The Best Interesting Random Facts
The famous Cliffs of Dover, which lie along the shore of England beside the English Channel, are as white as chalk, as they’re made out of basically the same material as a piece of blackboard chalk! Chalk consists of the remains of tiny sea organisms and fragments of sea shells. These fragments are continually washed […]
The colorful stone “icicles” which hang from the roof and walls of some caves are called stalactites, and those rising from the floor are called stalagmites. Both these formations build up when water drips through rocks in a cave roof. These rocks contain mineral deposits called calcite. It is this calcite and other minerals which […]
A volcano erupted on August 27, 1883 on the tiny Indonesian island of Krakatoa in the South Pacific. The eruption was so powerful that it caused a tidal wave, or huge wall of water, as tall as a 9-story building. The wave wiped out 163 villages on Krakatoa, killing 36,380 people. It even washed ashore […]
During the 4,600,000,000 years that the sun has been shining, it has been burning up 22 quadrillion tons of hydrogen and changing it into helium every year. Scientists estimate that the sun has enough of a supply of these gases to keep shining for another 5,000,000,000 years. How do they know this? Astronomers have been […]
The Sahara Desert, whose name comes from the Arab word sahra, meaning “wilderness,” is by far the biggest desert on earth. Though the exact boundaries of the Sahara are hard to define, this African desert stretches more than 3,000 miles at its longest point, and in most places is over 1,000 miles wide. The Sahara […]
The answer to both questions is yes, if you calculate the date according to calendars other than the one we use! We number our years from the supposed date of Christ’s birth. But Jews count their years from the date of creation, which ancient scholars claimed took place in the year 3761 B.C. So, the […]
We know there are nine planets. But in ancient times, people knew of only six: the earth and the five planets that can be seen without a telescope. Venus, the brightest planet in our sky, was named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty. Mercury, the fastest- moving planet, was named after the fleet-footed […]
Not snowdrifts, but dust storms and dustdrifts. They came as a result of the great dust storms that occurred between 1933 and 1937. The first huge storm arrived in the dry areas of the center of the United States in November of 1933. Though the storms started in the Midwest, so much dust was raised […]
Machu Picchu, in Peru, is called “The Lost City of the Incas” lost, because it was only discovered in 1911. The temples, palaces, stairways, and terraces of this ancient walled Inca city show that its people worshipped the sun and were amazingly accurate as astronomers. One of the temples is so arranged that a wall […]
Snow is actually water vapor that has frozen in the clouds into shimmering six-sided ice crystals. These ice crystals appear white instead of colorless, as does water, because all the sides of the little ice crystals that make up a snowflake reflect light. The amazing thing is that although billions of snowflakes fall in a […]
Hail or sleet is frozen rain, but snow is never formed as a frozen raindrop. Snow forms from ice crystals high above the earth. These particles turn into snow without first becoming rain. At the height that snow usually forms, the temperature is from 20 to 60 degrees below zero, far too cold for water […]
In cold weather, low temperatures cause the body to lose heat. But the wind also takes heat from the body, so a temperature reading doesn’t always tell us how cold it really feels. The wind chill factor was devised by weathermen to show how the temperature and the wind combine to produce the feeling of […]
Leaves are actually little “factories” that manufacture food to help the plant grow. In the spring and summer, these factories run at top speed, taking in carbon dioxide from the air and water from their roots. Then sunlight enters the leaf and sets the factory in motion. But a leaf could not begin its manufacturing […]
When you look up into the sky at the sun and the moon, they appear to be pretty equal in size. But that is far from true. The sun is actually 400 times larger than the moon, with a diameter of 865,000 miles as compared to the moon’s 2,160 miles. Why then do they look […]
The lines that divide the world’s time zones meet at the North and South Poles, so the zones get narrower as they near’ the poles. An Alaskan airline offers a flight over the Arctic regions that includes a circular flight around the North Pole. If you were to circle the North Pole, you’d pass through […]
The outer layer, or crust, of the earth is made up of plates that are constantly moving past one another in very slow side-to-side and up-and-down movements. These movements cause the earth’s rocks to rub against and slide past each other at their outer edges, creating a break in the crust. This break is called […]
Astronomers at the McDonald Observatory in Texas have found two very old stars that are so close together that the gravity of one is actually pulling the other apart. It is the smaller of the two stars that is being pulled apart. Some of its material is being added to the larger star, and some […]
Weather experts have a tough time finding out exactly how much rain has fallen in some distant parts of the world, so no one is really sure what is the heaviest single rainfall of all time. But we know that an island in the Indian Ocean once received more than six feet of rain in […]
