Did you know?

29 August 2026

1. 01

   The adult human body is made up of an estimated 37 trillion cells, each carrying out its own tiny share of the work of staying alive.

2. 02

   Water is one of the few substances that expands when it freezes, growing about 9% in volume — which is why ice floats instead of sinking.

3. 03

   A day on Mercury — the time it takes to spin once on its axis — lasts about 176 Earth days, longer than its own year of 88 Earth days.

4. 04

   The human brain makes up only about 2% of body weight but uses roughly 20% of the body's total energy.

5. 05

   Sound needs a medium such as air or water to travel through — in the vacuum of space, where there are no particles to carry vibrations, sound cannot travel at all.

6. 06

   Saturn's largest moon, Titan, has rivers, lakes and seas of liquid methane and ethane on its surface — the only place besides Earth known to have stable liquid on its surface.

7. 07

   The observable universe is estimated to be about 93 billion light-years across, even though it is only around 13.8 billion years old — space itself has been expanding the whole time.

8. 08

   The human nose can distinguish over 1 trillion different scents, according to research that overturned a much lower estimate scientists had long assumed.

9. 09

   Mount Kilimanjaro lies almost on the equator in Tanzania, yet its summit still carries glaciers, because the peak rises high enough for the air there to stay below freezing.

10. 10

    The platypus is one of the very few mammals that lay eggs instead of giving birth to live young, and it feeds its babies milk that oozes from patches of skin, since it has no nipples.

11. 11

    The Sun's core reaches a temperature of about 15 million degrees Celsius, hot enough to fuse hydrogen into helium and power every bit of sunlight Earth receives.

12. 12

    Earth's solid inner core is estimated to be nearly as hot as the surface of the Sun, at around 5,200 degrees Celsius.

13. 13

    The largest known living organism by area is a single honey fungus growing underground in Oregon, USA — its threadlike network is estimated to spread across several square kilometres of forest.

14. 14

    A day on Jupiter — one full spin on its axis — takes only about 10 hours, making it the fastest-spinning planet in the solar system.

15. 15

    Australia's Great Barrier Reef is the largest structure on Earth built by living organisms, stretching over 2,300 kilometres — long enough that it can be seen from space.

16. 16

    A newborn baby has about 300 bones, many of which fuse together as it grows, leaving an adult with only 206.

17. 17

    Honeybees can learn to recognise individual human faces, remembering and telling them apart using the same feature-by-feature strategy people use.

18. 18

    Gold is so malleable that a single gram can be hammered into a sheet of about 1 square metre, thin enough to be almost see-through.

19. 19

    Total solar eclipses are possible because of a coincidence: the Sun is about 400 times wider than the Moon, but also about 400 times farther away, so the two appear almost exactly the same size in the sky.

20. 20

    Human stomach acid is strong enough to have a pH of around 1.5 to 3.5 — acidic enough to dissolve metals like zinc, though the stomach's mucus lining keeps it from digesting itself.

21. 21

    Certain species of bamboo are the fastest-growing plants on Earth, capable of growing up to about 91 centimetres — nearly a metre — in a single day.

22. 22

    In 1947, engineers working on the Harvard Mark II computer found a real moth trapped in one of its relays, causing a malfunction — the incident is why computer glitches are still called 'bugs' today.

23. 23

    Static electricity built up just by walking across a carpet can reach 20,000 volts or more, yet it causes only a harmless shock because so little electric charge and current are actually involved.

24. 24

    Humans blink about 15 to 20 times a minute — far more often than needed just to keep the eyes moist. Scientists think blinking also gives the brain brief mental breaks.

25. 25

    Koalas are one of the very few animals besides primates to have fingerprints. Theirs are so similar to human fingerprints that they have occasionally confused crime-scene analysis.

26. 26

    The human body emits a faint visible glow of light, produced by biochemical reactions in cells. It is real light, just far too dim for human eyes to detect without special cameras.

27. 27

    Uranus rotates almost completely on its side, with its axis tilted about 98 degrees — likely the result of an ancient collision. Its poles, not its equator, face the Sun for part of each orbit.

28. 28

    Earth's magnetic field is generated deep inside the planet, by the churning motion of molten iron in the liquid outer core. Scientists call this process the geodynamo.

29. 29

    More than 80% of Earth's oceans remain unmapped and unexplored in detail, even though oceans cover about 70% of the planet's surface.