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Do astronauts burp?

Want to impress your friends with some quirky general knowledge?

Read on to find out how many pieces of bread one bolt of lightning can toast and discover what causes the Eiffel Tower to grow 15cms taller in the summer.

  • Astatine is an element so rare that if you searched the entire planet you’d only find a lump the size of a sugar cube.
  • When a flea jumps, the rate of acceleration is 20 times that of the space shuttle during launch.
  • If every star in the Milky Way was a grain of salt they would fill an Olympic sized swimming pool.
  • Twelve Astronauts have walked on the moon, between them bringing back 382 kilograms of rocks, pebbles, sand and dust.
  • Whales talk to each other by making a loud clicking noise. The sound waves travel extremely well underwater and they can hear each other from 100 miles away.
  • A TV screen shows 24 pictures a second. Because a fly sees 200 images a second, it would see TV as still pictures with darkness in between.
  • Cats can see clearly in one-sixth the amount of light we humans would need. This is due to a special layer of cells at the back of their retinas, which acts like a mirror, reflecting light back to the retina's cells.
  • Because of thermal expansion the Eiffel Tower is 15cm taller in summer.
  • Some people who have two or more different kinds of fillings in their teeth are able to hear high-power AM broadcast stations when located within a few hundred feet of the stations. In such cases, the strong radio waves act upon the teeth fillings in such a way that the electromagnetic oscillations get transformed to mechanical vibrations in the person's head, and these are heard as sound.
  • The amount of sunlight reaching the earth's surface is 6,000 times the amount of energy used by all human beings worldwide. The total amount of fossil fuel used by humans since the start of civilization is equivalent to less than 30 days of sunshine.
  • You weigh less if you stand at the equator than if you stood at the north pole. This is because the equator is actually further away from the centre of the earth, so the force of gravity is less.
  • Engineers at NASA claim to have made the loudest noise ever: of 210 decibels. This is so loud that it can make holes in solid materials.
  • The microwave oven was invented by accident, when Percy Spencer found that his chocolate bar had been melted by an experiment he was running on radar systems. He immediately started experimenting successfully on microwaved popcorn.
  • The planet Venus’s day is longer than its year. It takes 225 ‘Earth’ days to rotate around the Sun (a Venusian year) and 243 ‘Earth’ days to rotate on its axis (a Venusian day).
  • Men are six times more likely to be struck by lightning than women.
  • Do astronauts burp? Because you are weightless in space, the contents of your stomach float and tend to stay at the top of your stomach, under the rib cage and close to the valve at the top of your stomach. Because this valve isn't a complete closure (just a muscle that works with gravity), if you burp, it becomes a wet burp from the contents in your stomach. Urgh!
  • A bolt of lightning contains enough energy to toast 160,000 pieces of bread. Unfortunately the bolt only takes 1/10,000 of a second – so turning the bread over might prove difficult.

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