Brightening The Moon - The Mysterious Plan Of a Swedish Cosmetic Company

Brightening The Moon

It sounds like the plot of a James Bond movie: There's a plan afoot to make the moon brighter in the night sky, potentially saving the world billions of dollars in power costs running street lamps.

How would such an ambitious idea even be possible? By strategically placing highly reflective material on the lunar surface. A lot of it.

The project is called Brighter Moon, and Swedish parent company Foreo says it has already secured more than $52 million in funding.

The thing is, Foreo is a cosmetics company. When asked for more information on the backers of Brighter Moon, company reps declined to name even one, citing privacy reasons. The "Foreo Institute" is also supposedly trying to crowd-fund a new kind of toothbrush — which may in fact be real — so the moon project may be an elaborate hoax created to drum up interest in that.

Still, Brighter Moon proposes an interesting, if fanciful scenario. It also makes some good points: The moon reflects only about 12% of the sunlight that impacts it. By using the right material in the right places — over an area the size of Switzerland, or about 0.1% of the lunar surface — the amount of reflected light could be increased by 80%.

See here what Newsy Science has to say on this.

A brighter night sky would mean less need for streetlights, which could potentially translate to less electricity usage and thus fewer globe-warming carbon emissions, it said. "We want to raise public awareness about the project and generate consciousness about the global energy crisis," said
Paul Peros, CEO of Foreo.

However, scientists are skeptical about the idea. "Making the Moon brighter is not something I've ever heard of in the geoengineering literature," said Ben Kravitz, a postdoctoral researcher in the atmospheric sciences and global change division of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The company said it plans to use materials already available on the surface of the Moon to brighten it, but it is not clear how that would work. Peros said the company is investigating simply smoothing over a portion of the Moon's surface to increase its reflectivity.

"Furthermore, we are looking at the surfaces and composition of the soil and materials that currently exist on the Moon and how to best utilise them," he said.

Even if such a mission were successful, it could have side effects. Light at night can disrupt sleep and has been linked to increases in several types of cancer in lab animals. Foreo suggests the brightening effect would happen gradually over 30 years, allowing humans and animals time to adjust.

Interesting Space Facts 5

• 101. On the moon’s surface are large dark patches called seas – because this is what people once believed they were. They are, in fact, lava flows from ancient volcanoes.
• 102. Quasars are the most distant known objects in the Universe. Even the nearest is billions of light years away.
• 103. The brightest quasar is 3C 273, 2 billion light years away.
• 104. The brightest stars in the night sky are not actually stars, but the planets Jupiter, Venus, Mars and Mercury.
• 105. Jupiter’s moon Europa may have oceans of water beneath its dry surface and it is a major target in the search for life in the Solar System.
• 106. There may be 20 trillion galaxies in the Universe.
• 107. Galaxies are often found in a group or clusters. One cluster may have 30 or so galaxies in it.
• 108. In the 1970s the US Vikings 1 and 2 and the Soviet Mars 3 and 5 probes all reached the surface of Mars.
• 109.  The Solar System has nine planets including Pluto, but Pluto may be an escaped moon or an asteroid not a planet.
• 110. The Milky Way belongs to a cluster of 30 galaxies called the Local Group, which is 7 million light years across.
• 111. The Virgo Cluster is 50 million light years away and is made up of 1000 galaxies.
• 112. For a satellite or a spacecraft to stay in orbit 200 km above the earth, it has to fly over 8 km/sec.
• 113. When a spacecraft reaches 140% of the orbital velocity i.e. 11.2 km/sec, it is going fast enough to break free of the Earth’s gravity. This is called escape velocity.
  114. Saturn’s rings are sets of thin rings of ice, dust and tiny rocks, which orbit the planet around its equator.
• 115. A tablespoon of neutron star would weigh about ten billion tones.
• 116. The earth actually takes 365.24219 days to orbit the Sun, which is called one Solar Year. To compensate for the missing 0.242 days, the western calendar adds an extra day in February every fourth (leap) year, but misses out three leap years every four centuries.
• 117. X-Rays cannot reach the earth’s atmosphere, so astronomers can only detect them using space telescopes such as ROSAT.
• 118. The Sun has sunspots, the dark spots on the Sun’s photosphere (surface), 2000°C cooler than the rest of the surface.
• 119. After the big bang, there was antimatter, the mirror image of matter. Antimatter and matter destroyed each other when they met, thus they annihilated. Matter just won, but the Universe was left almost empty.
• 120. The afterglow of the Big Bang can still be detected as microwave background radiation coming from all over space.
• 121. Dishes in the space telescopes have to be made accurate two billionths of a millimeter.
• 122. You can see another galaxy with the naked eye: the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.2 million light years away.
• 123. Dried up riverbeds show that Mars probably once had water in its surface. There is sometimes ice at the poles and maybe water underground.
• 124. For a satellite to fly off into the space, its momentum should be greater than the pull of gravity of the earth.
• 125. The future of the Universe may depend on how much dark matter there is. If there is too much, its gravity will eventually stop the Universe’s expansion – and make it shrink again.

