Ten Facts About Earth

1.

Earth is the only planet in the Solar System to have water in its three states of matter: as a solid (ice), a liquid (sea, rain, etc.) and as a gas (clouds). These are all shown below. Water is, of course, the most important liquid for life.

2.

Earth is almost five billion years old, although life (resembling life as we know it) has only existed on the planet for the last 150 million to 200 million years. This means that life has only been present on Earth for only 5%-10% of its lifetime.

3.

Earth and Mercury are the two most dense planets in the Solar System. This means that particles inside the planet are most closely packed together.

4.

The length of time it takes for Earth to orbit the Sun is 365 and a quarter days. To make up this extra quarter which isn't counted at the end of a year, we have an extra day every four years on 29th February. The next Leap Year will be in 2012.

5.

Earth is gradually slowing down. Every few years, an extra second is added to make up for lost time. Millions of years ago, a day on Earth will have been 20 hours long. It is believed that, in millions of years time, a day on Earth will be 27 hours long.

6.

The centre of the Earth, its core, is molten. This means that it is liquid rock which sometimes erupts onto the surface through volcanic eruptions. This core is 7,500°c, hotter than the surface of the Sun!

7.

Earth is the only planet in the Solar System not to be named after a mythical God.

8.

Despite being called Earth, only 29% of the surface is actually 'earth.' The rest of the planet's surface (71%) is made up of water.

9.

From a distance, Earth would be the brightest of the planets. This is because sunlight is reflected off the planet's water.

10.

Earth is the only planet in the Solar System known to be geologically active, with Earthquakes and volcanoes forming the landscape, replenishing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and erasing impact craters from meteors. 

Misophonia: the disorder that makes people rage over hearing annoying sounds

Nails on a chalkboard, the sound of someone speaking the word, "moist", or the squeak of styrofoam are all common sounds that trigger a cringe, but for some people that cringe is magnified into fits of outrageous rage when they hear a repetitive annoying sound.

These tantrums of anger are actually a medical condition known as Misophonia or Sensitive Sound Syndrome and rather than react to the volume of the noise, people who suffer from Misophonia are often severely bothered by the soft repetitive noises such as someone chewing, smacking their lips while speaking, or a faucet dripping. In fact the name translates literally into "hatred of sound".

Most people develop this syndrome around the age of ten, and as far as research goes, there are no known cures, only coping mechanisms. Sufferers of Misophonia can wear ear plugs, learn to avoid the trigger noises (one woman even eats in separate room than her husband to avoiding his chewing noises), or even attend cognitive behavior therapy.

Gold From the God !

There is about 0.2 mg of gold in our bodies!

Everyone comes into the world with a bit of gold to their name. Our bodies contain about 0.2 mg of gold. Most of that gold is diffused with our blood. However, you’d need to bleed 40,000 people dry just to collect enough blood to make one 8g sovereign.

In what other unexpected places can you find gold? Well, some plants like Douglas fir and honeysuckle absorb it very efficiently from the soil. However, the amount of money needed to extract that gold just wouldn’t be worth it.

The most abundant gold mine on the planet is the sea where there are 10 million tons of the shinny stuff just floating around.

Insect that perform photosynthesis !!

There is an insect that can perform photosynthesis!

The aphids are among the few animals that can perform photosynthesis. They can do this because of the genes that they can steal from fungi through a physical and chemical process called lateral transfer. Green aphids produce the most ATP, orange aphids produce an intermediate amount, and white aphids produce almost none.This plant-bug freak is called the pea aphid; dismissed by farmers as pests, but a fascinating work of nature. Alain Robichon of the Sophia Agro Biotech Institute in France recent conducted a study on pea aphid. He reported that they use pigments called carotenoids to harvest the sun’s energy and make ATP, a molecule that acts as a store of chemical energy.

20 Nuclear weapon Facts You don't know about.

So here are 20 facts they don’t want you to think about:

1. There are at least 23,000 nuclear weapons in existence: sufficient to wipe out the entire human population of the planet many times over.

2. Of the 23,000 nuclear weapons in existence around 2,500 are on High Alert. This means they are ready to be launched at a moment’s notice.

