posted March 05, 2007 01:09 PM         

2. 5,280 feet make up one mile.

3. A Boeing 747's wingspan is longer than the Wright brother's first flight.

4. A bolt of lighting can strike the earth with a force as great as 100 million volts.

5. A cesium atom in an atomic clock beats 9,192,631,770 times a second.

6. A creep is a metallurgical term for when something that is normally very strong bends because of gravity. This happens to many metals at high temperatures, where they won't melt but they will creep.

7. A cubic mile of fog is made up of less than a gallon of water.

8. A device invented as a primitive steam engine by the Greek engineer Hero, about the time of the birth of Christ, is used today as a rotating lawn sprinkler.

9. A downburst is a downward blowing wind that sometimes comes blasting out of a thunderstorm. The damage looks like tornado damage, since the wind can be as strong as an F2 tornado, but debris is blown straight away from a point on the ground. It's not lifted into the air and transported downwind.

10. A fierce gust of wind blew 45 year old Vittorio Luise's car into a rover near Naples, Italy, in 1980. He managed to break a window, climb out and swim to shore--where a tree blew over and killed him.

11. A full loaded supertanker traveling at normal speed takes at least twenty minutes to stop.

12. A full moon always rises at sunset.

8. A full moon is nine times brighter than a half moon.

9. A jiffy is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second. Thus the saying, I will be there in a jiffy!

10. A jumbo jet uses 4,000 gallons of fuel to take off.

11. A large flawless emerald is worth more than a similarly large flawless diamond.

12. A lightning bolt generates temperatures five times hotter than those found on the sun's surface.

13. A manned rocket reaches the moon in less time than it took a stagecoach to travel the length of England.

14. A metric mile is 1,500 meters.

15. A neutron star has such a powerful gravitational pull that it can spin on its axis in 1/30th of a second with tearing itself apart.

16. A normal raindrop falls at about 7 miles per hour.

17. A pedometer measures walking distance.

18. A penny whistle has six finger holes.

19. A Pulsar is a neutron star and it gets its energy from its rotation.

20. A rainbow can only occur when the sun is 40 degrees or less above the horizon.

21. A shell constitutes 12 percent of an egg's weight.

22. A silicon chip a quarter-inch square has the capacity of the original 1949 ENIAC computer, which occupied a city block.

23. A standard grave is 7'8 x 3'2 x 6.

24. A syzygy occurs when three astronomical bodies line up.

25. A temperature of 70 million degrees Celsius was generated at Princeton University in 1978. This was during a fusionism experiment and is the highest man-made temperature ever.

26. A two-bit moon is in its first quarter.

27. A wind with a speed of 74 miles or more is designated a hurricane.

28. About seven million cars are junked each year in the U.S.

29. According to the Gemological Institute of America, up until 1896, India was the only source of diamonds to the world.

30. According to the Texas Department of Transportation, one person is killed annually painting stripes on the state's highways and roads.

31. All organic compounds contain carbon.

32. All snow crystals are hexagonal.

33. All the gold produced in the past five hundred years, if melted, could be compressed into a 50-feet cube.

34. All the stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, revolve around the center of the galaxy every 200 million years.

35. All totaled, the sunlight that strikes Earth at any given moment weighs as much as an ocean liner.

36. Almost all the helium that exists in the world today is from natural-gas wells in the United States.

37. American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first class.

38. An enneahedron is solid with nine faces.

39. An iceberg contains more heat than a match.

40. An inch of snow falling evenly on one acre of ground is equivalent to about 2715 gallons of water.

41. Any free moving liquid in outer space will form itself into a sphere because of its surface tension.

42. Approximately 98% of software in China is pirated.

43. April is Earthquake Preparedness month. For a little added incentive, consider this- The most powerful earthquake to strike the United States occurred in 1811 in New Madrid, Missouri. The quake shook more than one million square miles, and was felt as far as 1,000 miles away.

44. Astronauts in orbit around the Earth can see the wakes of ships.

45. Astronomers classify stars by their spectra.

46. At any given time, there are 1,800 thunderstorms in progress over the earth's atmosphere.

47. At room temperature, the average air molecule travels at the speed of a rifle bullet.

48. Back in the mid to late 80's, an IBM compatible computer wasn't considered a hundred percent compatible unless it could run Microsoft's Flight Simulator.

49. Bacteria, the tiniest free-living cells, are so small that a single drop of liquid contains as many as 50 million of them.

