BBC Focus Magazine

[King Random]

Post here all your weird and wonderful science and tech (S+T) facts.

You can also do pure trivia (or similar) as long as it is not rude.

Me - Trivia : Yahoo! derived its name from the word Yahoo coined by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels. A Yahoo is a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human!

Me - Tech : An atomic clock is accurate to within 1 second in 1,7 million years.

[M Paul Lloyd]

A very nice idea.......hopefully BBC Radio 2 Programmes - Steve Wright in the Afternoon
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006wr4r will not wish to sue us for borrowing their idea??

So I'll see your Yahoo and Atomic Clock and raise you a Factisimal ( no? ) of my own.

The modern compass has 360 degrees because it is based upon the ancient Babylonian base sixty system which was first formulated around 3100 bc.

It is also the basis of our standard clockface and time keeping system.

Not bad for people who lived over five thousand years ago.

Whilst our modern computers use a much simpler binary, base two, system ...... makes me wonder if we are quite as advanced as we like to think we are?

[Shadowwolf]

Well the Yahoo one explains a lot

I'll get back, need to recall something suitably inane.

[King Random]

1,525,000,000 miles of telephone wire a strung across the U.S.

[...]

if you were to lay out your large and small intestine in a straight line along the ground you'd be in all kinds of trouble, but you would find out that it measures between 8 and 10 meters long

[King Random]

A dragonfly has a lifespan of 24 hours.

Here are some more: http://www.tealdragon.net/humor/facts/facts.htm

[ChrisH]

There are 62,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body – laid end to end they would circle the earth 2.5 times

[Doonhamer]

The hottest part of a chilli is not the seeds, but the white pithy membrane that the seeds attach to...

[M Paul Lloyd]

It is? Oh dear, and I have been throwing that bit away.

[ChrisH]

You take a chess board and place one grain of rice on the first square, two grains on the second square four on the next square and so on, putting double the amount on each square as you go.

To complete all 64 squares you will need 100 tons of rice for every person in the world. It takes about 1000 years to produce this much rice.
You would also need a very big chess board as well

[King Random]

If you got a piece of rice and put it into the USA and then doubled it 50 times, the USA would be 5 inches deep in rice!

Also, if you had a huge piece of paper and cut it in half and then put the 2 pieces together and did that 50 times, you would end up with a pile of paper 13,500,000 miles high!

[M Paul Lloyd]

Bees build hives from wax and Wasps build nests from paper but they both have hexagonal egg laying cells.

[King Random]

The are just as many neurons in the brain as there are stars in the Milky Way.

The average person dreams 5 times each night, although you only remember the one that you woke up in the middle of.

[nemisis1960]

Right up to the 20th century, pound bars of salt (called amoleh) were the basic currency in Abyssinia (now called Ethiopia). strange but true

[M Paul Lloyd]

The Bristol-Ferranti Bloodhound missile (developed during the late 1950's) could accelerate from a zero launch to mach 2.7 (around 2,000 mph) in just over 3 seconds.

Beat that one Top Gear.

[nemisis1960]

The Bristol-Ferranti Bloodhound missile (developed during the late 1950's) could accelerate from a zero launch to mach 2.7 (around 2,000 mph) in just over 3 seconds.

Beat that one Top Gear.

Dunno a caravan with hamster pushing it in a veyron over the edge of a cliff might

[nemisis1960]

First novel ever written on a typewriter was "Tom Sawyer"

[M Paul Lloyd]

First science fiction novel.
Written in 80ad 'Vera Historia' 'True History' by Lucian of Samosata about a voyage to the moon.

[nemisis1960]

Watch Raiders of the Lost Ark at the part where Indy is in a snake pit and in the background you can see hieroglyphics of C3PO and R2D2 on one of the walls.

[nemisis1960]

Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliaphobia

Is the fear of long words.