Interesting Space Facts 4

• 76. Solar flares reach temperatures of 10 million °C and have the energy of a million atom bombs.
• 77. True binary stars are two stars held together by one another’s gravity, which spend their lives whirling around together like a pair of dancers.
• 78. Halley predicted that a comet he had discovered would return in 1758, 16 years after his death, and it really did. It was the first time a comet’s arrival had been predicted, and the comet was named after him as Halley’s Comet.
• 79. Ceres is the biggest asteroid in the Solar System – 940 km across, and 0.0002% the size of the earth.
• 80. The sun is about 5 billion years old and half a way through its life – as a medium sized star it will probably live for around 10 billion years.
• 81. Neptune’s mood Triton is the coldest place in the Solar System, with surface temperatures of -236°C.
• 82. Voyager 2 will beam back data until 2020 as it travels beyond the edges of the Solar System.
• 83. The Pioneer 10 and 11 probes carry metal plaques with messages for aliens telling them about us.
• 84. Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity (1905) shows that all measurements are relative, including time and speed. In other words, time and speed depends upon where you measure them.
• 85. When things are falling, their acceleration cancels out gravity, which is why astronauts in orbits are weightless.
• 86. The first space telescope was the Copernicus, sent out in 1972.
• 87. Astronauts learn Scuba diving which helps them to deal with space walks.
• 88. Weightlessness makes astronauts grow several centimeters during a long mission.
• 89. The first living creature in space was the dog Laika on – board Sputnik 2 in 1957. Sadly, she died when the spacecraft’s oxygen supply ran out.
  90. The first manned space flight was made in April 1961 by the Soviet Cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin in Vostok 1.
• 91. The heart of a star reaches 16 million °C. A grain of sand this hot would kill someone 150 km away.
• 92. Stars twinkle because we see them through the wafting of the atmosphere.
• 93. The sun weighs 2,000 trillion trillion tones – about 300,000 times as much as the Earth – even though it is made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, the lightest gases in the Universe.
• 94. The sun gets hot because it is so big that the pressure in its core is so tremendous – enough to force the nuclei of hydrogen atoms to fuse to make helium atoms. This nuclear reaction is like a gigantic atom bomb and it releases huge amounts of heat.
• 95. The nuclear fusion reactions in the Sun’s core send out billions of light photons every minute but they take 10 million years to reach its surface.
• 96. The Hiroshima bombs released 84 trillion joules of energy. A supernova releases 125,000 trillion trillion times as such.
• 97. The most distant galaxies (quasars) have red shifts so big that they must be moving away from us at speeds approaching the speed of light.
• 98. When light waves from distant galaxies are stretched out his way, they look redder. This is called red shift.
• 99. The moon’s gravity is 17% of the Earth’s so astronauts in space suits can jump 4 m high on the moon.
• 100. The moon is the only other world that humans have set foot on. Because the moon has no atmosphere or wind, the footprints planted in its dusty surface in 1969 by the Apollo astronauts are still there today, perfectly preserved.

