star known spins at 600 kilometers per second!
Some galaxies store their waste in vast halos, recycling the gas for new stars and extending their lifespans.
Elephants are the only animal that takes longer to learn to walk than humans.
For at least 20,000 years after the "Great Dying" 252.28 million years ago, 3 percent of its species died every 1,000 years.
Over 80 percent of the sources, opinions and editorials skeptical of climate change are found in the US or UK press.
Hookworms can live in the small intestines of humans and never be detected.
Some species of tapeworm, an intestinal worm that can infect humans, grow to 100 feet long.
Thanksgiving didn't become a national holiday until 1863, when Abraham Lincoln set it for the last Thursday in November.
The first Pilgrims, in 1620, were taught how to survive in the New World by a Putuxet Indian named Squanto.
The first Thanksgiving feast, in 1621, included fowl and deer, though the exact menu was never written down.
Nearly 90 percent of Americans eat turkey on Thanksgiving Day.
The Army is building a hypersonic flying bomb that can hit a target anywhere in the world -- in one hour.
Mars is only half the size of the Earth, measuring 4,200 miles in diameter.
You could jump three times higher on Mars than on Earth; gravity on Mars is only 37 percent that of Earth's.
Crossing the largest-known impact crater of any planet in the solar system, Mars' Hellas, would be like driving from Atlanta to Albuquerque.
NASA's recently launched Mars rover Curiosity could run for 10 years on its plutonium power source.
A Kiwi bird is similar in size to a chicken, but its one-pound egg is six times bigger than a chicken egg.
Indian Gul Mohammed is the shortest living person at 22.5 inches.
Bouvet Island in the South Atlantic Ocean is the most remote island on Earth. The nearest land is Antarctica, 994 miles away.
President Cleveland bought his friend's daughter her first baby carriage at birth, and married her in the White House when she was 21.
Some wasps recognize other wasp faces better than any other kind of object.
NASA's Planetary Protection Officers make sure we don't accidentally contaminate other planets and that WE don't get contaminated by alien lifeforms.
Mars rover "Curiosity" is carrying spare drill bits for when its robotic drill needs a fresh one.
Bamboo would be an ideal plant for Mars colonists to grow. It's fast growing, hardy and can be used to build furniture.
A "wet burp" may occur in space if you drink a carbonated liquid, like beer, and try to burp. Liquid will be ejected.
Nikola Tesla invented Tesla coils, which can generate electrical arcs up to 100,000,000 volts.
Nikola Tesla patented a radio-controlled robot-boat in 1898.
If underwater turbines could harness just 1/1000 of the energy of the Gulf Stream's current, they could power 7 million homes.
Electricity generated from waves, tides, deep-water currents and off-shore wind farms could power 240 million homes by 2050.
The Appalachian mountains in the Eastern United States were once as high as the Himalayas.
Betelgeuse, a red giant star that forms the right arm of the constellation Orion, is 800 times larger than our sun.
The Appalachian Mountains are the fourth range to occupy the Eastern United States. The others were raised and worn down over the last billion years.
It takes 3481 licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.
The guinea pig-sized Hyrax shares an ancestor with the elephant, despite their enormous size difference.
The Guinness Book of Records-holder for "most pounds of bees worn on the body" attracted 87 pounds of bees.
The world's most expensive coffee ingredient is ... dung.
In ancient sacred texts, God had a wife, named Asherah, who was worshiped alongside the Almighty.
Ice cream can be made from any kind of milk, including breast milk. But a London parlor that tried it was ultimately shut down.
Humans, even though they look pretty hairless, still have the same density of hair follicles as a chimp or gorilla the same size.
Rats show altruism: Given the choice, test rats will often choose to help liberate a fellow rat rather than eat a treat.
The world's earliest known animals look like baseballs.
A newly discovered cockroach, called Leaproach, can jump 50 body lengths (we can only manage about two).
The venom of the box jellyfish is among the most powerful in the world. It has caused at least 5,567 human deaths since 1954.
Astronomers are tracking a cloud of gas that will get eaten by the black hole in the center of our galaxy 27,000 light-years away.
Asteroid Vesta is not an asteroid at all -- it's actually a baby planet.
Astronomers have spotted the debris of a "comet storm" deep inside Eta Corvi, a star system 50 light-years from Earth.
