A lump of pure gold the size of a matchbox can be flattened into a sheet the size of a tennis court.
Absolutely pure gold is so soft that it can be molded with the hands.
An ounce of gold can be stretched into a wire 50 miles long.
Diamond is the hardest naturally occurring substance, and is also one of the most valuable natural substances. Diamonds are crystals formed almost entirely of carbon. Because of its hardness, the diamond is the most enduring of all gemstones. They are among the most costly jewels in the world, partly because they are rare, Only four important diamond fields have been found - in Africa, South America, India, and the Soviet Union.
In 1957, the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania, the first nuclear facility to generate electricity in the United States, went on line. (It was taken out of service in 1982.)
In 1982, in the first operation of its kind, doctors at the University of Utah Medical Center implanted a permanent artificial heart in the chest of retired dentist Dr. Barney Clark, who lived 112 days with the device.
Mercury is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature.
Mineral deposits in caves: The ones growing upward are stalagmites, the ones growing downward are stalactites.
Natural gas has no odor. The smell is added artificially so that leaks can be detected.
Prussic acid, in a crystalline powder called Zyklon B, was used to kill in Germany's gas chambers. The gas would paralyze the victim's lungs, causing them to suffocate.
Sea water, loaded with mineral salts, weighs about a pound and a half more per cubit foot than fresh water at the same temperature.
Ten per cent of the salt mined in the world each year is used to de-ice the roads in America.
The air we breathe is 78% nitrogen, 21.5% oxygen, .5% argon and other gases.
The Chinese were using aluminum to make things as early as 300 AD Western civilization didn't rediscover aluminum until 1827.
The Cullinan Diamond is the largest gem-quality diamond ever discovered. Found in 1905, the original 3,100 carats were cut to make jewels for the British Crown Jewels and the British Royal family's collection.
The most abundant metal in the Earth's crust is aluminum.
The only rock that floats in water is pumice.
Fortnight" is a contraction of "fourteen nights." In the US "two weeks" is more commonly used.
A bathometer is an instrument for indicating the depth of the sea beneath a moving vessel.
A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
A Sphygmomanometer measures blood pressure.
A typical lightning bolt is two to four inches wide and two miles long.
A wind with a speed of 74 miles or more is designated a hurricane.
Any month that starts on a Sunday will have a Friday the 13th in it.
At 4,145 miles, the Nile River is the longest in the world.
Each unit on the Richter Scale is equivalent to a power factor of about 32. So a 6 is 32 times more powerful than a 5!
Easter is the first Sunday after the first Full Moon after March 21.
England and the American colonies adopted the Gregorian calendar on September 14th, 1752. 11 days disappeared.
Flying from London to New York by Concord, due to the time zones crossed, you can arrive 2 hours before you leave.
If the sun stopped shining suddenly, it would take eight minutes for people on earth to be aware of the fact.
If you add up the numbers 1-100 consecutively (1+2+3+4+5 etc) the total is 5050.
In 1947, heavy snow blanketed the Northeast, burying New York City under 25.8 inches of snow in 16 hours; the severe weather was blamed for some 80 deaths.
Light travels at the rate of 186,200 miles a second.
More than 99.9% of all the animal species that have ever lived on earth were extinct before the coming of man.
Nearly 50% of all bank robberies take place on Friday.
Ten inches of snow equals one inch of rain in water content.
The anemometer is an instrument which measures the force, velocity, or pressure of the wind.
The base of the Great Pyramid of Egypt is large enough to cover 10 football fields.
The greatest snowfall ever in a single storm was 189 inches at the Mount Shasta Ski Bowl in February, 1959.
The Gregorian calendar was introduced by Pope Gregory in 1582 AD, and was adopted by Great Britain and the English colonies in 1752.
The highest point of the earth, with an elevation of 29,141 feet, is the top of Mt. Everest in Tibet.
The highest temperature ever recorded in the continental US was 134 degrees on July 10, 1913 in Death Valley, California.
The highest temperature ever recorded in the world was 136.4 degrees Fahrenheit at El Azizia, Lybia, on September 13, 1922.
The highest waterfall in the world, Angel Falls in Venezuela, has a total drop of 3,121 feet.
The linen bandages that were used to wrap Egyptian mummies averaged 1,000 yards in length.
The lowest temperature ever recorded in the world was 129 degrees below 0 at Vostok, Antarctica, on July 21, 1983.
The metal instrument used in shoe stores to measure feet is called the Brannock device.
