Did you know?

1 September 2026

01
A year on Mercury lasts just 88 Earth days, but one full day-night cycle there takes 176 Earth days.
02
Some neutron stars spin more than 700 times every second.
03
The Milky Way galaxy is home to an estimated 100 billion to 400 billion stars.
04
The Andromeda galaxy is slowly moving toward the Milky Way and is expected to merge with it in about 4.5 billion years.
05
The Moon is tidally locked to Earth, so the same side always faces us; its far side was first photographed only in 1959.
06
Saturn's moon Titan is the only place besides Earth known to have stable liquid lakes and rivers on its surface, though they are filled with liquid methane rather than water.
07
Light travels at about 300,000 kilometers per second -- fast enough to circle the Earth almost 7.5 times in a single second.
08
Most natural diamonds formed between 1 billion and 3.3 billion years ago, deep in Earth's mantle under intense heat and pressure.
09
Certain materials lose all electrical resistance when cooled below a critical temperature, a phenomenon called superconductivity that was first observed in 1911.
10
Helium has the lowest boiling point of any element, turning into liquid at only about 4 degrees above absolute zero.
11
Axolotls can regrow entire limbs, parts of their heart, and even portions of their brain throughout their life.
12
The platypus can detect the tiny electric fields generated by its prey's muscles, using sensors built into its bill.
13
Arctic terns migrate from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back every year, a round trip of roughly 70,000 kilometers.
14
Coral reefs are built by tiny animals called polyps, not plants, and Australia's Great Barrier Reef is the largest structure ever built by living organisms.
15
An average human heart beats about 100,000 times a day, adding up to roughly 2.5 billion beats over a lifetime.
16
Babies are born with about 300 bones, but many fuse together while growing, leaving adults with 206.
17
The human brain is about 73% water, a similar proportion to the rest of the body.
18
Skin is the body's largest organ, covering about 2 square meters and making up roughly 15% of total body weight.
19
Earth's magnetic poles have flipped hundreds of times over the planet's history, though not on any fixed schedule.
20
More than 80% of Earth's oceans remain unmapped and unexplored.
21
Dust blown from the Sahara Desert travels across the Atlantic Ocean and helps fertilize the soil of the Amazon rainforest.
22
The deepest known point in the ocean, the Mariana Trench's Challenger Deep, lies about 11 kilometers below the surface.
23
Nearly all the gold ever mined throughout human history is still in use today, because gold can be melted down and reused indefinitely.
24
Water can exist as solid, liquid and gas at the same time, at one specific temperature and pressure called its triple point.
25
The term 'computer bug' traces back to 1947, when engineers found an actual moth stuck inside the Harvard Mark II computer's relay.
26
Glass is an amorphous solid -- its atoms lack the orderly, repeating structure of a true crystal, even though it behaves rigidly like one.
27
Penicillin, the first widely used antibiotic, was discovered in 1928 when Alexander Fleming noticed mould killing bacteria in a lab dish he had left uncovered.