The Best Interesting Random Facts
They are called flash floods because they happen very rapidly. Flash floods are caused by sudden rainstorms in hilly or mountainous areas. The water rushes down the hillsides and into valleys or gullies. Streams overflow, swamping roads and bridges. It all happens so fast that people are taken by surprise. That’s what happened in Heppner, […]
Grains of sand are really very tiny particles of rock. It takes time and certain kinds of weather to turn rock into sand. Rain, frost, and wind can do the job. At beaches, the tide hitting against the rocks forms sand. Salt water, too, forms sand by dissolving minerals in the rocks. Since rocks are […]
For people who live north of the equator, the shortest day of the year falls around Dec. 22. This day is called the winter solstice. (The longest day of the year is called the summer solstice, and falls around June 21.) But the winter solstice falls at the beginning of winter, not in the colder […]
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 […]
The meanest kind of plant life is the strangler tree, which comes in several varieties. One example is the strangler fig tree of Brazil, whose fruit provides food for native birds. Once a bird has eaten a fig, it may fly off with the fig seed in its mouth. It often deposits that seed at […]
Yes. Many of the beaches on Florida’s east coast, which fronts on the Atlantic Ocean, are actually disappearing. They are being washed away by hurricane winds and waves. Not long ago, Miami had beautiful wide beaches all day long. Now, the only time Miami has beaches is when the tide is out, meaning at low […]
Just as your parents today might put a fence around your property to keep out unwanted guests or animals, Emperor Shih Huang Ti built a wall to keep out China’s enemies in 221 B.C. But his wall, the longest in the world, was 1500 miles long, or about the distance from New York City to […]
Since ancient times, though the day has been divided into 24 hours, each hour has not always had 60 minutes, as we measure them. The ancient Greeks divided the daytime into 12 hours, but they measured a day from sunrise to sunset. So, the longer a day was, the longer was each hour in it. […]
A hurricane watch is a warning issued by meteorologists at the U. S. Weather Bureau. When a hurricane is headed toward a coastline, it is considered a threat to that area and the inland regions bordering it. A hurricane watch is then issued. This doesn’t mean that the area will definitely be hit by the […]
Fog, like clouds, is a collection of water droplets, dust, and ice. Since city air has more dust and soot from factories, chimneys, and traffic, city fogs are thicker than country fogs. London, the city long famous for its incredibly thick “pea-soup” fogs, enacted antipollution laws which actually decreased its fog problem!
You won’t find a place called Gondwanaland on any map of the world. Gondwanaland, or simply Gondwana, is the name scientists use for one of the huge land masses, that existed before the continents began to drift apart. According to some scientists, all the continents once formed a single land mass, called Pangaea. This land […]
When you live in a place like Siberia, in northern Russia, you know what cold means. Ice and snow cover this area for half the year. This is the place of the lowest temperature ever recorded, 90° below 0° Fahrenheit. It is not a good place for people who enjoy outdoor sports. Five minutes outdoors […]
Early in the morning on June 30, 1908, a burning mass of something hit central Siberia so hard that 300 miles away, men and horses were knocked off their feet to the ground. Indeed the shock was felt in England, 3,500 miles away. For years, scientists tried to find out what it was that hit […]
You may have heard someone say, “It’s too cold to snow today,” but actually it can never be too cold to snow. Snow clouds form high in the air, where the temperatures are colder than it almost ever gets here in the United States. Two-inch snowstorms have fallen when the ground temperature was colder than […]
When water changes to ice, it becomes lighter. It is the only substance on earth that is lighter as a solid than as a liquid. This means that when the water in a lake freezes, the ice floats to the top, and fish swim beneath it. It is very, very rare for a lake to […]
The hottest continent on earth is Africa. It was on this continent, in the country of Libya, a desert nation on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, in which the highest temperatures on earth were recorded. The thermometer hit a record high of 136.4 degrees F. The United States comes in second in the race […]
Heat, light, radio waves, and x-rays are all forms of energy. The difference between the various forms of energy depends on the wavelength of the energy waves. Radio waves, for instance, have a very long wavelength, while x-rays have a very short wavelength. We can see only a very small portion of the energy waves […]
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, […]
