Sharonchik Topchik

19/08/2021

Fin whales are basically the Barry White of the ocean. The deep, bellowing songs that males use to attract mates are considered to be the loudest of all marine life and can be "heard up to 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) away," according to Scientific American. They can also be used to sonically map out the ocean floor thanks to the fact that the sound can reach depths of 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) under the water, which bounces back and provides researchers with accurate measurements. Beyond that, a 2021 study in Science showed how using a fin whale's song can be far more useful and have less of a negative impact on sea life than using a large air gun, which is the typical tool researchers rely on.

19/08/2021

Hang on to your hats because this isn't your average wind storm. In 1996, a tropical cyclone named Olivia hit off the coast of Barrow Island, Australia with such a force that it broke an incredible record. According to The Weather Channel, "Olivia's eyewall produced five extreme three-second wind gusts, the peak of which was a 253 mph gust," which blew past the previous wind record of 231 mph set in Mount Washington, New Hampshire back in 1934.

18/08/2021

While four babies are born on Earth every second, it's estimated that around two people pass away at the same time. That means that 105 people die each minute, 6,316 people die each hour, 151,600 people die each day, and 55.3 million people die each year. Sorry, folks—not all interesting facts are fun!

18/08/2021

Do you use Facebook? If you don't, you're among a number that gets increasingly smaller every day. In fact, 2 billion active users have an account on the social media platform, which is more than the population of the United States, China, and Brazil combined. Facebook's co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted about the milestone, saying, "We're making progress connecting the world, and now let's bring the world closer together."

18/08/2021

If the Earth's time zones were each one hour apart, then we would have 24 times zones, which sounds pretty straightforward. However, the situation is a little more complicated than that. Since many time zones only differ by 30 or 45 minutes, they don't fit into a neat and tidy 24-hour span, which means that there are more than 24, though it's hard to say exactly how many.

17/08/2021

Some countries are hundreds of years old, while others can trace their nation's history back for thousands of years. But South Sudan in North Africa just gained its independence from Sudan in 2011, which currently makes it the youngest country in the world.

16/08/2021

The total population of people who are alive on Earth hasn't even hit 8 billion. At the same time, there are 10 quadrillion (10,000,000,000,000,000) individual ants crawling around at any given time. According to wildlife presenter Chris Packham, who appeared on the BBC in 2014 to discuss this, when combined, all of those ants would weigh about the same as all of us humans.

16/08/2021

16/08/2021

Soccer—or football, depending on who you ask—is the most popular sport around the world. That's why when the FIFA World Cup games took place in both 2010 and 2014, nearly half of the world's population (around 3.2 billion people) tuned in to see who would win.