3. The missiles delivering nuclear weapons to their target travel at faster than 1000 miles in 4 minutes.

4. The only way our armed forces have of knowing if a nuclear attack is in progress is through an electronic early warning system. This system, like all electronic systems, is subject to malfunction.

5. When the electronic warning system signals that a nuclear attack is in progress the military chiefs of staff have a matter of minutes to decide if the warning is true or false.

6. If the chiefs of staff instruct the Prime Minister/President that an attack is in progress he has a matter of minutes to decide if this information is reliable and to press the button launching a retaliatory strike.

7. Central London would be utterly destroyed by a single megaton bomb.

8. One such bomb would, due to the blast alone, cause 98% deaths from Westminster to the City of London and from Lambeth to Marylebone.

9. A modelled attack on Detroit (when the population was 1.32 million) predicted that a single 1 megaton bomb exploded above the city would cause up to 630,000 deaths and injuries from blast alone. 83% of the population would be immediately killed or injured. Many of the remaining population would die or suffer terribly from the effects of radioactive fallout.

10. One 5 megaton nuclear bomb has as much explosive power as all the explosives used in the second world war.

11. If a nuclear power station or nuclear waste disposal site were the target of a nuclear attack it has been estimated that the resulting contamination would cover an area nearly 3 times that of Wales.

12. Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki referred to the pain and suffering as ‘indescribable’ and ‘hell on earth’. Eventually some survivors of Hiroshima arrived in hospital elsewhere. Such was their degree of suffering that when a nurse entered the ward they screamed for her to kill them.

13. There have been various crises since 1945 when the world came within a hair’s breadth of nuclear war. Our luck will run out. The system is held primed at all times.

14. In one crisis a single man saved the world from destruction. If Stanislav Petrov, in 1983, had told his Russian superiors that his electronic monitors were signalling a massive nuclear attack from the US, there would have been a global nuclear war. He did not tell them and the signals turned out to have been due to a malfunction.

15. A nuclear war would cause a blanket of particles in the atmosphere that would blot out the sun’s rays and result in the death of the vegetation on which life depends. This would be in addition to the death of people, animals, and plants caused by the explosive power, the radiation and the shockwaves.

16. Each of the weapons carried on the UK Trident submarine is 7 times more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb which killed 140,000. The UK Trident submarine carries 16 Trident missiles. Each missile can contain 3 No. 100 kiloton weapons. A single submarine is designed to carry over 300 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb.

17. The nuclear weapons on a single Trident submarine can destroy over 40 million people (extrapolating from Hiroshima).

18. The UK nuclear arsenal alone has the destructive power to destroy over 80% of the 195 capital cities of the world.

19. We in the UK have 4 Trident submarines; our ally, the US, has 14.

20. Trident renewal will cost the taxpayer 97 thousand million pounds yet it is totally useless in opposing any real existing threat

Interesting white tiger fact.

All white tigers found in captivity come from one found in India!

White tigers are distinct from the normal colouration in that they lack the pheomelanin pigment that in the normal tigers produce the orange color. They still produce the other color pigment, eumelanin, and hence are not considered albino.The white tiger is a rare pigmentation variant of the Bengal tiger, which was reported in the wild from time to time in Assam, Bengal.

Compared to normal colored tigers without the white gene, white tigers tend to be somewhat bigger, both at birth and as fully grown adults.

All white tigers found in captivity come from one tiger named Mohan, found in India in the 1950s. Mohan was the founding father of the white tigers. This breed has been protected for several decades now by the Indian government, and it is expected to be kept safe as long as the government has the power to do so.

Jellyfish evaporate in the sun. They're 98% water!

It turns out that jellyfish are 98% water. Most are transparent and bell-shaped. If they end up on the beach, they will most likely evaporate in a few hours and mostly disappear.When jellyfish are in the water, they can be a bit intimidating. Their tentacles can pack a painful electrical shock. However, once they wash up on shore, they are anything but intimidating.

Jellyfish also don’t have brains, bones or a heart. They do have rudimentary sensory nerves though.