the mind blown thread

(1) There are over 2500 satellites in orbit around the EarthThere are also over 10 000 man made objects orbiting around the Earth. These include a variety of pieces of satellite debris ranging from panels to disused equipment.

(2) Mosquito repellents don’t repel. They hide you. The spray blocks the mosquito’s sensors so they don’t know you’re there.

(3) Dentists have recommended that a toothbrush be kept at least 6 feet away from a toilet to avoid airborne particles from the flush.


(4) The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as substitute for blood plasma.

(5) American car horns beep in the tone of F.

(6) No piece of paper can be folded into half more than 7 times.

(7) Donkeys kill more people annually than plane crashes.

(8) 1 in every 4 Americans has appeared on television.

(9) You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching television.

(10) Oak trees do not produce acorns until they are fifty years of age or older.

(11) The first product to have a bar code was Wrigley’s gum.

(12) The king of hearts is the only king without a mustache.

(13) A Boeing 747s wingspan is longer than the Wright brothers’ first flight.

(14) American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first-class.

(15) Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.

(16) The first CD pressed in the US was Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.”

(17) Apples, not caffeine, are more efficient at waking you up in the morning.

(18) The 57 on the Heinz ketchup bottle represents the number of varieties of pickles the company once had.

(19) The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.

(20) Most dust particles in your house are made from dead skin.

(21) The first owner of the Marlboro company died of lung cancer.

(22) Barbie’s full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts.

(23) Michael Jordan makes more money from Nike annually than all of the Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined.

(24) Adolf Hitler’s mother seriously considered having an abortion but was talked out of it by her doctor.

(25) Marilyn Monroe had six toes.

(26) All US Presidents have worn glasses. Some just didn’t like being seen wearing them in public.

(27) The sound of E.T. walking was made by someone squishing her hands in jelly.

(28) Debra Winger was the voice of E.T.

(29) Pearls melt in vinegar.

(30) Thomas Jefferson is credited with inventing the coat hanger.

(31) Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.

(32) The 3 most valuable brand names on earth: Marlboro, Coca-Cola, and Budweiser, in that order.

(33) It’s possible to lead a cow upstairs…but not downstairs.

(34) Humans are the only primates that don’t have pigment in the palms of their hands.

(35) Ten percent of the Russian government’s income comes from the sale of vodka.

(36) The sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” uses every letter in the alphabet. (Developed by Western Union to Test telex/two communications)

(37) Average life span of a major league baseball: 7 pitches.

(38) A duck’s quack doesn’t echo, and no one knows why.

(39) The airplane Buddy Holly died in was the “American Pie.”(Thus the name of the Don McLean song.)

(40) Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history. * Spades – King David; * Clubs – Alexander the Great; *Hearts -Charlemagne; * Diamonds – Julius Caesar.

(41) Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them used to burn their houses down-hence the __expression “to get fired.”

(42) Hershey’s Kisses are called that because the machine that makes them looks like it’s kissing the conveyor belt.

(43) Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.

(44) Snails can sleep for 3 years without eating.

(45) Actor Tommy Lee Jones and US vice-president Al Gore were freshman roommates at Harvard.

(46) The fingerprints of koala bears are virtually indistinguishable from those of humans, so much so that they could be confused at a crime scene.

(47) Months that begin on a Sunday will always have a “Friday the 13th.”

(48) The Eisenhower interstate system requires that one mile in every five must be straight. These straight sections are usable as airstrips in times of war or other emergencies.

(49) There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.