Inertia is the tendency of objects that are at rest to remain at rest, or of moving objects to continue moving, unless they are acted upon by some outside force. This concept of physics was discovered by the Italian scientist Galileo in the 16th century. Because of the property of inertia, an object set on […]
Ordinary light seems white as it shines, but it is actually a combination of colors, violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. Any time the light gets broken up, as in a soap bubble, an oil puddle, a piece of cut glass, or a diamond, we see all or most of these colors. In […]
That depends on what you call “pretty.” Certainly, flowers don’t smell pretty to themselves; their aroma is intended only to attract insects that can help pollinate the plant. Insects, too, probably don’t find that a flower smells “pretty”; they simply visit the flower for its nectar. One flower whose aroma is definitely not pretty is […]
A greenhouse gives plants a glass covering which serves two purposes: it conserves the energy they get from the sun and it keeps the air temperature up. The atmosphere surrounding our planet acts the same way. Only a tiny fraction of the heat and energy produced by the sun ever reaches the earth. And that […]
The Aleutian Islands are said to have the worst weather in the world. They are far to the north and lie in the Bering Sea between Alaska and Russia. They are not so far north as to be in the Arctic. There are colder places, like the Antarctic, which holds the record for both one-time […]
A gas, a liquid, and a solid are simply different forms of the same thing. And that form is determined by how hot that substance is and how much pressure is applied to it. Heat can turn a solid into a liquid by giving its molecules more energy and motion, and then turn the liquid […]
Not only does it have a harpoon, but the harpoon is filled with a deadly poison that quickly kills its prey. Is this another meat-eating plant? No, it just looks like a plant. A tiny cactus, to be exact. That is the camouflage of this organism called the Hydra, which lives in freshwater ponds, streams, […]
Dr. James Van Allen, an American physicist, had been studying space satellites for many years, and in 1958 he came to the conclusion that the reason life on earth is not destroyed by radiation from the sun is due to two belts that surround the earth. These belts, named after Dr. Van Allen, are actually […]
The space telescope Hubble that was put in orbit in 1990 is able to see seven times farther into space than any other telescope. The space telescope was carried into orbit by the space shuttle. It is 45 feet long and consists of five separate astronomical instruments. Astronomers expect to be able to zoom in […]
Yes. On September 26, 1935, ships of the Japanese navy in the Pacific Ocean were caught in a terrible hurricane. The fierce winds made some of the largest waves ever recorded. Many were 40, 50 and 60 feet high. Some monster waves were as high as 90 feet. Waves caused by the winds of a […]
Most trees begin life as a seed and continue to grow as long as they live, some for hundreds or even thousands of years. The history of a tree, its age, plus events that took place as it grew, can all be revealed by studying its trunk after it is cut down. A tree grows […]
In March, 1889, the United States, Germany, and England were on the brink of war. A German war ship had shelled the small town of Apia on the island of Western Samoa and destroyed American property. Three American warships sailed into the harbor, where they came face to face with three German warships and one […]
Hurricanes are violent storms of wind and rain that can hit areas hundreds of miles across. They usually start in the tropics, with warm, moist air rising in a spiral over the ocean. As the air swirls upwards to colder areas in the atmosphere, the water vapor in the warm air cools and turns to […]
No. Dark, dirty snow absorbs the heat rays of the sun more quickly than clean, white snow, which reflects these rays back into the air. So dirty snow melts faster than clean snow. Actually, clean snow isn’t white at all. The tiny flakes are frozen, colorless ice crystals which reflect the light and make the […]
On Earth, clouds are made of water droplets and ice particles adrift in the atmosphere. Of all the planets in the solar system, only Earth has large amounts of water, so our planet is the only one with clouds, as we know them. But some planets have clouds made of things other than water. The […]
Amazingly enough, whenever you ice skate, you are doing precisely that, skating on water. Here’s how it happens. When the blade of your ice skate touches the ice, it actually is putting the pressure of your body weight on that thin strip of ice. The ice melts for an instant as a result of that […]
Almost all plants move their leaves and stems in some way, but usually this movement is so slow that we can’t see it. However, this is not true for a common plant called the mimosa. Normally, the long, thin leaves of this plant extend straight out from the stem, and the stem is erect. But […]
Since the moon’s mass (the amount of matter it contains) is smaller than earth’s, the moon has a weaker gravity pull, only one-sixth the pull of earth. This means that everything is six times lighter on the moon than it is on earth. A person weighing 120 pounds on earth would weigh only 20 pounds […]
