There are more possible iterations of a game of chess than there are atoms in the known universe. There are also more ways to arrange a deck of cards than atoms in the known universe.
Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
It can take a photon 100,000 years to travel from the core of the sun to the surface, but only 8 minutes to travel the rest of the way to earth. This is due to the extreme density of the core of the Sun (150 times that of water).
It would take roughly 1.1 million mosquitoes, all sucking at once, to completely drain the average human of blood. The average human has 1.75 square metres of skin, so this would mean about 63 mosquitoes per square centimeter of your skin.
Written language was developed independently by the Egyptians, Mesopotamians (the Sumer language), Chinese, and Mesoamericans (such as the Olmecs and Zapotecs). There is also evidence of possible forms of writing developed in other regions, such as Polynesia.
Atoms are made up of mostly empty space. If the nucleus of an atom was the size of a football, the nearest electron would be 0.8km away. That means even the most solid-looking objects we see are predominantly nothingness. Put another way, if you were to remove all the empty space in the atoms that make up a human being, they would be a lot smaller than a grain of salt. In fact, you would be able to fit 6 billion of us inside a single apple.
Honey does not spoil. You could feasibly eat 3000 year old honey. It does, however, crystallise with time, but all you have to do is put it in water and warm it until it's back to its original state and you can eat it. This has been observed by archaeologists excavating Egyptina tombs, finding pots of honey thousands of years old yet still preserved.
If you somehow found a way to extract all of the gold from the bubbling core of our lovely little planet, it is estimated that there would be enough to cover the surface of the planet in 13 inches.
To know when to mate, a male giraffe will continuously headbutt the female in the bladder until she urinates. The male then tastes the pee and that helps it determine whether the female is ovulating.
The largest known living organism by mass is a clonal colony of quaking aspen trees. Pando (Latin for I spread out) is a group of genetically identical quaking aspens in Utah with an interconnected root system. It's an estimated 80,000 years old and takes up more than 400000 square metres. The largest organism by area is a colony of honey fungus in Oregon, which has almost as much biomass as Pando.
The blue whale is the largest animal to have ever lived, reaching a confirmed max length of 29.9 meters and weight of 173 tonnes, dwarfing even the biggest dinosaurs and our biggest megaladon estimates. Their hearts are the size of a small car and have blood vessels so big that a small child could swim through. Our first ever recording of a blue whale's heartbeat showed their heartbeat staying within a range of 2-37bpm. For reference, the average human's resting heartrate is between 60-100bpm.
Four times more people speak English as a second language than as a native one. It's the most widely spoken tongue in the world, with nearly two billion people learning it as a second language and only around 460 million people speaking it natively. As of 2012, India claims to have the world's second-largest English-speaking population at 125 million people, second only to the USA (330 million).
About 400-500 grapes go into one bottle of wine. That's approximately 2kg per bottle.
Once, a Texas man was hospitalized when a bullet he shot at an armadillo ricocheted off the animal and hit him in the jaw. Despite several reports saying bullets ricocheted off of armadillos, these creatures are not bulletproof. Their shells are made of bony plates called osteoderms that grow in the skin. They're loosely connected for flexibility and are covered by a layer of keratin, the protein that makes up hair, nails, and horns. The shell protects the armadillos from thorny shrubs, under which they can hide from predators.
Chess is called the game of kings. The history of chess can be traced back nearly 1500 years, although the earliest origins are uncertain. The earliest predecessor of the game probably originated in India, before the 6th century AD. From India, the game spread to Persia. When the Arabs conquered Persia, chess was taken up by the Muslim world and subsequently spread to Southern Europe. In Europe, chess evolved into roughly its current form in the 15th century.
It might seem safe to assume that the Canary Islands were named after canary birds, but the location was actually named after dogs. Although it's off the coast of northwestern Africa, the archipelago is actually part of Spain. In Spanish, the area's name is Islas Canarias, which comes from the Latin phrase 'Canariae Insulae' which means 'island of dogs.'