Some black holes are shrouded in the ground-up remains of dead planets, which become a thick, dusty ring.
More of Mars is habitable for life as we know it than on Earth, but all of it is deep underground.
The artificial sweetener xylitol is being used in a brand of cycling shoes to cool sweaty feet.
A new battery runs on shredded paper and produces water as a waste product.
The fastest video in the world can record a trillion frames per second, enough to show a beam of light moving between two points.
The world's smallest steam engine is just a few micrometers across and made from a tiny plastic bead floating in water.
Every year at the World Cell Race, scientists race biological cells in Petri dishes.
In virtual reality tests, an overwhelming number of people kill one person in order to save five.
The world's largest Tesla coils will be 10 stories high and generate 200-foot-long arcs of high-voltage electricity.
A new urinal lets men play a video game by steering and adjusting their "flow."
A new home lighting system runs on glowing bacteria that eat waste.
Monsoons in Nepal delay earthquakes.
The Dead Sea was a beach about 120,000 years ago.
The herbicide atrazine causes testes to lose sperm.
A tortoise that Charles Darwin collected died at age 176 in 2006.
Plants, grasshoppers, fish and fruit flies have all been levitated to test the effects of weightlessness.
As many as 400 million beavers once inhabited North America.
Reindeer can see ultraviolet wavelengths, which may help them view contrasts in their mostly white environment.
Pigeons can do math as well as primates.
The Common Poorwill is the only known bird species to hibernate. It hibernates for up to five months.
As Beethoven got more deaf, in his later compositions he chose lower-frequency notes that were easier for him to hear.
Climate change is linked to the collapse of the Mayans in Central America and the Khmer Empire in Southeast Asia 400 years later.
Critters living at hydrothermal vents between Chile and Antarctica are unlike any in the Atlantic or the Pacific Oceans.
Some Finland scuba divers don't wear ankle weights so they can walk upside down on ice-covered lakes.
Scotland's Loch Ness subtly tilts back and forth according to the movement of the ground beneath it.
Some conservationists say it's better for some eagles if wind farms are granted a license to kill them.
In an effort to combat illegal gambling in Greece, all electronic games, like online chess, have been banned.
In France, it's illegal for a pig to be named Napolean.
Smoking marijuana on a regular basis, even over many years, does not impair lung function.
A Brazilian plant has sticky underground leaves that trap tiny worms, letting the plant essentially "eat" them.
The world's smallest hard drive is made of just 96 atoms.
Dawn dish soap on Teflon rails is a new way to slide new bridges into place.
An iPad dropped from 100,000 feet survived intact in a special protective sleeve: The G-Form iPad Extreme Sleeve 2.
A wire just one atom tall and four atoms wide carries an electric charge as well as a conventional wire can.
Plastic wrap with a layer of blue cheese fungus is able to clean itself.
An event in time was made invisible by using a "time lens," which manipulates wavelengths of light.
Slime molds are better at creating an efficient network than the most advanced technology.
Every star in the Milky Way is thought to have at least one companion alien world.
If a spacewalking astronaut cries, tears don't run down; they pool around the eyeball, making it hard to see.
When inside a spacesuit during a spacewalk, astronauts cannot whistle.
Jay-Z and Beyonce are planning on recording a music video in space (courtesy of Virgin Galactic).
Our aging galaxy is "entering retirement" as older stars dominate the population.
The "template" for life can hop from planet to planet via dead organisms locked inside meteorites.
Moons that orbit distant exoplanets -- exomoons -- may one day be detectable.
If societies paid the communities who live closest to wilderness areas to be stewards, 331 million of the world's poorest could earn a dollar a day.
Corn fields that use insecticides clothianidin and thiamethoxam are contributing to the collapse of bee colonies.
The world's deepest known undersea hot springs are anchored in an enormous gash in the Caribbean seafloor some five kilometers beneath the waves.
Refrigerators don't make for good donations after an earthquake. Haiti received 10 freight containers filled with them following the quake in 2010 - all requiring a foreign voltage.
The male seahorse can get "pregnant" when a female deposits eggs in his pouch.
The average person accidentally eats 430 bugs each year of their life.
Butterflies taste with their hind feet, which allows them to tell whether a leaf is edible.
When asked once if he was afraid of anything, Thomas Edison replied "I am afraid of the dark." He died with all the lights burning in his New Jersey home.
