Did you know?

14 September 2026

01
Elephants are among the few animals that can recognize themselves in a mirror, a sign of self-awareness shared with humans, apes and dolphins.
02
Crows can remember individual human faces for years and will warn other crows about people they consider a threat.
03
Because the Moon has no wind or water, the footprints left by Apollo astronauts could remain visible for millions of years.
04
Saturn's largest moon, Titan, has lakes and rivers made of liquid methane and ethane instead of water.
05
Olympus Mons on Mars is the tallest known volcano in the Solar System, standing about three times as high as Mount Everest.
06
Astronomers have found a white dwarf star nicknamed "Lucy" that appears to have crystallised into a giant sphere resembling a diamond.
07
Diamond and the graphite in pencil lead are both made of pure carbon — the only difference is how the atoms are arranged.
08
A rainbow is actually a full circle of light, but observers on the ground usually only see the upper arc because the horizon blocks the rest.
09
Helium was first discovered in 1868 by studying the Sun's light spectrum, years before it was found on Earth.
10
Under certain conditions, hot water can freeze faster than cold water, a puzzling phenomenon known as the Mpemba effect.
11
Antarctica is technically the largest desert on Earth, because deserts are defined by low precipitation, not temperature.
12
The Dead Sea is so salty that swimmers float on its surface almost without effort.
13
The world's oceans hold about 97% of all the water on Earth, leaving only a small fraction as fresh water.
14
Mount Kilimanjaro sits near the equator, yet its summit stays capped with snow and ice for most of the year.
15
The Amazon River pushes so much fresh water into the Atlantic Ocean that the sea's salinity drops for over 100 miles from shore.
16
The first recorded computer "bug" was an actual moth, found trapped in a Harvard Mark II relay computer in 1947.
17
A modern smartphone has far more computing power than all the computers NASA used combined to land astronauts on the Moon in 1969.
18
The @ symbol predates email by centuries — merchants in Spain and Portugal once used it to mark a unit price in trade records.
19
The world's first webcam was built at Cambridge University in 1991 just to let researchers check a coffee pot without walking over.
20
The human heart beats about 100,000 times a day, pumping roughly 7,500 litres of blood through the body.
21
Babies are born with about 300 bones, but adults have only 206 because many of them fuse together during growth.
22
By weight, human bone is about as strong as steel, while being far lighter and more flexible.
23
The human body produces about 1 to 1.5 litres of saliva every day to help with digestion and protect teeth.
24
The mimic octopus can imitate the shape, color and movement of more than a dozen other sea creatures, including venomous ones, to avoid predators.
25
A narwhal's long spiral tusk is not a horn but an oversized tooth, packed with millions of nerve endings that help it sense its surroundings.
26
Penguins do have knees, but they stay hidden beneath their feathers and skin, folded close to the body.
27
Cows can form close friendships with specific herd mates and show signs of stress when separated from them.
28
Dust blown across the Atlantic from the Sahara Desert carries phosphorus that helps fertilise the nutrient-poor soil of the Amazon rainforest.
29
Glass frogs have translucent skin on their underside, through which their beating heart and other internal organs can be seen.
30
The average house cat spends about 70% of its life asleep, more than almost any other mammal.