The monastic hours are matins, lauds, prime, tierce, sext, nones, vespers and compline.
The most snow accumulation in a one-day period was 75.8 inches at Silver Lake, Colorado, in April 1921.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced in 1978 that it would alternate men's and women's names in the naming of hurricanes. It was seen as an attempt at fair play. Hurricanes had been named for women for years, until NOAA succumbed to pressure from women's groups who were demanding that Atlantic storms be given unisex names.
The world's first speed limit regulation was in England in 1903. It was 20 mph.
The wristwatch was invented in 1904 by Louis Cartier.
There are 31,557,600 seconds in a year.
Though it goes to 10, 9 is estimated to be the point of total tectonic destruction from an earthquake (2 is the smallest that can be felt unaided.)
A cough releases an explosive charge of air that moves at speeds up to 60 mph.
A fetus acquires fingerprints at the age of three months.
A fingernail or toenail takes about 6 months to grow from base to tip.
A human being loses an average of 40 to 100 strands of hair a day.
A person will die from total lack of sleep sooner than from starvation. Death will occur about 10 days without sleep, while starvation takes a few weeks.
A sneeze can exceed the speed of 100 mph.
According to German researchers, the risk of heart attack is higher on Monday than any other day of the week.
According to the Kinsey Institute, the biggest erect penis on record measures 13 inches. The smallest tops off at 1 3/4 inches.
After spending hours working at a computer display, look at a blank piece of white paper. It will probably appear pink.
An average human drinks about 16, 000 gallons of water in a lifetime.
An average human scalp has 100,000 hairs.
An average person uses the bathroom 6 times per day.
Babies are born with 300 bones, but by adulthood we have only 206 in our bodies.
Beards are the fastest growing hairs on the human body. If the average man never trimmed his beard, it would grow to nearly 30 feet long in his lifetime.
Blondes have more hair than dark-haired people.
By age sixty, most people have lost half of their taste buds.
By the time you turn 70, your heart will have beat some two-and-a-half billion times (figuring on an average of 70 beats per minute.)
Each square inch of human skin consists of twenty feet of blood vessels.
Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.
Every person has a unique tongue print.
Every square inch of the human body has an average of 32 million bacteria on it.
Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.
Fingernails grow faster than toenails.
Fingerprints serve a function - they provide traction for the fingers to grasp things.
Humans shed about 600,000 particles of skin every hour - about 1.5 pounds a year. By 70 years of age, an average person will have lost 105 pounds of skin.
Humans shed and regrow outer skin cells about every 27 days - almost 1,000 new skins in a lifetime.
If it were removed from the body, the small intestine would stretch to a length of 22 feet.
If you are locked in a completely sealed room, you will die of carbon dioxide poisoning first before you will die of oxygen deprivation.
If you go blind in one eye, you'll only lose about one-fifth of your vision (but all your depth perception.)
In a lifetime the average US resident eats more than 50 tons of food and drinks more than 13,000 gallons of liquid.
In the late 19th century, millions of human mummies were used as fuel for locomotives in Egypt where wood and coal was scarce, but mummies were plentiful.
It takes 17 muscles to smile --- 43 to frown.
Jaw muscles can provide about 200 pounds of force to bring the back teeth together for chewing.
Lab tests can detect traces of alcohol in urine six to 12 hours after a person has stopped drinking.
Laughing lowers levels of stress hormones and strengthens the immune system. Six-year-olds laugh an average of 300 times a day. Adults only laugh 15 to 100 times a day.
Most men have erections every hour to hour and a half during sleep.
The ashes of the average cremated person weigh nine pounds.
The average duration of sexual intercourse for humans is 2 minutes.
The average human body contains enough: iron to make a 3 inch nail, sulfur to kill all fleas on an average dog, carbon to make 900 pencils, potassium to fire a toy cannon, fat to make 7 bars of soap, phosphorous to make 2,200 match heads, and water to fill a ten-gallon tank.
The average human produces 25,000 quarts of spit in a lifetime, enough to fill two swimming pools.
The average person releases nearly a pint of intestinal gas by flatulence every day. Most is due to swallowed air. The rest is from fermentation of undigested food.
The body's largest internal organ is the small intestine at an average length of 20 feet
The feet account for one quarter of all the human bodies bones.
The human body has enough fat to produce 7 bars of soap.
The human body has over 600 muscles, 40% of the body's weight.
The human brain is about 85% water.
The largest cell in the human body is the female ovum, or egg cell. It is about 1/180 inch in diameter. The smallest cell in the human body is the male sperm. It takes about 175,000 sperm cells to weigh as much as a single egg cell.