Although Mozart is buried somewhere in Vienna's St. Marx cemetery, the exact location is unknown.
Harrison Ford has a spider named after him: The Calponia harrisonfordi.
The shortest war on record was fought between Zanzibar and England in 1896. Zanzibar surrendered after 38 minutes.
When you take one step, you are using up to 200 muscles.
It is impossible to hum if your nose is plugged.
Most of the dust underneath your bed is actually your own dead skin.
The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog." uses every letter of the alphabet.
The first independent nation to grant women the right to vote was Sweden. From 1718 to 1771, taxpaying, "professional" women were allowed to vote.
The word "fart" comes from the Old English "feortan" (meaning "to break wind").
The bark spider of Madagascar makes the largest orb web in the world, measuring 82 feet in diameter.
Walt Disney, the creator of Mickey Mouse, was afraid of mice.
The ancestor of all modern horses lived about 140,000 years ago.
The human female egg is big enough to be seen with the naked eye.
The human female egg is 30 times wider than a sperm.
An average ejaculation, about a teaspoon, can contain 150 million sperm
Only about 15 percent of a man's sperm is healthy enough to inseminate an egg.
Birds fly at windows because they assume they're attacking a competitor.
Pelicans can plunge into the water from as high as 65 feet.
House mice court their mates with ultrasonic songs.
137 million DVD players were sold from their introduction in 1997 to 2007. Apple's iPhone sold more than 146 million in 4 years.
In 1994, a 17-year-old Michigan Boy Scout built a nuclear reactor in his mother's shed using radium from old clocks.
The computer mouse was invented in 1967 and was called an "X-Y Position Indicator." It cost over $300.
Leonardo da Vinci conceptualized helicopters, parachutes, weapons of war and designer handbags.
Kermit, the Muppet was patented on September 15, 1969 and not as a frog.
A Saturn-like exoplanet has been discovered 420 light-years away.
The famous North Star (Polaris) appears to be shrinking.
A solar "superwave" is thought to have blasted away the majority of Mars' atmosphere.
Antarctica is a great place to find meteorites. The black space rock can be easily seen in the white snow.
The Japanese beer company Sapporo has brewed beer from barley grown on the space station.
Blue whales have gotten bigger and bigger, but they may soon peak in size.
The fur of the African crested rat is permeated with toxins harvested from trees.
Bird-like lungs and egg-laying helped dinosaurs grow to such huge sizes.
Some spiders use "remote copulation," where males castrate themselves, but still successfully transfer sperm.
A super-high-resolution microscope can peer inside a living brain and see a neuron in action.
Siri, the iPhone 4S's voice recognition computer, is female only in the U.S. and Australia.
A prototype railgun uses a magnet instead of explosives to fire a projectile at Mach 7.
A new self-guided bullet works similar to a missile, able to hit targets more than a mile away.
Scratch-n-sniff jeans that smell like raspberries have been created by Boutique jean company Naked and Famous Denim.
Rap music is used to power an implantable medical device. Just don't turn it off.
The world's first solar-powered ski lift opened in 2012 in Switzerland.
The world's first magnetic soap could be used to help clean up oil spills.
500 million years ago a creature that looked like a tulip had its anus where your nose is.
Juvenile clams, oysters, scallops and mussels can swim about 466 miles (750 km) from their birth sites.
A great white shark can produce as many pups in one litter as a manta ray might in a lifetime.
One of three exploding lakes in the world is Lake Kivu in Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Bahamas have the greatest concentration of blue holes in the world.
African lions have started to behave differently because of a deep fear of humans.
You can start a fire with ice by directing sunlight through the ice onto dry wood shavings.
In space, flames burn like blobs instead of teardrops.
There is no evidence that the Vikings had horns on their helmets.
As of Feb. 14, 2012, the world's smallest valentine is 5 nanometers across and made from gold atoms.
Military tech firm Chamtech has invented a way to spray thousands of nanocapacitors onto any surface, creating spray-on Wi-Fi.
A massive surge of adrenaline from deep grief can bring on a fatal heart attack.
In some China subway stations, people are employed to shove passengers into crowded trains.
A cockroach has been turned into a fuel cell by tapping into its own body chemistry for electricity.
The tiny songbird called the northern wheatear migrates 9,000 miles from the Arctic to Africa.
