A handful of intriguing facts.
We travel 1.5 million miles a day around the Sun without noticing. That's an average speed of 67,000 mph, or 18.5 miles a second. For those of us living at Earth's midlatitudes - including the US, Europe, and Japan - we're also rotating at almost a thousand miles an hour too.
The biggest butterfly in the world has a 12 inch (31 cm) wingspan. It belongs to the Queen Alexandra's Birdwing butterfly, which you can find in the forests of the Oro Province, in the east of Papua New Guinea.
A cloud typically weighs around a million tonnes - with a volume of around one cubic km and a density of around 1.003km per m3 - that's a density that’s around 0.4 percent lower than the air surrounding it (which is why clouds float).
The world record for breath-holding underwater was achieved by Croatian Budimir Šobat in March 2021, who held his breath for a total of 24 minutes and 37 seconds. On average, a human can hold their breath between 30 to 90 seconds.
The fear of long words is called Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia. The 36 letter word was first used by the Roman poet Horace in the first century BCE to humorously criticise writers with an unreasonable penchant for long words.
One in 18 people have a third nipple. Known as polythelia, the third nipple is caused by a mutation in inactive genes. This can range from one that is invisible on the surface, to a full nipple with milk-producing tissue.
Earth’s rotation is changing speed. It's actually slowing. This means that, on average, the length of a day increases by around 1.8 seconds per century. 600 million years ago a day lasted just 21 hours.
Mirrors facing each other don't produce infinite reflections. Each reflection will be darker than the last and eventually fade into invisibility. Mirrors absorb a fraction of the energy of the light striking them. The total number of reflections mirrors can produce? A few hundred.