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German chemist Hennig Brand discovered phosphorus while he was examining urine.

There are five tillion trillion atoms in one pound of iron.

The pressure at the center of the Earth is 27,000 tons per square inch.

Bacteria can reproduce sexually.

A temperature of 70 million degrees Celsius was generated at Princeton University in 1978. This was during a fusionism experiment and is the highest man-made temperature ever.

Every cubic mile of seawater holds over 150 million tons of minerals.

An iceberg contains more heat than a match.

Air is denser in cold weather. A wind of the same speed can exert 25 percent more force during the winter as compared to the summer.

The Sun has a diameter of 864,000 miles.

There are 3 golf balls sitting on the moon.

The color black is produced by the complete absorption of light rays.

Sound at the right vibration can bore holes through a solid object.

Lab tests can detect traces of alcohol in urine six to 12 hours after a person has stopped drinking.

It takes a plastic container 50000 years to start decomposing.

The sun is estimated to be between 20 and 21 cosmic years old.

A car traveling at a constant speed of 60 miles per hour would take over 48 million years to reach the nearest star (other than our sun), Proxima Centauri. This is about 685,000 average human lifetimes.

Traveling at the speed of 186,000 miles per second, light take 6 hours to travel from Pluto to the earth.

To an observer standing on Pluto, the sun would appear no brighter than Venus appears in our evening sky.

Dissolved salt makes up 3.5 percent of the oceans.

Blood is 6 times thicker than water.

Mercury is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa is predicted to topple over between 2010 and 2020.

The nearest galaxy to our own is Andromeda.

The speed of sound must be exceeded to produce a sonic boom.

Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system.

There are 7 stars in the Big Dipper.

Out of all the senses, smell is most closely linked to memory.

Three astronauts manned each Apollo flight.

All organic compounds contain carbon.

The first atomic bomb exploded at Trinity Site, New Mexico.

The planet Venus has the longest day.

Because of the salt content of the Dead Sea, it is difficult to dive below its surface.

Carolyn Shoemaker has discovered 32 comets and approximately 800 asteroids.

The first portable calculator placed on sale by Texas Instruments weighed only 2-1/2 pounds and cost a mere $150. (1971)

The planet Saturn has a density lower than water. If there was a bathtub large enough to hold it, Saturn would float.

The shockwave from a nitroglycerine explosion travels at 17,000 miles per hour.

The fastest moon in our solar system circles Jupiter once every seven hours - traveling at 70,400 miles per hour.

Because of the rotation of the earth, an object can be thrown farther if it is thrown west.

Compact discs read from the inside to the outside edge, the reverse of how a record works.

Bacteria, the tiniest free-living cells, are so small that a single drop of liquid contains as many as 50 million of them.

A raisin dropped in a glass of fresh champagne will bounce up and down continually from the bottom of the glass to the top. This is because the carbonation in the drink gets pockets of air stuck in the wrinkles of the raisin, which is light enough to be raised by this air. When it reaches the surface of the champagne, the bubbles pop, and the raisin sinks back to the bottom, starting the cycle over.

On December 2, 1942, a nuclear chain reaction was achieved for the first time under the stands of the University of Chicago’s football stadium. The first reactor measured 30 feet wide, 32 feet long, and 21.5 feet high. It weighed 1,400 tons and contained 52 tons of uranium in the form of uranium metal and uranium oxide. Although the same process led to the massive energy release of the atomic bomb, the first artificially sustained nuclear reaction produced just enough energy to light a small flashlight.

Experiments conducted in Germany and at the University of Southampton in England show that even mild and incidental noises cause the pupils of the eyes to dilate. It is believed that this is why surgeons, watchmakers, and others who perform delicate manual operations are so bothered by noise. The sounds cause their pupils to change focus and blur their vision.

STASI, the East German secret police organization, devised a devilishly clever way to prevent someone from giving them the slip during the Cold War: they managed to synthesize the scent of a female dog in heat, which they applied to the shoes of the person under surveillance. Then they simply had a male dog follow the scent.

If you stand in the bottom of a well, you would be able to see the stars even in the daytime.

