Weird Science
1. Every year about 98% of atoms in your body are replaced.
2. At a glance, the Celsius scale makes more sense than the Fahrenheit scale for temperature measuring. But its creator, Anders Celsius, was an oddball scientist. When he first developed his scale, he made freezing 100 degrees and boiling 0 degrees, or upside down. No one dared point this out to him, so fellow scientists waited until Celsius died to change the scale.
3. In Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift described the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos. He did this more than 100 years before either moon was discovered.
4. In the Durango desert, in Mexico, there's a creepy spot called the "Zone of Silence." You can't pick up clear TV or radio signals. And locals say fireballs sometimes appear in the sky.
5. Ethernet is a registered trademark of Xerox, Unix is a registered trademark of AT&T.
6. Bill Gates' first business was Traff-O-Data, a company that created machines which recorded the number of cars passing a given point on a road.
7. Uranus' orbital axis is tilted at 82 degrees.
8. There is enough salt in the world’s oceans to cover all the land on all the continents to a depth of nearly 500 feet!
9. The final resting-place for Dr. Eugene Shoemaker - the Moon. The famed U.S. Geological Survey astronomer, trained the Apollo astronauts about craters, but never made it into space. Mr. Shoemaker had wanted to be an astronaut but was rejected because of a medical problem. His ashes were placed on board the Lunar Prospector spacecraft before it was launched on January 6, 1998. NASA crashed the probe into a crater on the moon in an attempt to learn if there is water on the moon.
10. Outside the USA, Ireland is the largest software producing country in the world.
11. The first fossilized specimen of Australopithecus afarenisis was named Lucy after the paleontologists' favorite song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," by the Beatles.
12. Figlet, an ASCII font converter program, stands for Frank, Ian and Glenn's LETters.
13. Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.
14. Plutonium - first weighed on August 20th, 1942, by University of Chicago scientists Glenn Seaborg and his colleagues - was the first man-made element.
15. The radioactive substance, Americanium - 241 is used in many smoke detectors.
16. The original IBM-PCs, that had hard drives, referred to the hard drives as Winchester drives. This is due to the fact that the original Winchester drive had a model number of 3030. This is, of course, a Winchester firearm.
17. The octopus has three hearts! The most poisonous octopus is the blue-ringed octopus pictured here, it has venom that can kill an adult human in minutes and there is no known antidote.Bule ringed Octopus
18. Sound travels 15 times faster through steel than through the air.
19. On average, half of all false teeth have some form of radioactivity, more then normal background radiation.
20. Only one satellite has been ever been destroyed by a meteor: the European Space Agency's Olympus in 1993.
21. Starch is used as a binder in the production of paper. It is the use of a starch coating that controls ink penetration when printing. Cheaper papers do not use as much starch, and this is why your elbows get black when you are leaning over your morning paper.
22. Sterling silver is not pure silver. Because pure silver is too soft to be used in most tableware it is mixed with copper in the proportion of 92.5 percent silver to 7.5 percent copper.
23. A ball of glass will bounce higher than a ball of rubber. A ball of solid steel will bounce higher than one made entirely of glass.
24. A chip of silicon a quarter-inch square has the capacity of the original 1949 ENIAC computer, which occupied a city block.
25. An ordinary TNT bomb involves atomic reaction, and could be called an atomic bomb. What we call an A-bomb involves nuclear reactions and should be called a nuclear bomb.
26. At a jet plane's speed of 1,000 km (620mi) per hour, the length of the plane becomes one atom shorter than its original length. This is do to the Lorentz contraction.
27. The first full moon to occur on the winter solstice, Dec. 22, commonly called the first day of winter, happened in 1999. Since a full moon on the winter solstice occurred in conjunction with a lunar perigee (point in the moon's orbit that is closest to Earth), the moon appeared about 14% larger than it does at apogee (the point in it's elliptical orbit that is farthest from the Earth). Since the Earth is also several million miles closer to the sun at that time of the year than in the summer, sunlight striking the moon was about 7% stronger making it brighter. Also, this was the closest perigee of the Moon of the year since the moon's orbit is constantly deforming. In places where the weather was clear and there was a snow cover, even car headlights were superfluous.