Interesting Space Facts 3

• 51. Planets have magnetic field around them because of the liquid iron in their cores. As the planets rotate, so the iron swirls, generating electric currents that create the magnetic field.
• 52. Earth’s atmosphere is the only atmosphere discovered till date that human can breathe in.
• 53. Earth’s atmosphere was formed from gases pouring out from volcanoes.
• 54. Jupiter has no surface for a spacecraft to land on because it is made mostly from helium gas and hydrogen. The massive pull of Jupiter’s gravity squeezes the hydrogen so hard that it is liquid.
• 55. Jupiter spins right round in less than 10 hours which means that the planet’s surface is moving at nearly 50,000 km/hr.
• 56. The first successful planetary space probe was the USA’s Mariner 2, which flew past Venus in 1962.
• 57. Voyager 2 has flown over 6 billion km and is heading out of the solar system after passing close to Neptune in 1989.
• 58. To save fuel on journeys to distant planets, space probes may use a nearby planet’s gravity to catapult them on their way. This is called slingshot.
• 59. Hubble’s law showed that Universe is getting bigger – and so must have started very small. This led to the idea of Big Bang.
• 60. It’s believed that it was the impact of a big meteorite may have chilled the earth and wiped out all the dinosaurs.
• 61. The first astronomers thought the regular pulses from far space might be signals from aliens, and pulsars were jokingly called LGMs (short for Little Green Men).
• 62. Pulsars probably result from a supernova explosion - that is why most are found in the flat disc of the Milky Way, where supernovae occur.
• 63. Three moons have yet been found to have their own moons: Saturn’s moon Titan, Jupiter’s Io, and Neptune’s Triton.
  64. The largest moon in the Solar System is the Jupiter’s moon Ganymede.
• 65. Saturn is not solid, but is made almost entirely of gas – mostly liquid hydrogen and helium. Only in the planet’s very small core is there any rock.
• 66. Winds ten times stronger than a hurricane on Earth swirl around Saturn’s equator reaching up to 1100 km/h – and they never let up: even for a moment.
• 67. The first space station was the Soviet Salyut 1 launched in April 1971; its low orbit meant it stayed up only five months.
• 68. In April 2001, Dennis Tito became the first space tourist, ferried up to the ISS by the Russian Soyuz space shuttle.
• 69. Einstein’s theory of general relativity shows that gravity not only pulls on matter, but also space and even ‘Time’ itself.
• 70. Since the star Deneb is 1800 light years away, we see it as it was when the emperor Septimus Severius was ruling the Rome (AD 200).
• 71. With powerful telescopes, astronomers can see galaxies 2 billion light years away. This means we see them as they were when the only life forms in Earth were bacteria.
• 72. The slowest rotating planet is Venus, which takes 243.01 days to turn around.
• 73. The fastest spinning objects in the Universe are neutron stars – these can rotate 500 times in just 1 second.
• 74. In summer in Uranus, the sun does not set for 20 years. In winter, darkness lasts for 20 years. In autumn, the sun rises and sets every 9 hours.
• 75. Uranus’s moon Miranda is the weirdest moon of all. It seems to have been blasted apart, and then put together again.