When 174 world leaders signed the Paris Agreement on Earth Day in 2016 at the United Nations (UN) headquarters in New York, it was the largest number of countries ever to come together to sign anything on a single day, according to the UN. The agreement aimed to combat climate change and accelerate and intensify the actions and investments needed to strengthen the global climate effort.
Earthquakes can range from minor tremors that are barely noticeable to building-toppling ground-shakers that cause massive destruction. But it's an inevitable part of life for those who live in countries such as China, Indonesia, Iran, and Turkey, which are some of the most earthquake-prone places on the planet. However, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, Japan records the most earthquakes in the world, but other countries such as Indonesia, Tonga or Fiji likely have the most earthquakes per unit area.
According to the Population Reference Bureau, since the time 'modern' Homo sapiens first hit the scene 50,000 years ago, more than 108 billion members of our species have been born. And a large chunk of that number is alive right now. According to the bureau, the number of people alive today represents a whopping seven percent of the total number of humans who have ever lived.
Not everyone lives in a booming city or sprawling suburb. Many people still make their homes outside of bustling locations-especially in India, which has the largest number of people living in rural areas (approximately 737 million people live outside of the city). China also has an impressively large rural population, with 545 million living outside of urban areas.
While modern nation states known as countries are relatively new, many nations can trace back their history hundreds or thousands of years (for example, Greece). But South Sudan in North Africa just gained its independence from Sudan in 2011, which currently makes it the youngest country in the world (with widespread recognition). It gained independence from the Republic of Sudan after a decades long civil war which ended in 2005. As of 2019, South Sudan unfortunately ranks third-lowest in the UN World Happiness Report, and second-lowest on the Global Peace Index.
The British royal family may be the most famous royal family on the planet, but there are still plenty of other nobles out there. In total, there are 26 royal families, and a total of 44 sovereign states around the world with a monarch as their Head of State. Examples include Japan, Spain, Swaziland, Bhutan, Thailand, Monaco, Sweden and the Netherlands
Panda diplomacy is the practice of sending giant pandas from China to other countries as a tool of diplomacy. While the practice has been recorded as far back as the Tang dynasty, when Empress Wu Zetian sent a pair of giant pandas to Emperor Tenmu of Japan in 685CE, the term only came into popular use during the Cold War. The People's Republic of China began to use panda diplomacy more prominently in the 1950s, and has continued the practice into the present day. However, in 1984 they adopted a loan policy which meant that subsequent pandas would be loaned, not gifted, so almost all giant pandas worldwide belong to China.
During his lifetime between 1162 and 1227, Genghis Khan fathered countless children.When Mongol armies attacked, the most beautiful women were reserved for Genghis. One thirteenth century Persian historian claimed that within a century of Khan's birth, his enthusiastic mating habits had created a lineage of more than 20,000 individuals. And while we may never know exactly how many offspring the leader of the Mongol Empire had, an international team of geneticists found that around 1 in every 200 men (around 16 million people) are direct descendants of his, according to a 2003 historical genetics paper.
Tokyo is a booming city-not only by Japanese standards, but also compared to cities around the world. With around 37 million people living in Tokyo, it's the world's largest city when it comes to population size, according to Reuters. The next largest city is Delhi, India (population 29 million) and Shanghai, China (population 26 million).
Canadians say 'sorry' so much that a law was passed in 2009 called the Apology Act declaring that an apology can't be used as evidence of admission to guilt.
Scientists previously thought that the moon's volcanic activity died down a billion years ago. But new data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, hints that lunar lava flowed much more recently, perhaps less than 100 million years ago. This would mean that there could still have been volcanic activity on the moon back when dinosaurs were still around.
There were two AI chatbots created by Facebook to talk to each other, but they were shut down after they started communicating in a gibberish language they made for themselves. These AIs were made to trade with each other, and started speaking in this gibberish because no language enforcement was set for them, and their only goal was to trade, so English became irrelevant. The code and documentation for these AIs is publicly available and you can run them yourself if you want to.
