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1861/ A car travelling
at a constant speed of 60 miles per hour would take longer
than 48 million years to reach the nearest star (other than
our Sun), Proxima Centauri. This is about 685,000 average
human lifetimes
1862/ Crabs are 10-legged
animals that walk sideways. There are almost 5,000 different
species of crabs; about 4,500 are true crabs, plus about 500
are hermit crabs (hermit crabs don't have a very hard shell
and use other animals' old shells for protection). Most crabs
live in the oceans, but many, like the robber crab, live on
land.
1863/ A brown dwarf is
a very small, dark object, with a mass less than 1/10 that
of the Sun. They are "failed stars" – globules
of gas that have shrunk under gravity, but failed to ignite
and shine as stars.
1864/ A dog was killed
by a meteor at Nakhla, Egypt, in 1911. The unlucky canine
is the only creature known to have been killed by a meteor.
1865/ The biggest crab
is the Japanese Spider crab (Macrocheira kaempferi), which
lives on the floor of the north Pacific Ocean; it has a 12
ft (3.7 m) leg span. The biggest land crab is the Coconut
crab (Birgus latro), which lives on islands in the Pacific
Ocean; it has a leg span up to 2.5 ft (75 cm).
1866/ A pulsar is a small
star made up of neutrons so densely packed together that if
one the size of a silver dollar landed on Earth, it would
weigh approximately 100 million tons.
1867/ Atherosclerosis
(the narrowing of the walls of the coronary arteries) is caused
by a build up of fatty material called atheroma. Atheroma
develops when LDL cholesterol undergoes a chemical process
known as "oxidation" and is taken up by cells in
the coronary artery walls, which then starts to narrow the
lumen of the artery,
1868/ The word "ceramics"
comes from the Greek word "Keramos" meaning "Pottery,"
"Potter's Clay," or "a Potter." This Greek
word is related to an old Sanskrit root meaning "to burn"
but was primarily used to mean "burnt stuff."
1869/ U.S. book sales
totaled $26,874,100,000 in 2002, a 5.5 percent increase over
2001, according to figures just released by the Association
of American Publishers (AAP).
1870/ A dairy cow drinks
20-50 gallons of water a day - about as much as a full bathtub.
1871/ Winds ten times
stronger than a hurricane on Earth blow around Saturn's equator.
Wind speeds can reach 1,100 mph.
1872/ The milk bottle
was invented in 1884 by Dr. Hervey D. Thatcher, Potsdam, New
York.
1873/ The Earth rotates
on its axis more slowly in March than in September.
1874/ Wisconsin and California
lead the United States in milk production.
1875/ The first spacecraft
to send back pictures of the far side of the Moon was Luna
3 in October 1959. The photographs covered about 70 percent
of the far side.
1876/ Dairy cows produce
the most milk of any mammal in the world.
1877/ In the history
of the solar system, 30 billion comets have been lost or destroyed.
That amounts to only 30 percent of the estimated number that
remain.
1878/ The average U.S.
dairy cow produces 22.5 quarts of milk each day. That’s
about 16,000 glasses of milk per year - enough for about 40
people.
1879/ Milk and other
dairy products supply 70% of the calcium in the U.S. food
supply.
1880/ The nation that
achieves the highest milk production per cow is Japan. Japan’s
cows average 17,500 pounds of milk a year compared to the
more than 16,000 pounds per cow per year produced by dairy
cows in the United States.
Click on the links below for more great
facts...
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