50. Bamboo (the world's tallest grass) can grow up to 90 cm in a day.

51. Because of the rotation of the earth, an object can be thrown farther if it is thrown west.

52. By weight, the sun is 70% hydrogen, 28% helium, 1.5% carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, and 0.5% all other elements. (Source: NASA)

53. Carolyn Shoemaker has discovered 32 comets and approximately 300 asteroids.

54. Charles Darwin's chlorophyll makes plants green.

55. Clouds fly higher during the day than the night.

56. Construction workers hard hats were first invented and used in the building of the Hoover Dam in 1933.

57. Diamonds are composed of just one chemical element, carbon.

58. Did you know you share a birthday with at least nine million other people in the world?

59. DuPont is the world's largest chemical company.

60. During the time that the atomic bomb was being hatched by the United States at Alamogordo, New Mexico, applicants for routine jobs like janitors, were disqualified if they could read. Illiteracy was a job requirement. The reason: the authorities did not want their trash or other papers read.

61. Each year there is one ton of cement poured for each man, woman and child in the world.

62. Earth is traveling through space at 660,000 miles per hour.

63. Edmonton, Canada was the first city in North America with a population of less than 1 million to open a Light Rail Transit System in 1978.

64. Ethernet is a registered trademark of Xerox, Unix is a registered trademark of AT&T.

65. Experts at Intel say that microprocessor speed will double every 18 months for at least 10 years.

66. February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not have a full moon.

67. Gold was the first metal to be discovered.

68. Hydrogen is the most common atom in the universe.

69. If you attempted to count the stars in a galaxy at a rate of one every second it would take around 3,000 years to count them all.

70. If you toss a penny 10,000 times it will not be heads 5000 times but more like 4950. The head picture weighs more, so it ends up on the bottom.

71. If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and six days, you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee.

72. In 1910, magician Harry Houdini was the first solo pilot to fly a plane in Australia.

73. In 1949, forecasting the relentless march of science, Popular Mechanics said computers in the future may weigh no more than 5 tons.

74. In 1961, MIT student Steve Russell, created SPACEWARS, the first interactive computer game, on a Digital PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1) mainframe computer. Limited by the computer technology of the time, ASCII text characters were the 'graphics' and people could only play the game on a device that took up the floor-space of a small house.

75. India has the world's largest stock of privately hoarded gold.

76. India tested its first nuclear bomb in 1974.

77. Iron nails cannot be used in oak because the acid in the wood corrodes them.

78. It takes 8.5 minutes for light to get from the sun to earth.

79. It takes one fifteen-to-twenty-year-old tree to produce seven hundred paper grocery bags.

80. It takes the insect-eating Venus Flytrap plant only half a second to shut its trap on its prey.

81. Japan's currency is the most difficult to counterfeit.

82. Kudzu is not indigenous to the South, but in that climate it can grow up to six inches a day.

83. Lab tests can detect traces of alcohol in urine six to 12 hours after a person has stopped drinking.

84. Life on Earth probably developed in an oxygen-free atmosphere. Even today there are microorganisms that can live only in the absence of oxygen.

85. Man releases over a billion tons of pollutants into the Earth's atmosphere every year.

86. Mercury is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature.

87. Methane gas can often be seen bubbling up from the bottom of ponds. It is produced by the decomposition of dead plants and animals in the mud.

88. Moisture, not air causes super glue to dry.

89. One ragweed plant can release as many as one billion grains of pollen.

90. One third of 95 developing countries have a waiting period of six years or more for a telephone connection, compared with less than a month in developed countries.

91. Only one satellite has been ever been destroyed by a meteor--the European Space Agency's Olympus in 199

92. Orchids are grown from seed so small that it would take thirty thousand to weigh as much as one grain of wheat.

93. Recycling one glass jar, saves enough energy to watch T.V for 3 hours.

94. Rene Descartes came up with the theory of coordinate geometry by looking at a fly walk across a tiled ceiling.

95. Robots in Japan pay union dues.

96. Russia built over 10,000 miles of railroad between 1896 and 1900.

97. Shortest Intercontinental Commercial Flight in the world is from Gibraltar (Europe) to Tangier (Africa.) Distance 34 miles, flight time 20 minutes.

98. South Africa produces two-thirds of the world's gold.

99. Stainless steel was discovered by accident in 1913.