In 2009, Stephen Hawking held a reception for time travelers, but didn't publicize it until after. This way, only those who could time travel would be able to attend. Nobody else attended.
In World War II, Germany tried to collapse the British economy by dropping millions of counterfeit bills over London. This was known as Operation Bernhard and estimates on the value of forged bills dropped varies from £132.6 million up to £300 million. This unit responsible for forging the bills also managed to perfect the art for US dollars, and forged bills were used to finance German intelligence operations.
Birds are the closest living relatives of crocodilians, as well as the descendants of extinct dinosaurs with feathers. This means that birds are thought to be the only direct descendants of dinosaurs still living today.
Cold showers have more health benefits than hot or warm showers. These include improving circulation, stimulating weight loss by improving metabolism, and easing depression by acting as a kind of light electroshock therapy. Cold showers can also increase your resistance to common illnesses.
During the first live iPhone presentation, Steve Jobs had to frequently switch phones behind his desk. Otherwise, it would run out of RAM and crash. The 100 or so iphones in existence at the time were also riddled with bugs, meaning the development team had to come up with a 'golden path', a series of specific tasks performed in a specific order that would be least likely to cause the phone to crash.
Movie theaters make roughly 85 percent of their profit off concession stands. This is because most of the money earned from ticket revenue goes to the movie distributors, and things like popcorn and fizzy drinks can be sold at profit margins of around 90%.
If you ate nothing but rabbit meat, you would die from protein poisoning. This would be a mixture of too much protein and an absence of fat in the diet (fat is essential to human nutrition), and is the origin of the term rabbit starvation. Similarly, any diet made up entirely of lean meats would also lead to protein poisining.
Italy built an entire courthouse to prosecute the Mafia back in 1986. Throughout and after the trial, several judges and magistrates were killed by the Mafia, including the two who led it--Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. They indicted 475 members in a trial that lasted from 1986-1992. They convicted 338 people, sentenced to a total of 2,665 years, not including life sentences handed to 19 bosses. To date, it was the biggest trial in the world. In 2020, another courthouse has been built, this time to prosecute the 'Ndrangheta, believed to currently be the richest crime syndicate in the world.
Pitbulls rank high among the most affectionate and least aggressive dogs. In general, they are not aggressive towards people but may be less tolerant of other dogs than other breeds. Pitbulls are only aggressive when forcibly trained/encouraged as such; usually because of irresponsible owners drawn to the dog's macho image who encourage aggression for fighting and protection.
When Blackbeard captured ships, many of the African slaves on board would go on to become pirates. When he died, nearly one-third of his total crew were former slaves. However, most slaves. However, he was no abolitionist. Reports also account that Blackbeard and his associates also returned slaves to the mainland to be sold at auction.
Cucumber can actually cure bad breath. A slice pressed to the roof of your mouth for 30 seconds with your tongue allows the phytochemicals to kill the problematic bacteria. Crunchy vegetables help remove plaque on teeth and gums, which bacteria can feed on, says Gregg Lituchy, a cosmetic dentist in New York City.
The King of Macedon, Philip, threatened Sparta with ' If once I enter into your territories, I will destroy ye all, never to rise again'. The Spartans replied: 'If'. Subsequently, neither Philip nor his son Alexander the Great attempted to capture the city. Philip is also recorded as approaching Sparta on another occasion and asking whether he should come as friend or foe; the reply was 'Neither'.
Einstein's brain went missing when he died in 1955. The pathologist on call, Thomas Harvey, who worked on his autopsy took it without permission. Einstein had left behind specific instructions regarding his remains: cremate them, and scatter the ashes secretly in order to discourage idolaters. Einstein's family was essentially strong-armed into agreeing to participate in research that Einstein explicitly did not want to participate in. Several studies were released about his brain many years later but none of them conclusively proved that there was anything special about his brain.
