20 Interesting Science Facts (#5)
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- 7up contained the mood-stabilising drug lithium citrate until 1950.
- 620 million years ago, a day was only 21.9 hours long.
- When the moon is directly overhead, you weigh slightly less.
- A jiffy was originally a unit of time which was equal to the time it takes light to travel one cm.
- Hyenas are more closely related to cats than dogs.
- The tails of comets generally point away from the Sun no matter what direction they are travelling.
- Argon comes from the greek word αργον, which means lazy.
- Magnesium is the 10th most abundant element in the human body.
- A Neutron star the same size as Brooklyn would be 500,000 times the mass of the Earth.
- In Britain, around 13% of men and 11% of women are left-handed, compared to just 3% of those born before 1910.
- October 10 is National Metric Day.
- A can of coke will sink in water, but a can of diet coke will float.
- Airports at higher altitudes need a longer airstrip due to lower air density.
- That sudden jerk you sometimes experience when you are half asleep is called a “Hypnic Jerk.”
- Light takes 8 minutes 17 seconds to travel from the Sun to the Earth.
- In 5 billion years the Sun will turn into a Red Giant.
- Inbreeding causes 3 out of every 10 Dalmation dogs to suffer from hearing disability.
- The deepest part of the world’s oceans is the Mariana trench in the Pacific that reaches a depth of 10.911 km.
- The Mariana trench is not the closest seabed to the centre of the earth. This is because the Earth is not a perfect sphere.
- At the bottom of the Mariana trench the pressure is over one thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level.
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