The Rapunzel Number is a mathematical formula that explains the physics of a ponytail.
Your chance of dying doubles every eight years, no matter how old you are.
More devices with the Mac-based iOS software were sold in 2011 (156 million) than all the Macs ever sold (122 million).
A typical asteroid, like Eros, contains $20 trillion in rare minerals.
1 out of 500 humans are born with extra fingers or toes.
A baby was born in California with 12 fingers and 12 toes, all perfectly functional.
The relatively small Halley's comet weighs as much as 665 Empire State Buildings.
The Medici Venus sculpture, now bare, once had red lipstick and golden hair.
Rhino horn is not ivory; the most important source of ivory is elephants.
The farthest a tornado has blown a person was about a mile, in Kickapoo, Kan. on May 1, 1930.
The first "test-tube" hamburger meat, made from cow stem cells, will be available in 2012 in Europe.
The oldest video of cats dates to 1894.
Memorial Hermann Medical Center in Houston now live-tweets open-heart surgery.
Underwater cameras are set to map Australia's Great Barrier Reef, like Google Street view.
An ATM in Los Angeles dispenses cupcakes.
A "speech jammer" causes people up to 90 feet away to stop talking. It's not for sale.
Condoms with QR codes can track where you have sex. They are for sale.
JP Morgan Chase's Palladium Card costs $1,000 to make and requires a $25 million deposit with the bank.
A violin in Japan has strings made from spider silk.
The fastest land-based robot is inspired by a cheetah and runs 18 miles per hour.
The biggest black holes shouldn't exist; there's not enough time in the Universe for them to gain so much mass.
Mercury's deepest craters probably contain water ice.
Ashton Kutcher will be Virgin Galactic's 500th space tourist.
Mars' atmosphere gets "blown" into space by the solar wind.
The next Mars rover "Curiosity" has a laser on board to zap rocks.
Astronauts who spend more than a month in space develop problems with their eyes..
The oldest planets known are nearly 13 billion years old and shouldn't exist.
Having high levels of testosterone can weaken a man's immune system.
Rhode Island and New York are tied for the least religious states.
Some heart transplant recipients start craving things the heart's previous owner liked.
Male bottlenose dolphins are sometimes bisexual, sometimes exclusively homosexual.
St. Patrick did not banish all the snakes from Ireland, contrary to popular legend.
Adolph Hitler most likely fathered a son with a French girl while stationed in France during WWI.
Just one person in a room adds 37 million bacteria to the air every hour.
The height of Mount Everest is disputed because of its snow cover.
The Marianas Trench in the western Pacific Ocean is nearly 7 Grand Canyons deep.
Flowers have a hard-wired response to warmth that's in their genes.
Corals are under threat from 22 kinds of emerging diseases. They also have herpes.
Venice is not only sinking again, it's also tilting eastward.
Superheated plasma tornadoes near the sun's surface hit speeds of up to 190,000 miles per hour.
“Two plus eleven equals thirteen” and “one plus twelve equals thirteen” contain all the same letters.
Aging male giraffes go black, not gray.
Female pandas are only "in the mood" for sex at the most three days each year.
Drivers in the U.S. are more prone to fatal car accidents on income tax deadline day.
Baboons can tell the difference between real English words and nonsensical ones.
As of 2012, more than 4 percent of the world's books have been digitized.
Less ice in the Arctic has made it possible to install three new cross-polar Internet cables.
A magnetic tattoo that vibrates when the owner's cellphone rings is under way.
An 800-pound paper airplane with a 45-foot wingspan was launched in March 2012 in Arizona.
An sea-faring robot recorded unusual noises from fish that turned out to be farts.
A new plastic coating behaves just like skin, turning red and "bleeding" when scratched.
A new lightweight super gel is lighter and stronger than Kevlar.
The odds of a ship hitting an iceberg are twice as remote as they were when the Titanic sank.
ATMs that scan customers' palms for identification are going into a bank in Japan.
A new LED light bulb lasts 20 years. It was designed by Dutch electronics company Philips.
Bullying is not just human; dolphins, seals, goats, chickens and other animals bully too.
Elephants learn to cooperate and problem solve when faced with puzzles and adversity.
People whose skin changes color with cheap jewelry will also be allergic to red tattoo ink.
An average daydream lasts about fourteen seconds and we have about two thousand of them per day.

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