Amazing Facts » General Facts About The World For Kids

According to a research conducted by scientists at Stanford, Princeton, and Berkeley and published in the Science Advances journal, it has reported that our planet is entering a new period of extinction with top scientists warning that species all over the world are “essentially the walking dead,” including humans.

The Guardian has further reported that vertebrates were vanishing at a rate 114 times faster than normal. They also added that such a similar event was 65 million years ago, when dinosaurs disappeared, most probably because of an asteroid. "We are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event," one of the authors of the paper told the BBC. The research also reports that climate change, pollution and deforestation as causes for the rapid change.

• If our Sun was just about two inches in radius, the nearest star would be at least 445 miles away.
• It takes eight minutes and seventeen seconds for light to travel from the Sun's surface to our planet.
• In five billion years, the Sun will short on fuel and transform into a red giant.
• Our oldest radio broadcasts of the nineteen thirties would have effectively travelled by now a distance of 100,000 stars.
• Our planet is over 4.5 billion years of age, the same age as the Sun and the Moon.
• Our planet rotates on its axis at a speed of 1,000 miles per hour, but it revolves around the sun at a fantastic speed of67,000 miles per hour.
• Utopia is a vast, smooth lying territory on the planet Mars.
• If you were able to drive your car upwards, you would connect in space, in just about an hour. Astronauts cannot burp, as there is no gravity to split up fluid from gas in their stomach.
• Every second around a hundred lightning jolts strike the world.
• Every year the Earth experiences over a million quake tremors.
• Every year, lightning strikes kill over a thousand people.
• The dinosaurs had been wiped out much before the Alps or Rockies were created.
• In 1986, the biggest ever hailstone, fell in Bangladesh and weighed over 1 kg.
• In 1999, an iceberg broke from the Antarctic ice ridge and it was the size of London.
• The air at the summit of Everest is only one-third that of the air at sea level.
• The tallest tree ever measured was 435 feet tall and was an Australian eucalyptus.
• Each individual sheds over 40 pounds of skin from their time they are born and until they die. In 1953, it was Watson and Crick who determined the molecular structure of the DNA.
• It was the Swiss scientist Friedrich Mieschler, who discovered DNA in 1869.
• However, the first artificial DNA was first created by US researchers in 1997.
• While the crayfish has 200 chromosomes, humans have only 46 chromosomes.
• The human stomach would digest itself if not for its coating of mucus.
• The first primary heart transplant was done in 1967, but the patient lived only for 18 days.
• UN projected as 12 October 1999 was pronounced as the Day of Six Billion.
• It was in 1866, that Alfred Nobel invented dynamite.
• It was in 1250, an Englishman by the name of Roger Bacon invented the magnifying glass.
• It was in 1607, that Galileo Galilei invented the thermometer.
• The wingspan of a Boeing 747 is greater than the Wright Brother’s initial flight.
• In 1895, Wilhelm Konrad Rontgen won the first Nobel Prize for discovering X-Rays.
• The acceleration of a flea’s jump is close to 20 times that of a space shuttle during its launch.
• The largest known species of the human tapeworm can grow up to 30 meters.
• The electric eel is known to product electrical shocks of up to 650 volts.
• The mortality rate for the Ebola Virus is four out five humans.
• Giraffes often sleep for only twenty minutes in a twenty-four hour period.
• Giraffes, however may sleep up to two hours in short bursts, and sleep standing up.
• The call of the whale is louder than the Concorde and can be heard over 500 miles.
• The day Bell was cremated; the US phone network was shut down for a minute in tribute.
• Wireless telephone network took a leap in 1962 after the launch of Telstar, the first satellite capable of exclusively relaying satellite TV and telephone signals.
• The total length of the blood vessels in the human body stretches up to 66,000 miles.
• A single red blood cell takes about 60 seconds to cover this entire length of the body.
• Wine was first made in Egypt around 2300 BC.
• The Australian billygoat plum contains over hundred times Vitamin C more than an orange.