A "fulgerite" is fossilized lightning. It forms when a powerful lightning bolt melts the soil into a glass-like state.

Some early TV screens did emit excessive X-rays, as did computer monitors, but that was fixed long ago. Doctors suggest that at worst, sitting too close might cause some temporary eye fatigue—the same for reading with insufficient light—but no permanent damage, no matter what your mother claimed.

Dirty snow melts faster than clean.

Clouds fly higher during the day than the night.

Clothes that are dried outside DO smell better because of a process called photolysis. What happens is this: sunlight breaks down compounds in the laundry that cause odor, such as perspiration and body oils.

In 1980, Namco released PAC-MAN, the most popular video game (or arcade game) of all time. The original name was going to be PUCK MAN, but executives saw the potential for vandals to scratch out part of the P in the games marquee and labeling.

The opposite of a "vacuum" is a "plenum."

If the world were tilted one degree more either way, the planet would not be habitable because the area around the equator would be too hot and the poles would be too cold.

A bowl of lime Jell-O, when hooked up to an EEG machine, exhibited movement which is virtually identical to the brain waves of a healthy adult man or woman.

A full moon always rises at sunset.

The hardness of ice is similar to that of concrete.

The first man-made item to exceed the speed of sound is the bull whip our leather whip. When the whip is snapped, the knotted end makes a "crack" or popping noise. It is actually causing a mini sonic boom as it exceeds the speed of sound.

From the smallest microprocessor to the biggest mainframe, the average American depends on over 264 computers per day.

From bridges to rebar, rust is everywhere. According to a recent study, the annual cost of metallic corrosion in the U.S. is approximately $300 billion. The report, by Battelle, Columbus, Ohio, and the Specialty Steel Industry of North America, Washington, D.C., estimated that about one-third of that cost could be avoided through broader application of corrosion-resistant material and "best anti-corrosive practice" from design through maintenance.

ENIAC, the first electronic computer, appeared 50 years ago. The original ENIAC was about 80 feet long, weighed 30 tons, had 17,000 tubes. By comparison, a desktop computer today can store a million times more information than an ENIAC, and 50,000 times faster.

Rain contains vitamin B12.

The first U.S. census to be tallied by computer was in 1950. UNIVAC did the tallying.

A scientist at Michigan State University has calculated that the production of a single hen egg requires about 120 gallons of water, a loaf of bread requires 300 gallons, and a pound of beef, 3,500.

You know the three physical dimensions, and the fourth dimension, time. For years, people have speculated about other dimensions. Experts in theoretical physics now say the major theories about the universe make sense together - and all the math seems to work - if there are 10 dimensions.

A dog was killed by a meteor at Nakhla, Egypt, in 1911. The unlucky canine is the only creature known to have been killed by a meteor.

A day on the planet Mercury is twice as long as its year. Mercury rotates very slowly but revolves around the sun in slightly less than 88 days.

A cosmic year is the amount of time it takes the sun to revolve around the center of the Milky Way, about 225 million years.

A car traveling at a constant speed of 60 miles per hour would take over 48 million years to reach the nearest star (other than our sun), Proxima Centauri. This is about 685,000 average human lifetimes.

A bucket filled with earth would weigh about 5 time more than the same bucket filled with the substance of the sun. However, the force of gravity is so much greater on the sun that the man weighing 150 pounds on our planet would weigh 2 tons on the sun.

Traveling at the speed of 186,000 miles per second, light take 6 hours to travel from Pluto to the earth.

To an observer standing on Pluto, the sun would appear no brighter than Venus appears in our evening sky.

Tiny dust particles surround a comet. They are swept into a long tail by the solar wind, which consists of subatomic particles speeding from the sum at speed of hundred of miles per second.

Time slows down near a black hole; inside it stops completely.

The wick of a trick candle has small amounts of magnesium in them. When you light the candle, you are also lighting the magnesium. When someone tries to blow out the flame, the magnesium inside the wick continues to burn and, in just a split second (or two or three), relights the wick.

On December 23, 1947, Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., held a secret demonstration of the transistor which marked the foundation of modern electronics.

Western Electric successfully brought sound to motion pictures and introduced systems of mobile communications which culminated in the cellular telephone.