Mulan has the highest kill-count of any (pure, not MCU, Star Wars etc. in which case Thanos easily comes out on top) Disney character (except for maybe King Kashekim Nedakh from Atlantis), and was the first Disney Princess to be shown killing people on-screen. From a scene in the movie, she shoots causes an avalanche to crush 2000 Huns, and only 6 survive. She later goes on to kill the leader of the Huns, one of the survivors, bringing her kill count to 1,995.
One of the earliest depictions of dreadlocks dates back to 1600BCE (roughly 3600 years ago) to the Minoan civilization, one of Europe's earliest civilizations, who lived in what is now known as Greece.
The reason the taste of artificial banana flavoring and artificial banana flavored products doesn't taste like bananas is because it is based on a type of banana that was mostly wiped out by several fungal plagues (most notably the Panama disease) in the 1950's.
Due to the humid and moist conditions that a sloth lives in, algae will sometimes grow in its fur giving the animal a green tint. Sloths also move extremely slowly, with top speeds of 6cm per second. Both of these traits allow this so called lazy animal to be almost invisible to predators, giving them a major evolutionary advantage. They also have an extremely thorough digestive system, where food can take many days to pass through. This allows them to extract every bit of energy and nutrition from the relatively small amount of food they consume.
American microbiologist Maurice Ralph Hilleman and his team are accredited with developing 8 of the 14 routine vaccinations used in current American vaccine schedules, these being measles, mumps, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, chickenpox, meningitis,  Neisseria meningitidis, Streptococcus pneumoniae and Haemophilus influenzae. He developed over 40 vaccines, an unparalleled record of productivity. According to one estimate, his vaccines save nearly 8 million lives each year.
It is predicted that the reason why night insects, such as moths, are attracted to lights is because they mistake them for the light of the moon, which they use to navigate the Earth in a process called transverse orientation. "Elements in their eyes are tuned to faint light, and act 'like miniature telescopes'. Thus when they're faced with powerful artificial illumination, it can act as a 'super-stimulant'," says Lynn Kimsey, professor of entomology at UC Davis.
Film producer Jeffrey Katzenberg revived The Walt Disney Studios by producing some of their biggest hits: The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. He decided to quit after the chairman refused to promote him to the number two spot. After leaving them, they withheld a bonus from him, which he took them to court for $250 million they owed him and won. He went on to found DreamWorks Studios, and oversaw the production of such popular animated franchises as Shrek, Madagascar and Kung Fu Panda.
Through the use of optogenetics, which uses a pulse of light to activate or deactivate neurons, scientists were able to create a false memory within a mouse's brain. A mouse was put in a box with the smell of acetephenone on one side and the smell of carvone on the other, but went to the side with acetephenone even though it had never smelled it before. This was done by simultaneously activating the neurons that sense acetophenone and those associated with reward, creating the 'memory' that the smell of acetephenone leads to a reward.
The word 'quarantine' derives from the Venetian dialect of Italian and the words 'quaranta giorni', meaning 'forty days'. This is because when it was discovered that ships were infested with plague-carrying rats they were made to sit at anchor outside Venice's city walls for forty days before coming ashore.
In a survival situation if you were to drink seawater it would rapidly dehydrate you and soon lead to your death. However, it is vastly less harmful to eat frozen seawater. This is because it contains a tenth the amount of salt as its liquid form, due to the fact that the salt is separated from the water when freezing as it does not fit into the crystalline structure of ice. If you are trying to make seawater drinkable manually, however, evaporation is still more efficient.
Due to the extremely warm weather in the summer of 2013, several nuclear power plants across the world, including ones in Japan, Israel and Scotland, were forced to close down because of a sudden increase in the population of jellyfish, as well as loss in efficiency due to warmer water. Mass amounts of jellyfish can sometimes clog the filters that draw seawater into the power plants in order to cool down the reactors.
France has conducted 210 nuclear weapon tests, more than the United Kingdom, China, India, and North Korea combined! This is just over a fifth of the amount conducted by the United States, however, who have conducted roughly 1,032 tests.