Interesting Space Facts 2

• 26. Twice during Mercury’s orbit, it gets so close to the Sun and speeds so much that the Sun seems to go backwards in the sky.
• 27. Nicolaus Copernicus was the astronomer who first suggested that the Sun was the centre, and that the Earth went round the sun.
• 28. The ideas of Copernicus came not from looking at the night sky, but from studying ancient astronomy.
• 29. As the earth turns, the stars come back to the same place in the night sky every 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.09 seconds. This is a sidereal day (star day).
• 30. When Neil Armstrong stepped on the Moon for the first time, he said these famous words: “That’s one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind.”
• 31. From the moon, astronauts brought back 380 kg of Moon rock.
• 32. During the moon landing, a mirror was left on the Moon’s surface to reflect a laser beam which measured the Moon’s distance from the Earth with amazing accuracy.
• 33. The stars in each constellation are named after a Greek alphabet.
• 34. The brightest star in each constellation is called the Alpha Star, the next brightest Beta, and so on.
• 35. The distance to the planets is measured by bouncing radar signals off them and timing how long the signals take to get there and back.
• 36. Spacecrafts have double hulls (outer coverings) which protect them against other space objects that crash into them.
• 37. Manned Spacecrafts have life support systems that provide oxygen to breathe, usually mixed with nitrogen (as in ordinary air). Charcoal filters out smells/
• 38. Spacecrafts toilets have to get rid of waste in low gravity conditions, Astronauts have to sit on a device which sucks away the waste. Solid waste is dried and dumped in space, but the water is saved.
  39. A comet’s tail is made as it nears the Sun and begins to melt. A vast plume of gas millions of kilometers across is blown out behind by the solar wind. The tail is what you see, shining as the sunlight catches it.
• 40. The Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet smashed into Jupiter in July 1994, with the biggest crash ever witnessed.
• 41. Giant stars have burned all their hydrogen, and so burn helium, fusing helium atoms to make carbon.
• 42. The constellation of Cygnus, the Swan, contains the very biggest star in the known universe – a hyper giant which is almost a million times as big as the sun.
• 43. Planet Uranus was discovered by William Herschel, who wanted to name the planet George, after King George III, but Uranus was eventually chosen.
• 44. The first rockets were made 1,000 years ago in China.
• 45. Robert Goddard launched the very first liquid-fuel rocket in 1926.
• 46. Over 100 artificial satellites are now launched into space every year, a few of which are space telescopes.
• 47. The lower a satellite’s orbit, the faster it must fly to avoid falling back to the Earth. Most satellites fly in low orbits, 300 km from the earth.
• 48. Hipparchus was the first astronomer to try to work out how far away the Sun is.
• 49. The red color of Mars is due to oxidized (rusted) iron in its soil.
• 50. Mars’s volcano Olympus Mons is the biggest in the solar system. It covers the same area as Ireland and is three times higher than our Mount Everest.

Interesting Space Facts

Space Facts-

• 1. Saturn's moon Titan has plenty of evidence of organic (life) chemicals in its atmosphere.
• 2. Life is known to exist only on Earth, but in 1986 NASA found what they thought might be fossils of microscopic living things in a rock from Mars.
• 3. Most scientists say life's basic chemicals formed on the Earth. The astronomer Fred Hoyle said they came from space.
• 4. Oxygen is circulated around the helmet in space suits in order to prevent the visor from misting.
• 5. The middle layers of space suits are blown up like a balloon to press against the astronaut's body. Without this pressure, the astronaut's body would boil!
• 6. The gloves included in the space suit have silicon rubber fingertips which allow the astronaut some sense of touch.
• 7. The full cost of a spacesuit is about $11 million although 70% of this is for the backpack and the control module.
• 8. Ever wondered how the pull of gravity is calculated between heavenly bodies? It's simple. Just multiply their masses together, and then divide the total by the square of the distance between them.
• 9. Glowing nebulae are named so because they give off a dim, red light, as the hydrogen gas in them is heated by radiation from the nearby stars.
• 10. The Drake Equation was proposed by astronomer Frank Drake to work out how many civilizations there could be in our galaxy - and the figure is in millions.
• 11. SETI is the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence - the program that analyzes radio signals from space for signs of intelligent life.
• 12. The Milky Way galaxy we live in: is one among the BILLIONS in space.
  13. The Milky Way galaxy is whirling rapidly, spinning our sun and all its other stars at around 100 million km per hour.
• 14. The Sun travels around the galaxy once every 200 million years – a journey of 100,000 light years.
• 15. There may be a huge black hole in the very middle of the most of the galaxies.
• 16. The Universe is probably about 15 billion years old, but the estimations vary.
• 17. One problem with working out the age of the Universe is that there are stars in our galaxy which are thought to be 14 to 18 billion years old – older than the estimated age of the Universe. So, either the stars must be younger, or the Universe older.
• 18. The very furthest galaxies are spreading away from us at more than 90% of the speed of light.
• 19. The Universe was once thought to be everything that could ever exist, but recent theories about inflation (e.g. Big Bang) suggest our universe may be just one of countless bubbles of space time.
• 20. The Universe may have neither a centre nor an edge, because according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, gravity bends all of space time around into an endless curve.
• 21. If you fell into a black hole, you would stretch like spaghetti.
• 22. Matter spiraling into a black hole is torn apart and glows so brightly that it creates the brightest objects in the Universe – quasars.
• 23. The swirling gases around a black hole turn it into an electrical generator, making it spout jets of electricity billions of kilometers out into space.
• 24. The opposite of black holes are estimated to be white holes which spray out matter and light like fountains.
• 25. A day in Mercury lasts approximately as long as 59 days on earth.

