Fast Facts
April 7, 2006
- A space vehicle must move at a rate of 7 miles per second to escape Earth’s gravitational pull. This is equivalent to traveling from New York to Philadelphia in about 20 seconds.
A fetus acquires fingerprints at the age of 3 months.
A fingernail or toenail takes about 6 months to grow from base to tip.
A human being loses an average of 40 to 100 strands of hair a day.
A person will die from total lack of sleep sooner than from starvation. Death will occur after about 10 days without sleep, while starvation takes a few weeks.
According to German researchers, the risk of heart attack is higher on Monday than any other day of the week.
Blondes have more hair than dark-haired people.
By age 60, most people have lost half their taste buds.
Every time you lick a stamp, you are consuming one-tenth of a calorie.
Laughing lowers levels of stress hormones and strengthens the immune system. Six-year-olds laugh an average of 300 times a day. Adults only laugh 15 to 100 times a day.
The largest cell in the human body is the female ovum, or egg cell. It is about 1/180 inch in diameter. The smallest cell in the human body is the male sperm. It takes about 175,000 sperm cells to weigh as much as a single egg cell.
A lump of pure gold the size of a matchbook can be flattened into a sheet the size of a tennis court.
Mercury is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature.
The only rock that floats in water is pumice.
There are more atoms in a bucketful of water than there are bucketfuls of water in the Atlantic Ocean.
In 5 billion years the sun will run out of fuel and turn into a red giant.
The first live televised murder was in 1963, when Jack Ruby killed John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, while millions of viewers watched.