The largest cell in the human body is the female reproductive cell, the ovum. The smallest is the male sperm.
The largest human organ is the skin, with a surface area of about 25 square feet.
The left lung is smaller than the right lung to make room for the heart.
The little lump of flesh just forward of your ear canal, right next to your temple, is called a tragus.
The longest muscle in the human body is the sartorius. This narrow muscle of the thigh passes obliquely across the front of the thigh and helps rotate the leg to the position assumed in sitting cross-legged. Its name is a derivation of the adjective "sartorial," a reference to what was the traditional cross-legged position of tailors (or "sartors") at work.
The most common blood type in the world is Type O. The rarest, Type A-H, has been found in less than a dozen people since the type was discovered.
The Neanderthal's brain was bigger than yours is.
The only bone in the human body not connected to another is the hyoid, a V-shaped bone located at the base of the tongue between the mandible and the voice box. Its function is to support the tongue and its muscles.
The permanent teeth that erupt to replace their primary predecessors (baby teeth) are called succedaneous teeth.
The sound of a snore (up to 69 decibels) can be almost as loud as the noise of a pneumatic drill.
The tips of fingers and the soles of feet are covered by a thick, tough layer of skin called the stratum corneum.
There are 45 miles of nerves in the skin of a human being.
Three-hundred-million cells die in the human body every minute.
Women burn fat more slowly than men, by a rate of about 50 calories a day.
Women's hearts beat faster than men's.
A hamlet is a village without a church and a town is not a city until it has a cathedral.
About one-tenth of the earth's surface is permanently covered with ice.
According to National Geographic, Mt. Everest grows about 4 millimeters a year: the two tectonic plates of Asia and India, which collided millions of years ago to form the Himalayas, continue to press against each other, causing the Himalyan peaks to grow slightly each year
Alaska, with 8, is the US state with the most national park sites.
All gondolas in Venice, Italy must be painted black, unless they belong to a high official.
As of Dec. 31, 2000, the number of climbers summiting Mt. Everest reached 1314, and the number of deaths on the mountain reached 167.
At 840,000 square miles, Greenland is the largest island in the world. It is three times the size of Texas. By comparison, Iceland is only 39,800 square miles.
Australia is the only country that is also a continent.
Canada is an Indian word meaning 'Big Village'.
Damascus, Syria, was flourishing a couple of thousand years before Rome was founded in 753 BC, making it the oldest continuously inhabited city in existence.
Devon is the only county in Great Britain to have two coasts.
Disney World in Orlando, Florida covers 30,500 acres (46 square miles), making it twice the size of the island of Manhattan, New York.
Dueling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors.
French was the official language of England for over 600 years.
Grand Rapids, Michigan was the first city in the US to put fluoride in their water.
Hawaii is the only US state that grows coffee.
Hawaii officially became apart of the US on June 14, 1900.
If Monaco's ruling house of Grimaldi should ever be without an heir (male or female), the country will cease to be a sovereign state.
In 1771 the kingdom of Poland was larger in are than any other European country except Russia and had a bigger population than any other European country except France.
In the Great Seal of the US the eagle grasps 13 arrows and an olive branch.
It is forbidden for aircraft to fly over the Taj Mahal.
Japan is the world's leading importer of iron ore.
La Paz, Bolivia, at 11,900 feet above sea-level, is the highest large city in the world.
Lake Pontchartrain Causeway at New Orleans, Louisiana, is the world's largest bridge. It is almost 24 miles (about 38 kilometers) long.
Maine is the only state in the United States whose name has one syllable.
Mexico City is sinking at a rate of 6 to 8 inches a year because it's built on top of an underground reservoir. Wells are drawing out more and more water for the city's growing population of more than 15 million people.
Mexico City is the oldest capital city in the Americas.
More water flows over Niagara Falls every year than over any other falls on earth.
Most landfilled trash retains its original weight, volume, and form for 40 years.
New Jersey, with 96, is the US state with the greatest number of hazardous waste sites.
Quito in Ecuador, South America, is said to have the most pleasant climate in the world. It is called the 'Land of Eternal Spring.' The temperature rarely drops below 46 degrees Fahrenheit during the night, or exceed 72 degrees Fahrenheit during the day.
St. Augustine, Florida is the oldest city in the US.
Talking on a cellular phone while driving is against the law in Israel.
The 1st US zoo was built in Philadelphia, PA, in 1876.