Iran carries out the most gender-change operations in the world after Thailand. Estimates suggest around 50,000 people living in Iran are transgender. Sex reassignment surgeries are partially financially supported by the state. However, the government of Iran is considered to be one of the most discriminatory towards homosexual people in the world, and hundreds have been executed due to their sexual orientation. Some homosexual individuals in Iran have been pressured to undergo sex reassignment surgery in order to avoid legal and social persecution.
There is an Australian man, James Harrison, who has a singularly unique blood plasma composition that has been used to cure Rhesus disease, a hemolytic disease that affects newborn babies. He has made over 1,000 donations throughout his lifetime, and these donations are estimated to have saved over 2.4 million babies from the condition.
In Bordeaux, France, 1940, Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes issued an estimated 30,000 Portuguese travel visas to Jewish families in order for them to flee persecution from the Nazis. Once his superiors had learned of his actions, he was ordered back to Portugal, dismissed from office and denied his pension benefits. Sousa Mendes went on to die in 1954, impoverished and unsung.
Archeologists in London have found a Mesolithic tool-making factory that gives substantial proof human beings were living on the River Thames 7,000 BCE. That's over 9,000 years ago! This predates previous estimates of human habitation of the Thames, which was thought to be 4000 BCE.
In 1995, strange 2-meter-wide circular patterns were discovered on the ocean's floor. Deemed the 'underwater crop circles', these mysterious patterns were a mystery until early 2011 when it was discovered that a previously undiscovered species of 12-centimeter long puffer-fish were the culprits. After studying these animals, scientists say that the meticulous creation and upkeep of these patterns by the male puffer-fish serve as an attraction for the opposite sex as well as a nest for the female puffer-fish's eggs.
In the bioengineering department of the University of Illinois, researchers have created small 'biobots', partly out of synthetic gel and partly out of muscle cell, that can move on their own. Whilst only a small scientific step, this brings mechanical engineering one step closer to developing autonomous biobots: tiny devices that could exist within the human body, freely detecting illness and administering medication.
Colombian drug-lord Pablo Escobar kept four hippos in his estate before his death in 1993. Deemed too much hassle to move by authorities, his hippos were left there and have since bred and escaped becoming an invasive species of Colombia. TThere are now an estimated 80-100 hippos living in the Magdalena River Basin area.
The world's biggest tire producer is LEGO. In 2011, LEGO manufactured over 318 million tires, while brands such as Bridgestone, Michelin, Goodyear all produced below 200 million each. In Billund, Denmark, LEGO produces 870,000 tyres every day. They may be tiny toy tires, but the fact still stands.
Research has found that a mid-day nap can make you more creative, focused, and fresh for the rest of the day. But one study in 2007 also found that they can also reduce your risk of heart disease. Specifically, those who regularly nap were found to be 37 percent less likely to die from a heart attack or other coronary ailment than those who worked straight through the day. This is likely due to reducing stress and lowering blood pressure.
Orcas are the only predators that regularly kill and devour Pacific white-sided dolphins off the B.C. and Washington coasts. So researchers were surprised when drone footage showed such dolphins playing within a few fin-spans of killer whales' toothy jaws. As it turns out, the orcas they play with are of a different species, which are strict pescatarians, and so don't eat dolphins as they are mammals. This still seems like a surprising risk to take, as the two species are nearly identical to our eyes.
NASA answering President Kennedy's challenge and landing men on the moon by 1969 required the most sudden burst of technological creativity, and the largest commitment of resources ($24 billion) ever made by any nation in peacetime. At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 Americans and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities. In less than 8 years they developed 5 different space craft. i.e. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo service, Apollo command, Lunar Lander. Ultimately 24 people flew to the moon and 12 walked on it. In the 50 years since that time, no human has traveled more than a few hundred miles from Earth.
There are more life forms on human skin than there are people on our planet. There are about a trillion microbes on your skin or in your skin, so more than 100 times the total number of humans on the planet. In fact, the ratio of human cells to microbes in the human body is roughly 1:1.3.