At a glance, the Celsius scale makes more sense than the Fahrenheit scale for temperature measuring. But its creator, Anders Celsius, was an oddball scientist. When he first developed his scale, he made freezing 100 degrees and boiling 0 degrees, or upside down. No one dared point this out to him, so fellow scientists waited until Celsius died to change the scale.

An ordinary TNT bomb involves atomic reaction, and could be called an atomic bomb. What we call an A-bomb involves nuclear reactions and should be called a nuclear bomb.

A chip of silicon a quarter-inch square has the capacity of the original 1949 ENIAC computer, which occupied a city block.

A ball of glass will bounce higher than a ball of rubber. A ball of solid steel will bounce higher than one made entirely of glass.

Sterling silver is not pure silver. Because pure silver is too soft to be used in most tableware it is mixed with copper in the proportion of 92.5 percent silver to 7.5 percent copper.

Starch is used as a binder in the production of paper. It is the use of a starch coating that controls ink penetration when printing. Cheaper papers do not use as much starch, and this is why your elbows get black when you are leaning over your morning paper.

On average, half of all false teeth have some form of radioactivity.

Sound travels 15 times faster through steel than through the air.

The original IBM-PCs, that had hard drives, referred to the hard drives as Winchester drives. This is due to the fact that the original Winchester drive had a model number of 3030. This is, of course, a Winchester firearm.

The radioactive substance, Americanium - 241 is used in many smoke detectors.

Plutonium - first weighed on August 20th, 1942, by University of Chicago scientists Glenn Seaborg and his colleagues - was the first man-made element.

Hot water is heavier than cold.

Every year about 98% of atoms in your body are replaced.

Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.

Outside the USA, Ireland is the largest software producing country in the world.

The final resting-place for Dr. Eugene Shoemaker - the Moon. The famed U.S. Geological Survey astronomer, trained the Apollo astronauts about craters, but never made it into space. Mr. Shoemaker had wanted to be an astronaut but was rejected because of a medical problem. His ashes were placed on board the Lunar Prospector spacecraft before it was launched on January 6, 1998. NASA crashed the probe into a crater on the moon in an attempt to learn if there is water on the moon.

Ethernet is a registered trademark of Xerox, Unix is a registered trademark of AT&T.

The Siberian larch accounts for more than 20% of all the worlds trees.

A plant in central Australia, the candlesticks of the sun, grows a candle-shaped flower once every 7 years.

The bark of a redwood tree is fireproof. Fires that occur in a redwood forest take place inside the trees.

While known as a painter, sculptor, architect, and engineer, Leonard da Vinci was the first to record that the number of rings in the cross section of a tree trunk revealed its age. He also discovered that the width between the rings indicated the annual moisture.

The fragrance of flowers is due to the essences of oil which they produce.

The primary purpose of growing rice in flooded paddies is to drown the weeds surrounding the young seedlings. Rice can, in fact, be grown in drained areas.

The slippers plant (bulbo stylis) of Haiti looks like a pair of fuzzy slippers.

The giant puffball, lycoperdon giganteum, produces 7,000,000,000,000 spores, each of which could grow into a puffball a foot in diameter and collectively cover an area of 280,000 square mile, greater than the size of Texas. Fortunately, only one of the spores actually becomes a puffball, and all the others die.

The telegraph plant of Asia has leaves that flutter constantly, even when there is no breeze.

Of the 15,000-odd known species of orchids in the world, 3,000 of them can be found in Brazil.

The tree dictated on the Lebanese flag is a Cedar.

An ear of corn averages 800 kernels in 16 rows. A pound of corn consists of approximately 1,300 kernels. 100 bushels of corn produces approximately 7,280,000 kernels. Corn is produced on every continent of the world with the exception of Antarctica.

Heroin is derived from the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, which means the poppy that brings sleep.

Pine, spruce, or other evergreen wood should never be used for barbecuing. These woods, when burning or smoking, can add harmful tar and resins to the food. Only hardwoods should be used for smoking and grilling, such as oak, pecan, hickory, maple, cherry, alder, apple, or mesquite, depending on the type of meat being cooked.