The abbreviation 'ORD' for Chicago's O'Hare airport comes from the old name 'Orchard Field.'
The Arctic ocean is the smallest and shallowest. The Arctic Ocean is the world's smallest ocean. It is mostly covered by solid ice, ice floes, and icebergs
The Atlantic Ocean is saltier than the Pacific Ocean.
The border between Canada and the U.S. is the world's longest frontier. It stretches 3,987 miles (6,416 km).
The city of St. Petersburg, Russia, was founded in 1703 by Peter the Great, hence the name, St. Petersburg. But it wasn't always that simple. In 1914, at the beginning of World War I, Russian leaders felt that Petersburg was too German-sounding. So they changed the name of the city to Petrograd -- to make it more Russian-sounding. Then, in 1924, the country's Soviet Communist leaders wanted to honor the founder of the Soviet Union, Vladimir I. Lenin. The city of Petrograd became Leningrad and was known as Leningrad until 1991 when the new Russian legislators -- no longer Soviet Communists -- wanted the city to reflect their change of government.
The Eiffel Tower was built for the 1889 World's Fair.
The first city to reach a population of 1 million people was Rome, Italy in 133 B.C. London, England reached the mark in 1810 and New York, USA made it in 1875. Today, there are over 300 cities in the world that boast a population in excess of 1 million.
The flag of the Philippines is the only national flag that is flown differently during times of peace or war. A portion of the flag is blue, while the other is red. The blue portion is flown on top in time of peace and the red portion is flown in war time.
The Fresh Kills Landfill site on Staten Island, New York, opened in 1948, is the world's largest. It covers 3,000 acres and receives up to 14,000 tons of garbage a day. It is scheduled to reach capacity and close by the year 2002.
The Great Lakes are Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Lake Superior, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario.
The Great Lakes are the most important inland waterway in North America. All the lakes, except Lake Michigan, which lies entirely in the United States, are shared by the United States and Canada and form part of the border between these countries.
The Great Lakes contain 6 quadrillion gallons of fresh water, one-fifth of the world's fresh surface water. The Great Lakes are the largest group of freshwater lakes in the world.
The Great Lakes have a combined area of 94,230 square miles - larger than the states of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Vermont combined.
The Hollywood sign was first erected in 1923. Conceived as a real estate ad, it originally read Hollywoodland. The sign stands 50 feet tall, stretches 450 feet across, weighs 450,000 pounds.
The international telephone dialing code for Antarctica is 672.
The Jordanian city Amman was once called Philadelphia.
The largest body of fresh water in the world is Lake Superior.
The largest US city in area is Juneau, Alaska, which covers 3,108 square miles. Los Angeles covers only 458.2 square miles.
The Ohio river forms at the confluence of the Allegheny and the Monongahela.
The only continent without reptiles or snakes is Antarctica.
The original name of Los Angeles was El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles del rio Porciuncula, translating into:The Village of our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the Porciuncula River.
The Pantheon is the largest building from ancient Rome that survives intact.
The river Danube empties into the Black Sea.
The San Diego Zoo in California has the largest collection of animals in the world.
The seven hills of Rome are the Palatine (on which the original city was built), the Capitoline, Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, Caelian, and Aventine.
The smallest island with country status is Pitcairn in Polynesia, at just 1.75 square miles.
The tallest monument built in the US, the Gateway Arch, in St. Louis, Missouri, is 630 feet tall.
The US city with the highest murder rate is Detroit, with 45.3 homicides per 100,000 people.
The Vatican's Swiss Guard still wears a uniform designed by Michelangelo in the early 16th century.
The water in the Great Salt Lake of Utah is more than four times as salty as any ocean.
The wettest spot in the world is located on the island of Kauai. Mt. Waialeale consistently records rainfall at the rate of nearly 500 inches per year.
The world's smallest independent state is the Vatican City, with a population of about 1,000 - and a zero birthrate.
The world's longest railway is in Peru. The Central Railway climbs to 15,694 feet in the Galera tunnel, 108 miles from Lima. Tourists take it to get to the ruins of Machu Picchu.
The world's longest suspension bridge opened to traffic on April 5, 1998. The 3,911-meter (12,831-feet) Akashi Kaikyo Bridge is 580 meters (1,900 feet) longer than the Humber Bridge in England, the previous record holder.
The world's tallest mountains, the Himalayas, are also the fastest growing. Their growth - about half an inch a year - is caused by the pressure exerted by two of Earth's continental plates (the Eurasian plate and the Indo-Australian plate) pushing against one another.
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