Some Facts To Blow Your Mind Out

1. Each of us is made up of 7 octillion atoms (7 followed 27 zeros) that are mostly empty space. If you could squeeze all the empty space out of those atoms, you could reduce the entire human race to the size of a sugar lump.

True. Look at this diagram of a hydrogen atom. Notice the distance between the nucleus and the electron. At true scale this distance is enormous. If you imagine the nucleus as a pea in the middle of a football stadium, then the electron would be a gnat whizzing around the very wedge of the top row of seats.

If you could bring the gnat right up close to the pea and eliminate all the empty space in between, then you could reduce humanity to the size of a sugar lump.

In the book Finn's mad scientist Uncle Al builds a machine that can squash out some of this empty space, reducing Finn and a bunch of soldiers to 150th of their actual size.

True or false:

2. You can take an insect, turn it into a bullet and fire it out of a gun.

False. It would vaporise and there'd be bits of legs and guts everywhere. It might make your enemy go "Ur.." but it wouldn't kill them. Although you can weaponise an insect and turn it into a killing machine in its own right.

In World War Two the Japanese dropped infected fleas over China to spread cholera, killing nearly half a million people. During the Cold War each side developed horrific insect killing machines - hybrid fleas, mosquitoes and other insects that would carry and spread diseases and other lethal biological or nerve agents. The plan was to drop them over enemy cities or armies.

In the book, the Scarlatti Wasp was developed during research into just such a program, but the project was shelved because it was so horrific. And then someone released it...

True or false:

3. Our sense of smell works, not chemically by scent molecules locking onto receptors in the nose, but by quantum vibration, whereby smells wobble some strange bit of our noses in a way we don't really understand.

True. Possibly. For many years medical science has assumed smell is a chemical process. Some scientists now think that scent molecules wobble about in such a way they emit an electron that can be picked up by smell receptors in the nose. In part it could explain the fantastic sense of smell some animals and insects have. Bloodhounds have a sense of smell 10 to 100 million times more powerful than a human's. A silkworm can smell a mate seven miles away.

In my book the Scarlatti wasps can pick up each other's scent over tens of miles.

True or false:

4. There are 14 million insects on earth for every single human being, or in other words 14 million insects that can be apportioned to you personally. Call them your own private army.

False. In fact there are at least 140 million insects per person. Do the math. The number of insects in existence is thought to be 10 to the power of 18 or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000; the global human population is thought to be 7,100,000,000: making a neat 142,857,142.86 per head. Let's just hope they never turn on us...

In my book Finn collects just a tiny fraction of his share, which seems fair enough. If you go to his website he'll show you how to set up a lamp trap and start a collection of your own.

True or false:

5. Niels Bohr – the father of sub-atomic physics and a true genius of the 20th century and possibly the brainiest man ever to walk the planet – used to be a footballer.

True. He used to play in goal for the Danish side Akademisk Boldklub, and his brother played in mid-field (was so good in fact he played for Denmark). Everybody in Denmark loved Niels, he was brainy, personable, an all round super star and national hero. So much so the Danish brewer Carlsberg built him a house and gifted him a lifetime supply of free beer. Hic.

If it weren't for him, Uncle Al would never have been able to build the Boldklub Accelerator which reduces the size of atoms.

Other notable if unlikely goalkeepers include Albert Camus (French existential novelist), Pope John-Paul 2nd (last Pope but one), Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes) and Che Guevara (Cuban revolutionary).

True or false:

6. Polo mints possess a quality called "triboluminescence" which means they will light up when snapped in half.

True. Find a very dark place and snap or crush a Polo mint and it will release a tiny flash of light. It is thought this is caused by the electrons trapped in the crystalline structure of the sugars being released suddenly and violently: they rush about to find a new place to go – hence the glow.

The same can be observed when opening a strip of sellotape along the line where the adhesive bond is being unbroken. Also it's a property of certain minerals.

In the book Finn wears round his neck a piece of the mineral sphalerite which belonged to his father, then his mother, and which passed on to him after her death. It will glow simply by being scratched and he likes to keep it next to his heart.