Lightning keeps plants alive. The intense heat of lightning forces nitrogen in the air to mix with oxygen, forming nitrogen oxides that are soluble in water and fall to the ground in rain. Plants need nitrates to survive, so without lightning, plants could not live.

The squirting cucumber (Ecballium elaterium), when brushed by a passerby, ejects its seeds and a stream of poisonous juice that stings the skin.

Leaves of the Sumatra breadfruit tree are notched when they first form, yet have no indentations when the leaves mature.

There are an estimated 285,000 species of flowering plants on Earth compared to 148,000 for all other plants. Flowering plants are very important because they provide food for herbivores - plant-eating animals - and for humans.

The giant sequoia, which produces millions of seeds, can take 175 to 200 years to flower. No other organism takes this long to mature sexually.

The partridge berry is a botanical Siamese twin. Each berry develops from 2 flowers.

A person standing under an oak tree is 16 more times liable to be hit by lightning than if he had taken refuge beneath a beech tree. The oak tree has vertical roots which provide a more direct route to ground water.

Oak trees do not have acorns until they are fifty years old or older.

American colonists discovered that superior candles could be made from the fruit of a squat bush growing in the sand dunes along the New England seashore. The small, grayish bayberry was picked, crushed, and boiled. It had to be skimmed several times before the pale, nearly transparent, green fat was sufficiently refined. Bayberry candles were highly prized, because so much labor and so many berries were needed to make just one candle.

The shape of plant collenchyma cells and the shape of the bubbles in beer foam are the same - they are orthotetrachidecahedrons.

Kudzu is not indigenous to the South, but in that climate it can grow up to six inches a day.

Bamboo can grow up to three feet in a 24 hour period.

A single coffee tree yields only one pound of roasted, ground coffee annually.

In ancient religions, the Norsemen considered the mistletoe a baleful plant that caused the death of Baldur, the shining god of youth.

The average ear of corn has eight-hundred kernels arranged in sixteen rows.

The Mexican Jumping Bean is not a bean. It is actually a thin-shelled section of a seed capsule containing the larva of a small gray moth called the jumping bean moth (Laspeyresia saltitans).

The Curly Redwood Lodge is one of northern California’s most unique lodges. It was built from one curly redwood tree that produced 57,000 board feet of lumber. The tree - cut down in 1952 - was 18 feet 2 inches at the trunk. Curly redwood is unique because of the curly grain of the wood, unlike typical straight grained redwood.

Orchids are grown from seed so small that it would take thirty thousand to weigh as much as one grain of wheat.

The leaves of the Victorian water lily are sometimes over six feet in diameter.

In 1764 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart played for the Royal Family at Versailles in France. He was even given the honor of standing behind the Queen at dinner - Mozart was only eight years old.

At age 22, Jerry Lee Lewis married for the third time. His bride? His thirteen year old cousin.

At age 4, Mozart composed a concerto for the clavier.

At age 15, Jerry Garcia swapped his birthday accordion for an electric guitar.

John Philip Sousa enlisted in the Marines at age 13. He worked as an apprentice in the band.

The Japanese national anthem is expressed in only four lines. The Greek anthem runs 158 verses.

Vaudevillian Jack Norworth wrote "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" in 1908 after seeing a sign on a bus advertising BASEBALL TODAY - POLO GROUNDS. Norworth and his friend Albert von Tilzer (who write the music) had never been to a baseball game before his song became a hit sing-along.

Mass murderer Charles Manson recorded an album called "Lie."

Elvis Presley received his U.S. army discharge on March 5, 1960.

The leading female singer in an opera is called the prima donna.

Brian Epstein managed The Beatles to superstardom.

The Beatles performed their first U.S. concert in Carnegie Hall.

The Beach Boys formed in 1961.

George Anthiel composed film scores, but earlier in his life he had been an avant garde composer. In 1924 his "Ballet mecanique" was performed at Carnegie Hall. The work was scored for a fire siren, automobile horns, and an airplane propeller. After only a few minutes of this racket, an aging gentleman in the orchestra seats tied his handkerchief to his cane and began waving a white flag.

