Did you know?
12 September 2026
- 01
A day on Mercury, from sunrise to sunrise, lasts about 176 Earth days, longer than Mercury's own year of 88 Earth days.
- 02
Neptune takes about 165 Earth years to complete one full orbit around the Sun.
- 03
Saturn's rings are made mostly of water ice, in pieces ranging from tiny grains to chunks the size of a house.
- 04
A full NASA spacesuit costs more than 12 million dollars to build.
- 05
Footprints left on the Moon by Apollo astronauts could last for millions of years, since there is no wind or water there to erode them.
- 06
Glass is classified as an amorphous solid: its atoms are arranged loosely like a liquid's, but it behaves rigidly like a solid.
- 07
Diamond conducts heat about five times better than copper, even though it does not conduct electricity.
- 08
Liquid helium cooled near absolute zero becomes a superfluid and can flow with no friction at all.
- 09
A single bolt of lightning carries enough energy to toast about 100,000 slices of bread.
- 10
Sound cannot travel through a vacuum because it needs particles, such as air or water, to move through.
- 11
Antarctica is technically classified as a desert because it receives very little precipitation each year, despite being covered in ice.
- 12
Lightning strikes somewhere on Earth roughly 8 million times a day.
- 13
The Pacific Ocean is slowly shrinking by a few centimeters a year as the Atlantic Ocean widens.
- 14
Earth's core is almost as hot as the surface of the Sun, reaching temperatures of around 5,400 degrees Celsius.
- 15
The Mariana Trench, the deepest point in the ocean, is deeper than Mount Everest is tall.
- 16
The first computer 'bug' was literally a real moth found stuck inside a relay switch in 1947.
- 17
The QWERTY keyboard layout was designed in the 1870s, partly to reduce jamming in mechanical typewriters.
- 18
The first computer mouse, built in 1964, had a wooden shell.
- 19
The first text message was sent in 1992 and simply said 'Merry Christmas.'
- 20
Sea otters hold hands while sleeping so they do not drift apart in the water.
- 21
Flamingos are born grey; their feathers turn pink because of pigments in the shrimp and algae they eat.
- 22
Some jellyfish species can reverse their own aging process, making them biologically capable of living indefinitely.
- 23
Octopuses have taste receptors on their arms, letting them taste whatever they touch.
- 24
Koalas have fingerprints so similar to human fingerprints that they have reportedly confused crime-scene investigators.
- 25
Babies are born with about 300 bones, but adults have only 206 because many of them fuse together while growing.
- 26
The human heart beats about 100,000 times a day, pumping roughly 7,500 liters of blood.
- 27
The human nose can distinguish more than one trillion different scents.
- 28
Human skin fully replaces itself roughly every 27 days.
- 29
The masseter, the jaw muscle used for chewing, is the strongest muscle in the human body relative to its size.