True or false:

7. Trees blow up when lightning strikes.

True. The water inside them instantly boils and expands blowing most of the tree to smithereens. This isn't in the book, I just love it as a fact.

True or false:

8. Great White Sharks are more deadly than mosquitoes.

False. Bite for bite, sure the shark is nastier, but in terms of slaughter there's no comparison. Mosquito bites – which spread diseases like malaria – kill an estimated one million people per year – mostly children under five – while less than six are killed by shark bites. In fact hippos, deers, bees, dogs, ants, jellyfish, cows, horses spiders and snakes are all more likely to kill you than a shark. But then who wants to see a horror movie call Moo?

So don't be concerned that a few insects get wasted in the book. There's a lot of machine gun blood and guts action against spiders, ants – wasps certainly – very few of which are innocent.

True or false:

9. Pigs can be killed, near frozen and brought back to life.

True. Scientists have anesthetised pigs, drained their blood, nearly frozen them (getting down to 10C) , then reversed the process and brought them successfully back to life with an electric shock. They don't technically die, they are kept in a state of suspended animation.

Many insect species (with the right type of blood) can be kept at a temperature of -10C for very long periods and still come back to life. The larvae of one type of midge can be kept in liquid nitrogen at temperature of -200C for three days and still pop up as good as new.

The Scarlatti wasp is kept on ice in a state of suspended animation for many years before being brought back to life.

True or false:

10. If aliens on a planet 65 million light years away are looking at us right now, all they'll see are dinosaurs.

True. When you look out into space you're not just seeing a place, you're also seeing a time – the time it's taken the light to travel to you.

The universe is both very much smaller and much larger than we tend to think. A light year is the distance travelled by light in the course of a year. Or 5.88 trillion miles. So 5.88 trillion times 65 million makes… a Lot.

Indeed the total size of the observable universe is 46 billion light years – and that may be only the start of it. It may be infinite, and one of an infinite number of parallel universes…

What's out there? God? Aliens? More science?
Such thoughts make my brain ache, but here's another thought to bear in mind across the Infinity Drake series.

Finn's father, Ethan Drake, went missing during an experiment into this kind of thing. Nobody knows how it happened, and nobody knows where he is. But maybe, somehow, somewhere out there… there is an answer. Keep reading!

Interesting Happy Facts

1. Sea otters hold hands when they sleep to keep from drifting apart.

2. When you were born, you were, for a moment, the youngest person on earth.

3. The elements that we are composed of were formed in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are all made of star dust.

4. Cows have best friends.

5. A prison in Washington pairs up “death row” shelter cats with select inmates as part of a rehabilitation program. It seems to be a pretty wonderful thing for both the inmates and the cats.

6. Blind people smile even though they’ve never seen anyone else smile.

7. Turtles can breathe through their butts.

8. The Beatles used the word “love” 613 times in their songs.

9. Squirrels plant thousands of new trees each year simply by forgetting where they put their acorns.

10. Macaques in Japan use coins to buy vending machine snacks.

11. A BBC News program broadcast in 1957 ended claiming that spaghetti grew on trees on a farm in Switzerland. Many viewers believed the report and called the BBC asking how to grow their own trees. Their response: “Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”

12. Norway knighted a penguin.

13. In China, killing a Panda is punishable by death.

14. Rats laugh when tickled.

15. The voices of Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse got married in real life.

16. Spiders can’t fly.

17. Sweden has a rabbit show jumping competition called Kaninhoppning.

18. Gentoo penguins propose to their lifemates with a pebble.

19. Dolphins have names for each other.

20. Kissing burns 2 calories a minute. Undressing burns 8.

21. Puffins mate for life. They make their homes on cliff sides and even leave some separate room for their toilet.

22. The Kingdom of Bhutan uses “Gross National Happiness” as an important national measurement.

23. When playing with female puppies, male puppies will often let them win, even if they have a physical advantage.

24. Pigs’ orgasms last for 30 minutes.

25. A study measuring the effects of music found that cows produce more milk when listening to soothing music. They produce the most when listening to R.E.M’s “Everybody Hurts.”

26. There is a program that makes prison inmates responsible for training and raising seeing-eye dogs. Many reported that they felt like they were making amends for their past actions by working with the puppies.