28. According to security equipment specialists, security systems that utilize motion detectors won't function properly if walls and floors are too hot. When an infrared beam is used in a motion detector, it will pick up a person's body temperature of 98.6 degrees compared to the cooler walls and floor. If the room is too hot, the motion detector won't register a change in the radiated heat of that person's body when it enters the room and breaks the infrared beam. Your home's safety might be compromised if you turn your air conditioning off or set the thermostat too high while on summer vacation.
29. A Tigers stripes are actually skin deep, a hairless Tiger would still have his stripes. No two Tigers have the same strips, each individual cat’s markings are unique.Tiger
30. Western Electric successfully brought sound to motion pictures and introduced systems of mobile communications which culminated in the cellular telephone.
31. On December 23, 1947, Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., held a secret demonstration of the transistor which marked the foundation of modern electronics.
32. The wick of a trick candle has small amounts of magnesium in them. When you light the candle, you are also lighting the magnesium. When someone tries to blow out the flame, the magnesium inside the wick continues to burn and, in just a split second (or two or three), relights the wick.
33. Time slows down near a black hole; inside it stops completely.
34. Tiny dust particles surround a comet. They are swept into a long tail by the solar wind, which consists of subatomic particles speeding from the sum at speed of hundred of miles per second.
35. To an observer standing on Pluto, the sun would appear no brighter than Venus appears in our evening sky.
36. Traveling at the speed of 186,000 miles per second, light take 6 hours to travel from Pluto to the earth.
37. A brown dwarf is a very small, dark object, with a mass less than 1/10 that of the Sun. They are 'failed stars', globules of gas that have shrunk under gravity, but failed to ignite and shine as stars.
38. A bucket filled with earth would weigh about 5 time more than the same bucket filled with the substance of the sun. However, the force of gravity is so much greater on the sun that the man weighing 150 pounds on our planet would weigh 2 tons on the sun.
39. A car traveling at a constant speed of 60 miles per hour would take over 48 million years to reach the nearest star (other than our sun), Proxima Centauri. This is about 685,000 average human lifetimes.
40. A cosmic year is the amount of time it takes the sun to revolve around the center of the Milky Way, about 225 million years.
41. A day on the planet Mercury is twice as long as its year. Mercury rotates very slowly but revolves around the sun in slightly less than 88 days.
42. A dog was killed by a meteor at Nakhla, Egypt, in 1911. The unlucky canine is the only creature known to have been killed by a meteor.
43. You know the three physical dimensions, and the fourth dimension, time. For years, people have speculated about other dimensions. Experts in theoretical physics now say the major theories about the universe make sense together - and all the math seems to work - if there are 10 dimensions.
44. A scientist at Michigan State University has calculated that the production of a single hen egg requires about 120 gallons of water, a loaf of bread requires 300 gallons, and a pound of beef, 3,500.
45. Portland cement is used for underwater work. It hardens because of a chemical reaction it has with the water, not because the water mixed with it evaporates. The amount of water that reacts with the cement is crucial for this process, and the physical structure of this cement enables it to control exactly how much water gets into the reaction. So it doesn't matter at all how much water surrounds the cement as long as it has enough to set.
46. There are more insects in just one square mile of fertile soil than there are human beings on the entire planet!
47. The human body contains 20 times more microbes than it does cells. In fact, a visitor from outer space might think the human race is just one big chain of microbe hotels. Read More
48. Dating back to the 1600's, thermometers were filled with Brandy instead of mercury.
49. The first "technology" corporation to move into California's Silicon Valley was Hewlett-Packard, in 1938. Stanford University engineers Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started their company in a Palo Alto garage, with $1,538. Their first product was an audio oscillator bought by Walt Disney Studios for use in making Fantasia.
50. The first U.S. census to be tallied by computer was in 1950. UNIVAC did the tallying.
51. Rain contains vitamin B12.
52. ENIAC, the first electronic computer, appeared 50 years ago. The original ENIAC was about 80 feet long, weighed 30 tons, had 17,000 tubes. By comparison, a desktop computer today can store a million times more information than an ENIAC, and 50,000 times faster.
53. From bridges to rebar, rust is everywhere. According to a recent study, the annual cost of metallic corrosion in the U.S. is approximately $300 billion. The report, by Battelle, Columbus, Ohio, and the Specialty Steel Industry of North America, Washington, D.C., estimated that about one-third of that cost could be avoided through broader application of corrosion-resistant material and "best anti-corrosive practice" from design through maintenance.
54. From the smallest microprocessor to the biggest mainframe, the average American depends on over 264 computers per day.
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