Assorted Facts 9
Fish have gel-slime on their bodies that protects them from parasites.
Fish swimming at depths of 15,000 feet (almost 3 miles down!) can withstand a pressure of 7,000 pounds per square inch. They are able to live in these crushing depths by pumping gas into their swim bladder.
One way to tell the age of a fish is by looking at its scales. They have growth rings just like trees. These are called circuli. Clusters of them are called annuli. Each annuli show one year.
The world's largest mammal, the blue whale, weighs 50 tons at birth. Fully grown, it weighs as much as 150 tons.
A giraffe's heart weighs an incredible 24 pounds.
A chicken loses its feathers when it becomes stressed.
A chicken once had its head cut off and survived for over eighteen months, headless.
A giraffe can go longer without water than a camel.
A full grown giraffe's neck can weigh as much as 500 pounds.
The tallest mammal in the world is the giraffe.
Giraffes have black tongues.
An area of the Sun's surface the size of a postage stamp shines with the power of 1,500,000 candles.
Your fingernails can turn yellow from wearing nail polish and from the sun.
If the entire solar system were the size of a quarter, the sun would be visible only under a microscope, and the nearest star would be 300 feet away.
Male bears are called boars.
The smallest species of bears is called sun or Malayan bears.
The driest place on earth is Wadi Halfa in Sudan, with an annual average rainfall of less than 2.5 mm (less than one-tenth of an inch).
In NSW, the wettest town is Dorrigo with an average of 2,004mm per year.
On average, the wettest town in Australia is Tully (N QLD) with an annual average rainfall of 4,204mm.
In Australia, Bellenden Kerr (NE QLD) received 11,251mm in 1979. With a massive 960mm of this total falling in just 24 hours on January 3/4.
Bears whose brown fur is tipped with lighter-colored hairs are called grizzly bears.
If you spray an antiseptic spray on a polar bear, its fur will turn purple.
Dogs sweat only through their tongues.
The tornado is the most violent of all earth's storms.
The average lifespan of a tornado is less than 15 minutes.
All of the stars comprising the Milky Way galaxy revolve around the center of the galaxy once every 200 million years or so.
Until the mid sixteenth century, Comets were believed to be not astronomical phenomena, but burning vapors that had arisen from distant swamps and were propelled across the sky by fire and light.
Our galaxy has approximately 250 billion stars and it is estimated by astronomers that there are 100 billion other galaxies in the universe.
There is a doggy disco held in Italy every year where owners can dance with their dogs.
A cat sees about six times better than a human at night because of the tapetum lucidum , a layer of extra reflecting cells which absorb light.
A cat's jaws cannot move sideways.
The tiny droplets of water that make up fog are so small that it would take seven thousand million of them to make a single tablespoonful of water.
The fogs, which are more common in winter, occasionally cause havoc with air travel by lingering into the early afternoon.
A cat can run about 20 kilometers per hour (12 miles per hour) when it grows up. This one is going nowhere today - it is too lazy!
At one time the earth consisted of one land mass and a huge body of water. Geologists today call the land Pangaea (from the Greek words "all land" while the water was called Panthalassa (from the Greek words "all sea"). Between 180 and 200 million years ago, Pangaea split into two parts: Laurasia, which consisted of North America, Europe and Asia; and Gondwanaland, which consisted of Africa, South America, India, Antarctica and Australia.
Astronauts brought back about 800 pounds of lunar rock to Earth. Most of it has not been analyzed.
Approximately 40,000 tons of meteoric dust hits the Earth each year.
In a lifetime, on average a honey bee produces 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey.
Honeybees use the sun as a compass which helps them navigate.
According to Hawaiian lore, the earth mother Papa mated with the sky father Wake to give birth to the Hawaiian Islands.
About one-tenth of the earth's surface is permanently covered with ice.
A Red Giant (a kind of exploded star) has a lower density than any vacuum here on earth.
A comet's tail always points away from the sun.
In Spit Bergen, Norway at one time of the year the sun shines continuously for three and a half months.
In Newport, Rhode Island it is illegal to smoke from a pipe after sunset.
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.
The Star Alpha Herculis is twenty five times larger than the circumference described by the earth's revolution around the sun. This means that twenty five diameters of our solar orbit would have to be placed end to end to equal the diameter of this Star.
Just twenty seconds worth of fuel remained when Apollo 11's lunar module landed on the moon.
Jupiter's moon Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System, and is larger than the planets Mercury and Pluto.
It takes about 1.25 seconds for moonlight to reach the Earth.
In Devon, Connecticut, it is unlawful to walk backwards after sunset.
If the sun stopped shining suddenly, it would take eight minutes for people on earth to be aware of the fact.
For 186 days you can not see the sun in the North Pole.
Every eleven years the magnetic poles of the sun switch. This cycle is called"Solarmax".
Because of the speed at which the sun moves, it is impossible for a solar eclipse to last more than 7 minutes and 58 seconds.
A single snowstorm can drop 40 million tons of snow, carrying the energy equivalent to 120 atom bombs.
There is NOT a law of nature that prohibits 2 snowflakes from being identical.
Aztecs believed that the sun died every night and needed human blood to give it strength to rise the next day. So they sacrificed 15,000 men a year to appease their sun god, Huitzilopochtli. Most of the victims were prisoners taken in wars, which were sometimes started solely to round up sacrificial victims.
Hurricane Beulah moved into South Texas, and torrential rains from the hurricane turned the rich agricultural areas of South Texas into a large lake. Beulah also spawned a record 115 tornadoes.
A tornado traveled 275 miles across Lake Ontario, New York and Lake Champlain.
One South Dakota tornado was observed hovering in a field for 45 minutes.
In 1967, Hurricane Beulah unleased 115 tornadoes over Texas.
A female ostrich shows remarkable ability to recognize her own eggs even when mixed in with those of other females in their communal nest.
Ostriches are so powerful that a single kick at a predator, such as a lion, could be fatal.
Ostriches stretch out their neck and lay their head on the ground to keep from being seen, hence the myth that ostriches hide in the sand.