27. Google, the periodic table, the structure of our DNA, and “Yesterday” by the Beatles are all ideas that were conceived in dreams.

Amazing Facts

1. If you are struck by lightning, your skin will be heated to 28,000 degrees Centigrade, hotter than the surface of the Sun.

2. If you trace your family tree back 25 generations, you will have 33,554,432 direct ancestors – assuming no incest was involved.

3. The average distance between the stars in the sky is 20 million miles.

4. It would take a modern spaceship 70,000 years to get to the nearest star to earth.

5. An asteroid wiped out every single dinosaur in the world, but not a single species of toad or salamander was affected. No one knows why, nor why the crocodiles and tortoises survived.

6. If you dug a well to the centre of the Earth, and dropped a brick in it, it would take 45 minutes to get to the bottom – 4,000 miles down.

7. Your body sheds 10 billion flakes of skin every day.

8. The Earth weighs 6,500 million million million tons.

9. Honey is the only food consumed by humans that doesn’t go off.

10. The Hawaiian alphabet has only 12 letters.

11. A donkey can sink into quicksand but a mule can’t.

12. Every time you sneeze your heart stops a second.

13. There are 22 miles more canals in Birmingham UK than in Venice.

14. Potato crisps were invented by a Mr Crumm.

15. Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in their correct order.

16. Eskimoes have hundreds of words for snow but none for hello.

17. The word “set” has the most definitions in the English language.

18. The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating its letters is uncopyrightable.

19. Windmills always turn counter-clockwise.

20. The “Sixth Sick Sheik’s Sixth Sheep’s Sick” is the hardest tongue-twister.

21. The longest English word without a vowel is twyndyllyngs which means "twins".

22. 1 x 8 + 1 = 9; 12 x 8 + 2 = 98; 123 x 8 + 3 = 987; 1234 x 8 + 4 = 9876; 12345 x 8 + 5 = 98765; 123456 x 8 + 6 = 987654; 1234567 x 8 + 7 = 9876543; 12345678 x 8 + 8 = 98765432; 123456789 x 8 + 9 = 987654321

23. The word "dreamt" is the only common word in the English language that ends in "mt".

24. Albert Einstein never wore any socks.

25. The average human will eat 8 spiders while asleep in their lifetime.

26. In space, astronauts cannot cry because there is no gravity.

27. Hummingbirds are the only creatures that can fly backwards.

28. An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.

29. Cockroaches can live 9 days without their heads before they starve to death.

30. A flamingo can eat only when its head is upside down.

31. The lighter was invented before the match.

32. It is physically impossible for pigs to look up at the sky.

33. The average person has over 1,460 dreams a year!

34. Scientists with high-speed cameras have discovered that rain drops are not tear shaped but rather look like hamburger buns.

35. The first Internet domain name ever registered was Symbolics.com on March 15, 1985.

36. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone back in 1876, only six phones were sold in the first month.

37. Approximately 7.5% of all office documents get lost.

38. Business.com is currently the most expensive domain name sold: for $7.5 million.

39. In 2001, the five most valuable brand names in order were Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, GE, and Nokia.

40. In Canada, the most productive day of the working week is Tuesday.

41. In a study by the University of Chicago in 1907, it was concluded that the easiest colour to spot is yellow. This is why John Hertz, who is the founder of the Yellow Cab Company picked cabs to be yellow.

42. It takes about 63,000 trees to make the newsprint for the average Sunday edition of The New York Times.

43. On average a business document is copied 19 times.

44. The largest employer in the world is the Indian railway system in India, employing over 1.6 million people.

45. Warner Chappel Music owns the copyright to the song "Happy Birthday." They make over $1 million in royalties every year from the commercial use of the song.

46. All babies are colour-blind when they are born.

47. Children grow faster in the springtime than any other season during the year.

48. Each nostril of a human being registers smells in a different way. Smells that are made from the right nostril are more pleasant than the left. However, smells can be detected more accurately when made by the left nostril.

49. Humans are born with 350 bones in their body, however when a person reaches adulthood they only have 206 bones. This occurs because many of them join together to make a single bone.