Brian Epstein, a record store owner in London, was asked by a customer for a copy of the record, "My Bonnie", by a group known as The Silver Beatles. He didn’t have it in stock so he went to the Cavern Club to check out the group. He signed to manage them in a matter of days and renamed them The Beatles.

Montgomery is the birthplace of music great Nat King Cole, pop singers Clarence Carter and Toni Tenille, Metropolitan Opera singer Nell Rankin, and blues legend Willie Mae Big Mama Thornton.

An eighteenth-century German named Matthew Birchinger, known as the little man of Nuremberg, played four musical instruments including the bagpipes, was an expert calligrapher, and was the most famous stage magician of his day. He performed tricks with the cup and balls that have never been explained. Yet Birchinger had no hands, legs, or thighs, and was less than 29 inches tall.

In every show that Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt (The Fantasticks) did there was at least one song about rain.

Peter Batten was a deserter from the British Army at the time of the creation of the film. In the final weeks of production, he was arrested for desertion, and Paul Angelis had to finish voicing the part of George.

The Beatles appear at the end of "The Yellow Submarine" in a short live action epilogue. Their voices for the cartoon movie were done by Paul Angelis (Ringo), Peter Batten (George), John Clive (John), and Geoffrey Hughes (Paul).

Jazz began in the 20th century, when bands in New Orleans began to apply the syncopated rhythms of ragtime to a variety of other tunes. In the first days of jazz, ensemble playing was emphasized. Only gradually did jazz come to be based on improvised solos.

The Beatles played the Las Vegas Convention Center in 1964. Some 8,500 fans paid just $4 each for tickets.

Warner Communications paid $28 million for the copyright to the song "Happy Birthday".

Verdi wrote the opera Aida at the request of the khedive of Egypt to commemorate the opening of the Suez canal.

No one knows where Mozart is buried.

"Mr. Mojo Risin" is an anagram for Jim Morrison.

Brian Setzer, of the Brian Setzer Orchestra, started out in a garage band called Merengue.

Dark Side of The Moon (a Pink Floyd album) stayed on the top 200 Billboard charts for 741 weeks! That is 14 years.

In 1992, Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon, better known to country music fans as singer/comedienne Minnie Pearl, was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President George Bush. In 1994, Minnie became the first woman to be inducted into the Comedy Hall of Fame. She was too frail and sick to attend the ceremony, and so good friend and comedian George Lindsey ("Goober") accepted the award for her. She died in 1996 at age 83.

The famous Russian composer Aleksandr Borodin was also a respected chemistry professor in St. Petersburg.

The song "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" was written by George Graff, who was German, and was never in Ireland in his life.

In the band KISS, Gene Simmons was "The Demon", Paul Stanley was "Star Child", Ace Frehley was "Space Man", and Peter Criss was "The Cat.

At the tender age of 7, the multi-award-winning composer and pianist Marvin Hamlisch ("The Way We Were," "The Sting") was one of the youngest students ever admitted to the renowned Juilliard School of Music in New York City.

The rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd took their name from a high school teacher named Leonard Skinner who had suspended several students for having long hair.

Most toilets flush in E flat.

The brass family of instruments include the trumpet, trombone, tuba, cornet, flügelhorn, French horn, saxhorn, and sousaphone. While they are usually made of brass today, in the past they were made of wood, horn, and glass.

According to Margaret Jones, author of a Patsy Cline biography, there are a dozen places in Virginia that could claim to be the hometown of the nomadic Cline. Her family moved 19 times before she was 15.

A person breathes 7 quarts of air every minute.

The kidneys filter about 500 gallons of blood each day.

Heroin is the brand name of morphine once marketed by Bayer.

Human lungs are 100 times easier to blow up than a standard toy balloon. But they tend to make lousy party favors.

Electrical stimulation in certain areas of the brain can revive long lost memories.

Urine was once used as a detergent for washing.

The human kidney consists of over 1 million little tubes with a total length of about 40 miles in both kidneys.

Your hearing is less sharp if you eat too much.

Sometimes when you belch, a little bit of your stomach acids comes along. This makes for a very disgusting and burning burp.

The hardest substance in the human body is enamel.

