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Fact File


In the Fact File section we bring you a new collection of quick facts each week. (Click on the links below for more facts)

 
 


1861/ A car travelling at a constant speed of 60 miles per hour would take longer than 48 million years to reach the nearest star (other than our Sun), Proxima Centauri. This is about 685,000 average human lifetimes

1862/ Crabs are 10-legged animals that walk sideways. There are almost 5,000 different species of crabs; about 4,500 are true crabs, plus about 500 are hermit crabs (hermit crabs don't have a very hard shell and use other animals' old shells for protection). Most crabs live in the oceans, but many, like the robber crab, live on land.

1863/ A brown dwarf is a very small, dark object, with a mass less than 1/10 that of the Sun. They are "failed stars" – globules of gas that have shrunk under gravity, but failed to ignite and shine as stars.

1864/ A dog was killed by a meteor at Nakhla, Egypt, in 1911. The unlucky canine is the only creature known to have been killed by a meteor.

1865/ The biggest crab is the Japanese Spider crab (Macrocheira kaempferi), which lives on the floor of the north Pacific Ocean; it has a 12 ft (3.7 m) leg span. The biggest land crab is the Coconut crab (Birgus latro), which lives on islands in the Pacific Ocean; it has a leg span up to 2.5 ft (75 cm).

1866/ A pulsar is a small star made up of neutrons so densely packed together that if one the size of a silver dollar landed on Earth, it would weigh approximately 100 million tons.

1867/ Atherosclerosis (the narrowing of the walls of the coronary arteries) is caused by a build up of fatty material called atheroma. Atheroma develops when LDL cholesterol undergoes a chemical process known as "oxidation" and is taken up by cells in the coronary artery walls, which then starts to narrow the lumen of the artery,

1868/ The word "ceramics" comes from the Greek word "Keramos" meaning "Pottery," "Potter's Clay," or "a Potter." This Greek word is related to an old Sanskrit root meaning "to burn" but was primarily used to mean "burnt stuff."

1869/ U.S. book sales totaled $26,874,100,000 in 2002, a 5.5 percent increase over 2001, according to figures just released by the Association of American Publishers (AAP).

1870/ A dairy cow drinks 20-50 gallons of water a day - about as much as a full bathtub.

1871/ Winds ten times stronger than a hurricane on Earth blow around Saturn's equator. Wind speeds can reach 1,100 mph.

1872/ The milk bottle was invented in 1884 by Dr. Hervey D. Thatcher, Potsdam, New York.

1873/ The Earth rotates on its axis more slowly in March than in September.

1874/ Wisconsin and California lead the United States in milk production.

1875/ The first spacecraft to send back pictures of the far side of the Moon was Luna 3 in October 1959. The photographs covered about 70 percent of the far side.

1876/ Dairy cows produce the most milk of any mammal in the world.

1877/ In the history of the solar system, 30 billion comets have been lost or destroyed. That amounts to only 30 percent of the estimated number that remain.

1878/ The average U.S. dairy cow produces 22.5 quarts of milk each day. That’s about 16,000 glasses of milk per year - enough for about 40 people.

1879/ Milk and other dairy products supply 70% of the calcium in the U.S. food supply.

1880/ The nation that achieves the highest milk production per cow is Japan. Japan’s cows average 17,500 pounds of milk a year compared to the more than 16,000 pounds per cow per year produced by dairy cows in the United States.

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