There’s no way to say how long the “average” star lives, because there’s really no such thing as an “average” star. Some stars are so small that their diameter is only 1/70,000 the diameter of the sun, while others have a diameter a thousand times larger than the sun’s. Stars “die” in different ways too. […]
Scientists measure the strength of an earthquake with a machine called a seismograph, which takes its name from seismos, the Greek word for an earthquake. The seismograph basically consists of a very delicate metal arm with a needle or pen at the end, which rests on a moving drum of paper. When the earth is […]
Before the first man landed on the moon, scientists had come up with three possible ways that the moon might have been formed. First, it could have formed out of the same gas cloud that formed the earth. Or it could have broken off from the earth many millions of years ago. Or perhaps the […]
Any solid can change to a liquid if it becomes hot enough, and the temperature at which a solid becomes a liquid is called the melting point of that substance. The temperature at which a liquid turns into a gas is called the boiling point. The freezing point of water is 32 degrees F., that’s […]
The Polar Lights have got to be among the most fascinating sights in the world. These glowing or flickering colored night lights are known in the Northern Hemisphere as the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, and in the Southern Hemisphere as the Aurora Australis, or Southern Lights. These displays light up the sky with flashing, […]
The planet is Pluto was known as the farthest planet from the sun till 2006. It no longer has that title. Now called a dwarf planet, it is no longer classified as a planet. It is so far from the sun, our solar system’s source of heat, that even on a “summer” day Pluto is […]
In order to avoid airplane collisions because of all the air traffic over our big cities, the sky is carefully mapped. It is actually divided into highways, or airways, which are numbered and have speed limits. As a kind of road sign, radar signals from control towers at check points along the route are beamed […]
Most things get a little bigger when they are heated, even though you probably cannot notice it. If you were to place a glass in a pan of water and heat the water slowly, all the surfaces of the glass would expand evenly, making the whole glass a little bigger. But if you pour boiling […]
Poison ivy is a vine that straggles over the ground or winds itself around tree trunks, or even forms its own bush if it has nothing to wind itself around. The poison ivy leaf is made up of three leaflets. These leaflets contain poisonous oil that irritates the skin of anyone touching them. This oil […]
If you hear someone describing a bad winter hailstorm, you can be pretty sure he’s either lying or mistaken, for it almost never hails in winter. Hailstones rarely form unless a thunderstorm is brewing. Hail is caused by the same cloud conditions that usually cause rain in a thunderstorm, except that with hail, the raindrops […]
In the Methusaleh Grove, high on the windswept White Mountains near Bishop, California, grow the oldest living things on earth, over 4,000 years old. These are the bristlecone pines, also known as “living driftwood” because of their gnarled and bent appearance. The bristlecone pine is a bushy evergreen that got its name from the long, […]
The term “carrot-topped” is often used for a person with reddish hair, but not all carrots are orange-red. There are white carrots, yellow carrots, and pale green carrots. And if you were to look at some Dutch paintings from the 16th century, you’d find purple carrots too, because that’s what carrots looked like at the […]
You didn’t know that air weighed anything? Well, it does, and we call that weight air pressure. At sea level, the average air pressure, or weight of all the earth’s atmosphere pressing down on one square inch of ground, is 14.7 pounds. This pressure, or weight varies with time and weather. Fair weather is associated […]
No, it’s not really very cold, and it’s not really very hot, either. It all depends on where in the atmosphere you are! The earth’s atmosphere consists of layers of gases. The lowest layer, called the troposphere, extends to a height of seven miles, and this is the layer in which all our weather takes […]
There is a cactus that grows only in southern Arizona and northern Mexico that has a skin around its trunk that permits it to blow up to twice its normal size. It is the saguaro cactus, a giant desert plant. This cactus can soak up 200 gallons of water when it rains, enough to keep […]
In 1961, astronomers detected a very powerful source of energy in space. When they looked through a telescope to try to find that energy source, they found an object that looked like a faint star. But they knew the object was giving off far too much energy to be a single star. They named this […]
Water moves continuously through the ocean in huge rivers called currents. Currents may flow on the surface of the ocean, where they are shallow, or they may flow far below the surface, where they are deeper. Ocean currents are set in motion by the wind. The rotation of the earth moves them clockwise in the […]
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 […]