50. May babies are on average 200 grams heavier than babies born in other months.

51. Leonardo da Vinci was dyslexic, and he often wrote backwards.

52. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler had only one testicle.

53. Queen Lydia Liliuokalani was the last reigning monarch of the Hawaiian Islands. She was also the only Queen the United States ever had.

54. Rolling Stones band member Bill Wyman married a 19 year-old model Mandy Smith in 1988. At the same time Wyman's son was engaged to Mandy Smith's mother. If his son had married Smith's mother, Wyman would have been the step grandfather to his own wife.

55. There are 158 verses in the Greek National Anthem.

56. There are about 6,800 languages in the world.

57. There was no punctuation until the 15th century.

58. Children laugh about 400 times a day, while adults laugh on average only 15 times a day.

59. The coconut is the largest seed in the world.

60. There is cyanide in apple pips.

61. If you were to take 1 lb. of spiders web and stretch it out it would circle the whole way around the world!

62. If every person in China stood on a chair and jumped off at the same time...it would knock the earth off its axis!

63. A mole can dig a tunnel 300 feet long in just one night!

64. The shortest war on record, between Britain and Zanzibar in 1896, lasted just 38 minutes.

65. The Shell Oil Company originally began as a novelty shop in London that sold seashells.

66. The symbols + (addition) and – (subtraction) came into general use in 1489.

67. If you save one penny and double it every successive day, (day two you have 2 pennies and day three you have 4 pennies, and so on), by the end of 30 days you’ll have $5,368,708! (or £’s or whatever currency).

68. It is not possible to tickle yourself. The cerebellum, a part of the brain, warns the rest of the brain that you are about to tickle yourself. Since your brain knows this, it ignores the resulting sensation.

69. The best time for a person to buy shoes is in the afternoon. This is because the foot tends to swell a bit around this time.

70. The typical lead pencil can draw a line that is thirty-five miles long.

71. Due to precipitation, for a few weeks, K2 is taller than Mt. Everest.

72. Astronauts get taller when they are in space.

73. There are over one hundred billion galaxies with each galaxy having billions of stars.

74. The surface area of the lungs is roughly the same size as a tennis court.

75. A dog can hear sounds that are 100 times fainter than the faintest sounds that a person can hear. If a person can just hear a noise that is coming from 10 feet away, a dog could hear that same noise from 100 feet away.

76. If a sole (a type of fish) lays upon a chessboard it can change the colouring of its body to match the pattern of the chess board. The sole takes about 4 minutes to make the change.

77. Of all the animals on earth the mosquito has contributed to the deaths of more people than any other animal.

78. In the courts of the Roman Empire, instead of swearing an oath on a bible, men swore to the truth on their statements while holding their genitals. Hence the word 'testify', from 'testicles'.

79. The first soap powder, produced in 1907, was made with Perborate and Silicate - hence its brand name, Persil.

80. If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, there would be 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 from the Americas and 8 Africans. Only 1 would own a computer.

81. All elephants walk on tiptoe, because the back portion of their foot is made up of all fat and no bone.

82. Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.

83. Hawaii has the only royal palace in the United States.

84. Chicken liver can be used to change A type blood to O type blood.

85. It takes only 8 minutes for sunlight to travel from the sun to the earth, which also means, if you see the sun go out, it actually went out 8 minutes ago.

86. The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue.

87. An octopus has 3 hearts.

88. If the population of China walked past you in single file, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.

89. The hair on a polar bear is not white, but clear. They reflect light, so they appear white.

90. Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people do.

91. The combination "ough" can be pronounced in 9 different ways; Read this: "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed."

92. The blue whale has a heart the size of a small car and its blood vessel is so broad, that a person could swim through it.

93. A left-handed person finds it easier to open a jar than a right-handed person because they can supply a stronger anticlockwise turning force than a right-handed person. However a right-handed person will find it easier to tighten the jar up afterwards.

94. The orbit of the Moon about the Earth would fit easily inside the Sun.

95. A chameleon can move its eyes in two directions at the same time.

96. Typewriter is the longest word that can be made only using one row on the keyboard.

97. Because of the rotation of earth you can throw a ball farther to the west than to the east.

98. The name of all the continents ends with the same letter that they start with.

99. Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.

100. There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar (euro, pound).