The possibility of dying on your way to buy a lottery ticket is higher than the possibility of actually winning the lottery. You are also more likely to be struck by lightning, or be hit by a falling airplane part in your lifetime than win the lottery. This is because on average the chance of a ticket being the jackpot ticket is 1 in 13,983,816.
It is possible that pessimism is inherited genetically. People can be predisposed to see the world more darkly than others if they have a different variation of the ADRA2b gene. Neuroscientist Professor Rebecca Todd explain: 'A previously known genetic variation causes some individuals to perceive the world more vividly than others - and particularly negative aspects of the world...For example, people who have this variation might look out at a crowd of people and only see angry faces'.
In 1913, upon Edinburgh Zoo's opening, Norway gifted them their first king penguin. Since 1972, the Norwegian King's Guard has adopted 3 penguins, at different time periods, and each was given a rank within the regiment. One of them was even knighted by King Harald V of Norway as Sir Nils Olav III
While the Egyptians were building the pyramids, a colony of Woolly mammoths that had survived, took residence on a small island called Wrangle Island. Mammoths lived there up until around 1,650 BCE, which is nearly 1,000 years after the pyramids were built.
Jack Black is the son of rocket scientists. His parents, Thomas William Black and Judith Love Cohen were satellite engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. Jack Black joked about his academic parents in a 2003 interview with Newsweek, saying, "I didn't inherit any of their brainpower. But I have the power to rock. They're rocket scientists. I'm a rock scientist."
Ethan Zuckerman invented popup ads in the late 90s while working for Tripod.com. He has since apologized, and thinks it is time online sites and services moved away from using ads altogether. "I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web" he writes in an article for The Atlantic, going on to explain that everything from Facebook tracking us across sites to Google knowing just about everything about you has something to do with advertising.
Green is seen as a symbol of life, but scientists claim that the earliest life on Earth might have been purple. Early life-forms on Earth may have been able to generate metabolic energy from sunlight using a purple-pigmented molecule called retinal that possibly predates the evolution of chlorophyll and photosynthesis. If retinal has evolved on other worlds, it could create a a distinctive biosignature as it absorbs green light in the same way that vegetation on Earth absorbs red and blue light.
The Earth is not a perfect sphere: instead, it is closer to an oblate spheroid. It is pudgier towards the equator, mostly due to the centrifugal force caused by the Earth's rotation. However, it is not a perfect oblate spheroid either. The mass is distributed very unevenly throughout the planet, and the higher the concentration of mass at one location, the stronger the gravitational pull, creating 'bumps' around the globe. Other dynamic factors also influence the shape of the Earth, such as tides (shifting the distribution of water), movement of tectonic plates, mass shifting inside the planet and more.
Nowadays, E-commerce is a dominant market. Who wouldn't want to get anything at the click of a button? However, you'd be surprised that the earliest sale transaction on the internet was of weed. In 1972, long before eBay or Amazon, students from Stanford University in California and MIT in Massachusetts conducted the first ever online transaction. Using the Arpanet account at their artificial intelligence lab, the Stanford students sold their counterparts a tiny amount of marijuana.
Walmart once had over 23,000 applications for 600 jobs in a newly opened store in Washignton DC. With those numbers, the Walmart acceptance rate was at 2.6%. This makes it twice as hard as getting into Harvard and over five times harder than getting into Cornell.
According to the UN's World Happiness Report, Finland has been the world's happiest country for 3 consecutive years as of 2020. The data is based on citizens asked to rate their life from 1 to 10. Interestingly, Finland is closely followed by other European countries such as Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and the Netherlands.
According to a 2014 study, 12 out of 15 addicts were able to quit smoking through the use of magic mushrooms. For 3 sessions, the chronic smokers were treated with psychedelic mushrooms. Surprisingly, the 80% success rate dwarfed the 35% success rate of leading treatment drugs.
