Did you know?

10 September 2026

01
The tallest known living tree, a coast redwood in California, stands about 116 meters tall — taller than a 35-story building.
02
A cheetah can accelerate from a standstill to 100 kilometers per hour in about 3 seconds, faster than most sports cars.
03
A three-toed sloth can take up to a month to fully digest a single meal, one of the slowest digestion rates of any mammal.
04
The human genome contains an estimated 20,000 protein-coding genes, far fewer than scientists once expected.
05
A Venus flytrap only snaps shut after its trigger hairs are touched at least twice within about 20 seconds, a mechanism that helps it avoid wasting energy on false alarms.
06
Light travels at about 300,000 kilometers per second, fast enough to circle Earth nearly seven and a half times in a single second.
07
Astronomers estimate that the Milky Way galaxy contains around 100 billion stars.
08
The core of the Sun reaches temperatures of about 15 million degrees Celsius, compared with roughly 5,500 degrees Celsius at its visible surface.
09
The Andromeda Galaxy is on a collision course with the Milky Way, but the two are not expected to merge for about 4 billion years.
10
Absolute zero, the coldest temperature theoretically possible, is -273.15 degrees Celsius, the point at which atomic motion would essentially stop.
11
A rainbow is actually a full circle of light; people on the ground only see the upper arc because the horizon blocks the rest.
12
The static shock you feel touching a doorknob can exceed 20,000 volts, though the current is far too low to cause harm.
13
GPS satellites run on clocks that tick slightly faster than clocks on Earth due to weaker gravity in orbit, so their time is adjusted by about 38 microseconds every day to stay accurate.
14
NASA's Parker Solar Probe is the fastest human-made object ever built, reaching speeds of about 690,000 kilometers per hour as it swings close to the Sun.
15
Most natural diamonds formed 150 to 200 kilometers below Earth's surface, under immense heat and pressure, before volcanic eruptions carried them upward.
16
Winds carry dust from the Sahara Desert across the Atlantic Ocean, depositing an estimated 27 million tons of it over the Amazon rainforest every year.
17
Antarctica is technically the world's largest desert, receiving less annual precipitation than the Sahara Desert.
18
Earth's magnetic north and south poles have completely swapped places many times in the planet's history, most recently about 780,000 years ago.
19
A vacuum flask keeps drinks hot or cold using a vacuum layer between its two walls, because a vacuum cannot conduct heat the way air or metal does.
20
The Dead Sea is roughly ten times saltier than the ocean, which is why swimmers float on its surface with ease.
21
A standard compact disc, introduced in 1982, can hold about 700 megabytes of data.
22
About 95 percent of international internet traffic travels through fiber-optic cables laid along the ocean floor.
23
A modern smartphone has far more computing power than the room-sized guidance computers NASA used to send astronauts to the Moon in 1969.
24
Some quantum computers must be cooled to temperatures colder than outer space, within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero, to keep their qubits stable.
25
The first email was sent in 1971 by engineer Ray Tomlinson, who also chose the '@' symbol to separate the username from the computer's address.
26
An average human heart beats about 100,000 times a day and roughly 2.5 billion times over a 70-year lifetime.
27
The human body sheds about 500 million skin cells every day, replacing its entire outer skin layer roughly once a month.
28
The human brain makes up about 2 percent of body weight but uses roughly 20 percent of the body's total energy.
29
A human sneeze can expel droplets at speeds of up to 160 kilometers per hour.
30
Human taste buds are replaced roughly every one to two weeks, which is why a burned tongue regains its sense of taste fairly quickly.