Did you know?
5 September 2026
- 01
An octopus can taste what it touches, because each of its arms is covered in taste-sensing suckers.
- 02
The Dead Sea is about ten times saltier than the ocean, which makes it easy for people to float on its surface.
- 03
The human nose can tell apart thousands of different smells, even ones it has never encountered before.
- 04
Mars has two small moons, Phobos and Deimos, and Phobos is slowly spiraling closer to the planet every year.
- 05
A cheetah can accelerate from a standstill to 100 kilometers per hour in about three seconds, faster than most sports cars.
- 06
Contrary to popular belief, the Great Wall of China cannot actually be seen from space with the naked eye.
- 07
If all the blood vessels in an adult human body were laid end to end, they would stretch about 100,000 kilometers.
- 08
Butterflies taste with sensors on their feet, which lets them identify a plant simply by landing on its leaves.
- 09
Neptune has the fastest winds of any planet in the solar system, with gusts topping 2,000 kilometers per hour.
- 10
A platypus can detect the faint electric fields produced by its prey's muscles to find food underwater with its eyes shut.
- 11
Scientists think it may rain diamonds deep inside Uranus and Neptune, formed when methane is crushed under extreme pressure.
- 12
Gram for gram, human bone is stronger than steel, while being far lighter in weight.
- 13
The Milky Way galaxy is on a slow collision course with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, expected to merge in about four billion years.
- 14
A woodpecker's skull has a spongy layer of bone that cushions its brain from thousands of high-speed impacts every day.
- 15
Mantis shrimp have up to 16 types of color receptors in their eyes, far more than the three humans have.
- 16
Earth's solid inner core spins at a slightly different rate than the rest of the planet.
- 17
Uranus spins almost completely on its side, likely because of an enormous collision early in its history.
- 18
Elephants communicate over several kilometers using deep infrasound rumbles too low for human ears to hear.
- 19
Human DNA is roughly 98 percent similar to that of chimpanzees, our closest living relatives.
- 20
The world's oceans have an average depth of about 3,700 meters, deep enough to submerge most mountains.
- 21
An ostrich's eye is bigger than its entire brain.
- 22
Ice floats on water because it is less dense than its liquid form, an unusual property most substances do not share.
- 23
The ginkgo tree has changed very little in over 200 million years, earning it the nickname "living fossil".
- 24
Ferrofluids are liquids containing tiny magnetic particles that form spiky patterns when a magnet is held nearby.
- 25
Most of Earth's ozone layer sits in the stratosphere, between about 15 and 35 kilometers above the surface.
