Home > Facts > Science Facts
9 Feb 2010
Fact of the day
Nostradamus wrote 942 quatrains (4 line long poems) in his lifetime which he organised into centuries. Many people believe that he could predict the future and that these poems contain cryptic information about future events.
Random Facts
Karl von Frish's great discovery was the dance language of of honeybees. Bees communicate the direction of, distance to and quality of food supplies. They do so by a special 'waggle dance', which von Frisch decoded by careful observation and experiments in which he varied the location of a food source.
Jonathan Hodgkin, Professor of Genetics at Oxford University has estimated that in 1965 it cost about £1000 per base letter to sequence 5S ribosomal RNA from bacteria. But during the Human Genome Project, sequencing costs were about £0.10 per letter. So, that over this period, costs halved approximately every 27 months.
There are forty two dots on a pair of dice.
During the 1990s, one third of the cancer deaths in the US were due to the use of tobacco, largely cigarettes.
A human heart beats about 100,000 times a day.
Find facts about:
When we abbreviate Christmas to 'Xmas', the first letter is not our 'X' but the similar-looking Greek 'chi', the first letter of 'Christ' in Greek.
|
The largest sapphire weighed 2,302 carats. It was found in Australia circa 1935, and was carved into the shape of the head of President Abraham Lincoln.
|
The Boeing 767 aircraft is a collection of 3.1 million parts from 800 different suppliers around the world: fuselage parts from Japan, centre wing selection from Southern California, and flaps from Italy.
|
In the United States the principal orange-producing states are Florida, California, Texas, and Arizona. From 1991 to 1992 the yield of oranges in the United States was about 10 million metric tons.
|
In 1994 Stuart Campbell published a book called The UFO Mystery - Solved! In which he proposed that UFOs are not in fact caused by little green men flying over our heads, but rather are caused by astronomical mirages.
|
The oldest known animal fossils on Earth are called "Ediacara" after a locality in Australia where they were first discovered.
|
Pearls melt in vinegar.
|
Before Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1438, there were only about 30,000 books throughout the whole of Europe, nearly all Bibles or biblical commentary.
|
Saturn would float if you could find an ocean big enough.
|
About | Privacy policy | Terms & conditions
© 1995-2010 All rights reserved