Pain travels through the body at 350 feet per second.

When honey is swallowed, it enters the blood stream within a period of 20 minutes.

Several well documented instances have been reported of extremely obese people flushing aircraft toilets whilst still sitting on them. The vacuum action of these toilets sucked the rectum inside out.

If you squeezed out all of the bacteria from your intestines, you could almost fill up a coffee mug.

The average square inch of skin holds 650 sweat glands, 20 blood vessels, 60,000 melanocytes, and during the summer months, six or seven mosquito bites.

Each red blood cell lives an average of 4 months and travels between the lungs and other tissues 75,000 times before returning to the bone marrow to die.

You blink every 2-10 seconds. As you focus on each word in this sentence, your eyes swing back and forth 100 times a second, and every second; the retina performs 10 billion computer-like calculations.

The sense of touch: electrical impulses travel from the skin toward the spinal cord at a rate of up to 425 feet per second.

Between the ages of 30 and 70, you nose may lengthen and widen by as much as half an inch.

Skin is the largest organ of the human body.

The pupil of the eye expands as much as 45 percent when a person looks at something pleasing.

Mouth ulcers are the most common human affliction.

The most common non-contagious disease in the world is tooth decay.

The hardest bone in the human body is the jawbone.

The iris membrane controls the amount of light that enters your eye.

Lacrimal fluid lubricates the eyes.

Lead poisoning is known as plumbism.

Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter had an operation for hemorrhoids while he was in office.

Human blood travels 60,000 miles per day on its journey through the arteries, arterioles and capillaries and back through the venules and veins.

Hay fever is the sixth most prevalent chronic condition in the United States.

Your jaw muscle is the most powerful muscle in your body.

Despite accounting for just one-fiftieth of body weight, the brain burns as much as one-fifth of our daily caloric intake.

From the age of thirty, humans gradually begin to shrink in size.

Devoid of its cells and proteins, human blood has the same general makeup as sea water.

Scientists have identified more than 300 viruses capable of bringing fatal diseases to insects. The organisms are believed to be entirely different than those that cause disease in humans, and are thus harmless to man.

During a lifetime, one person generates more than 1,000 pounds of red blood cells.

If you lock your knees while standing long enough, you will pass out.

In 1918 and 1919, a world epidemic of simple influenza killed 20 million people in the United States and Europe.

One group, the Hunza in Northwest Kashmir, reportedly have not experienced cancer. The group is also said to have unusual longevity.

By age sixty, most people have lost half of their taste buds.

Blonde beards grow faster than darker beards.

Americans spend an estimated $500 million each year on allergy treatments.

In 1990, a 64-year old Hartsville, Tennessee, woman entered a hospital for surgery for what doctors diagnosed as a tumor on her buttocks. What surgeons found, however, was a four-inch pork chop bone, which they removed. They estimated that it had been in place for five to ten years. The woman could not remember sitting on it, or eating it for that matter.

Queen Victoria eased the discomfort of her menstrual cramps by having her doctor supply her with marijuana.

Every person has a unique tongue print.

Did you know that you can actually die from a broken heart? Studies have shown that people who had experienced great loss or sadness can develop cracks in their heart which could lead to death.

A follicle that is more oval in shape will produce curlier hair, which, when viewed under a microscope, is more "flat" in appearance than a straight hair, which is "round".

Smoking makes it almost impossible for a male to have a natural erection and it shrinks the penis. It also reduces the mobility of sperm.

A new born baby breathes five times faster than an adult man.

Brain surgery is done with the patient still awake. The brain has no nerves therefore it has no sensation. The person is put to sleep to open the skull but after that the person wakes up to see the operation be completed.

It only takes 7 lbs of pressure to rip off your ears.

There are more than one form of the Ebola virus. Different strains are named after the area they were discovered in.

Over 25% of Zaire is infected with a form of the Ebola virus that does not kill.

There have been cases of people dying from paper cuts. The paper cut gets infected, and without proper treatment you can die from the infection.

The first drug that was offered as a water-soluble tablet, was aspirin in 1900.

The little lump of flesh just forward of your ear canal, right next to your temple, is called a tragus.