Every year, the town of Lopburi holds a buffet for monkeys. During the Monkey Buffet Festival, the town serves 3000 kgs of fruits and vegetables to the local monkey population of 2,000 crab-eating macaques in Lopburi Province north of Bangkok. The festival was described as one of the strangest festivals by London's Guardian newspaper along with Spain's baby-jumping festival. During that festival, known as El Salto del Colacho (the devil jump), men dressed as the devil in red and yellow suits jump over babies born during the previous twelve months of the year who lie on mattresses in the street. The 'devils' hold whips and oversized castanets as they jump over the infant children.
Rowan Atkinson has made generations laugh at his goofy antics as Mr. Bean. However, the Englishman is actually quite the intellectual. What most people don't know is that Atkinson has a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Oxford up his sleeve. His MSc thesis considered the application of self-tuning control. Oxfor also made Atkinson an Honorary Fellow in 2006.
Chlorine is in all of our bodily secretions and excretions. Our body's chlorine levels are almost always parallel to the levels of sodium (due to the makeup of salt i.e. sodium chloride). There is roughly 95g of chlorine in the body, which is enough to disinfect about 8000l of water.
Adrenaline, also known as epinephrine, is a hormone released by our body during stressful situations. This hormone gives us a temporary boost of strength, speed, or basically anything that can help us stay alive. In some cases, adrenaline also keeps us from feeling the pain of fatal wounds. It has even been found that adrenergic hormones, such as adrenaline, can produce retrograde enhancement of long-term memory in humans.
The Sun accounts for 99.8% of the mass in our solar system with a mass of around 330,000 times that of Earth. The Sun is made up of mostly hydrogen (three quarters worth) with the rest of its mass attributed to helium. It is roughly 4.5 billion years old. Although massive, it is relatively tiny compared to some other stars, and is classified as a yellow dwarf star. For example, UY Scuti, which lies near the center of the Milky Way, is classified as a hypergiant and is 1,708 solar radii (compared to the Sun's 1).
The universe extends far beyond our own galaxy, The Milky Way, which is why scientists can only estimate how many stars are in space.  However, scientists estimate the universe contains approximately 1 septillion (1 followed by 24 zeros!) stars. While no one can actually count every single grain of sand on the earth, the estimated total from researchers at the University of Hawaii, is somewhere around seven quintillion, so there are many more stars in the known universe than grains of sand on Earth.
In Monopoly, when a player throws doubles (both dice land on the same number) he may take another turn. However, if he throws doubles three times in one turn, then he is considered to be 'speeding' and must go to jail. There is an approximately 0.46% chance of this happening. However, a monopoly game lasts about 20-25 turns, so according to Wolfram Alpha that's about a 7% chance of rolling three doubles in the whole game.
In terms of land area, the British Empire was the largest empire in recorded history, covering around 26% of the entire world's land surface. However, the Mongol Empire, which comes in at second with around 18% of the world's land surface, was the largest contiguous land empire, and was at its peak roughly 700 years before the British Empire.
Without a doubt, the greatest conqueror of all time was Genghis Khan, founder of the Mongol Empire. It is estimated that he was responsible for the deaths of up to 11% of the world's population (40 million people). Originally known as Temijin, this son of a Mongol chieftain was given the honorary title of Chinggis Khan when he assumed power, thought to mean 'the oceanic, universal ruler'. He went on to conquer more than double the land than the second greatest conqueror in history, Alexander the Great.
According to estimates in the Food Waste Index Report 2021 by UNEP, 931 million tonnes of food was wasted globally in 2019, roughly 17% of food produced for human consumption.If food waste were a country, it would be the third-biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions, behind only China and the United States. Individual households were found to be responsible for around 61% of the total, meaning reducing food waste at home could be extremely beneficial for the environment.
Bones of primitive Homo sapiens first appear 300,000 years ago in Africa, with brains as large or larger than ours. They're followed by anatomically modern Homo sapiens at least 200,000 years ago, and brain shape became essentially modern by at least 100,000 years ago. However, tools, artefacts and cave art suggest that complex technology and cultures, 'behavioural modernity', evolved more recently, about 65,000 years ago, and agriculture as we understand it today is believed to have been discovered only 12,000 years ago.
