• Astronauts cannot belch – there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their stomachs. • The largest meteorite craters in the world are in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada and in Vredefort, South Africa. • The speed of light is exactly 186,287.49 miles per second or 299,792,458 meters per second. • Humans have 46 chromosomes, peas have 14 and crayfish have 200. • An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit in the body. • The word “automobile” is a mixture of the French word ‘auto’ which means self and “mobile” which means moving. • The first car was invented in the year 1672 by Ferdinand Verbiest. • The first Japanese car to be manufactured in the US was the Honda Accord in November 1982. • Ostrich (Struthio camelus) is a large, flightless bird that lives in the dry grasslands of Africa. It is the largest of all birds. • Every second around 100 lightning bolts strike the Earth. Every year lightning kills 1000 people. • The molecular structure of DNA was first determined by Watson and Crick in 1953. • Englishman Roger Bacon invented the magnifying glass in 1250. The thermometer was invented in 1607 by Galileo Galilei. • Wilhelm Rontgen won the first Nobel Prize for physics for discovering X-rays in 1895. • On the day that Alexander Graham Bell was buried the entire US telephone system was shut down for 1 minute in tribute. • If the sun were the size of a beach ball then Jupiter would be the size of a golf ball and the Earth would be as small as a pea. • Traffic lights with red and green gas lights were first introduced in London in 1868. Unfortunately, they exploded and killed a policeman. The first successful system was installed in Cleveland, Ohio in 1914. • The accent that Mike Myers used for the character Shrek came from the accent that his mother would use when she was telling him bedtime stories when he was a child. • Niagara Falls froze completely solid in the winter of 1932. • The word “queue” is the only word in English that is pronounced the same way when the last four letters are removed. • Dogs perform many useful tasks for humans including hunting, farm work and security as well as assisting those with disabilities such as the blind. Ends
