Amazing Facts

Eskimos use their refrigerators to prevent food from freezing.

Ten books on a shelf can be arranged in 3,628,800 different ways.

On average, people can hold their breath for one minute. The world record is seven and a half minutes. You will take about half a billion breaths during the course of your lifetime.

A modern day mobile phone has more computing power in it than the Apollo spaceships that first went to the Moon in 1969.

In the 1970s, Pan American World Airways accepted reservations for flights to the Moon in the year Former president Ronald Reagan was one of the many who signed up.

Americans consume 42 tons of aspirin per day.

In 1900, there were 8000 cars in the United States; by 1920, there were nearly ten million of them.

King Camp Gillette invented the first disposable safety razor. Two years after he first patented his invention, he sold 168 blades. The following year, he sold 12.4 million of them.

The bubbles in Guinness stout sink to the bottom rather than float to the top like all other beers. No one knows why. hi/uk_news/scotland/ stm hi/uk_news/scotland/ stm

There are hefty price tags on some internet domain names. The highest selling domain name to date, business.com, went for $7.5 million in The buyer was eCompnanies.

All the gold ever mined in the world would weigh about 165,347 tons total. Put together, that amount would only make a cube about the size of a tennis court.

The weight of the Earth increases every year due to the 3000 tons of meteorite lumps that fall on it from space. Earth is estimated to weigh 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg.

Greek astronomer Aristarchos stated in the 3 rd century BC that the Earth revolves around the Sun – but nobody took much notice and the idea didn’t catch on. In the 6 th century BC Greek mathematician Pythagoras said that the Earth was round and not flat – but he was dismissed as a crank and largely ignored. In the 2 nd century AD Greek astronomer Ptolemy stated that earth was the centre of the universe – and this was considered a fact for the next 1400 years.

The Sun loses up to a billion kilograms in weight every second. The amount of energy produced by the Sun in a two- week period is roughly equal to the combined stored energy of all the coal, iron and natural gas reserves ever found on Earth. The Sun has enough energy to burn for at least another 5 billion years.

The nearest major galaxy outside of our own Milky Way is Andromeda, which is 2.5 million light years away. When you look at the Andromeda Galaxy, you are seeing light that has been travelling across space for more than two million years. The light you are seeing left Andromeda long before that first humans walked on the Earth.