(50) All of the clocks in the movie “Pulp Fiction” are stuck on 4:20

†¢Antares is about 420 million kms in diameter, which is 300 times the width of the sun.
†¢The gravitational field inside a black hole is so strong that it can swallow anything in the universe, even a passing star and its light. If an objest weighing 1 kg is brought to within 6 m of a black hole, it would weigh a million million tonnes.
†¢The surface of the moon is pitted with craters of all sizes upto 250 km in diameter. These have been created by meteorites smashing into the surface long ago.
†¢The largest Volcano in the solar system is on Mars Olympus Moons, 600 km wide and 24,000 m high, is nearly three times higher than Mt. Everest.
†¢Quassars are stupendous power houses. They give out as much energy as hundreds of galaxies from a volume of space only a light year across.
†¢Halley's comet is seen after every 76 years in the sky. It was last seen in the year 1986.
†¢The sun is a 5 billion years old star and is supposed to remain exist for another 5 billion years.
†¢Jupiter planet is mostly made of gases.
†¢Unlike other planets in the solar system, Venus spins not from west to east, but from east to west.
†¢A new and tiny moon of jupiter revolves around the planet in just over 7 hours - making it the fastest moon in the solar system.
†¢More than 75 million meteors enter the earth's atmosphere every day, but they disintegrate before hitting the ground.
†¢Mars is called the Red planet because it's surface is red.
†¢Pluto is the smallest and coldest planet among all ten planets.
†¢Sirus star is much brighter than the sun. In fact, no star is as bright as sirus.
†¢A person of 60 kgs weight barely will weigh 10 kg on moon, but 1,680 kg on the sun.

]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OsW8zctD7CM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=uZpmgWS9XtE

YouTube

†¢If YouTube were a country, it would be the third most-populated place in the world.
†¢20 hours-worth of video is uploaded to the site every single minute.
†¢comScore recently announced that the site had surpassed 100m viewers in the USA alone. They also reported that this US audience consumed over 6bn videos at the beginning of this year.
†¢According to Youtube themselves, over half of users visit the site at least once a week

Facebook
According to Facebook’s internal statistics:
†¢The site has more than 250m active users globally
†¢More than 120m users log on to Facebook at least once each day and more than 30 million users update their statuses at least once each day. Combined, more than 5bn minutes are spent on the site on a daily basis.
†¢The average user has around 120 friends on the site.
†¢Every single month, more than a billion photos are uploaded to the site.
†¢More than 50 translations are available on the site, with more than 40 in development.
†¢Mobile is a big issue, with more than 30m active users accessing the site through mobile devices. It's well documented that users who access Facebook through mobile devices are almost 50% more active than those who don’t.

MySpace
†¢Although now overtaken by Facebook, MySpace is the second largest social network, experiencing in excess of 60m unique users each month.
†¢MySpace apparently reaches 30% of UK adults aged 15-24 - it's been suggested that its as common to have a MySpace account in the UK as it is to own a dog.
†¢According to Knol, MySpace has more than 115m active monthly users globally with, on average, 300,000 new people signing up to the site every day.

Twitter
†¢Over the past twelve months, Twitter’s year-on-year growth rate has broken the 1000% barrier.
†¢The company holds exact numbers close to their chest, but it's estimated that Twitter currently has between 6 - 10m global users and this is growing rapidly.
†¢According to a recent report on Twitter usage by Sysomos, 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity and that 72.5% of all users joining during the first five months of 2009.
†¢The same report found that over 50% of all updates are published using mobile and Web-based tools, other than Twitter.com’s own website.
†¢It also found that Tuesday is the most active day for Tweeting, followed by Wednesday and then Friday.
†¢Hitwise recently reported that one out of every 350 website visits in the UK is via Twitter, but barely 5% of users currently go to an online retail service through the medium.
†¢Not really a stat, but still quite a cool piece of info: Twitter is now officially a term in the English Dictionary.

6 Best Facts about the Universe You Don't Know

1. The Big Bang: Most people are familiar with the Big Bang to some extent, but the depth of information know available is mind boggling, taking us back to the tiniest fractions of a second after the Big Bang began (10-43 seconds). It's important to understand that the Big Bang didn't happen at a place, the Big Bang happened everywhere, causing the tiny "point" that was the universe to explode apart, form particles and matter and then inflate in size. The Big Bang itself is an unexplainable singularity, happening with a universe of zero size and infinite temperature and density, and the cause is unknown.

Now for some mind-boggling numbers to gasp or scratch your head at. Between 10-43 seconds and 10-35 seconds, the entire universe expanded to a size 1050 times bigger than it was, an unimaginable inflation of 100 trillion trillion trillion trillion times. Within the first 100 seconds of the Big Bang, all of the building blocks for all of the matter in the Universe today were formed.

2. Organization Exists at Every Level: Our solar system is a collection of planets orbiting our sun, stars group together into clusters and the Milky Way is a collection of stars all grouped together by gravity as well. Well, gravity and organization persists at even larger scales as well. Galaxies group together into clusters. The Milky Way is a part of the Local Group, with almost 50 other galaxies. This is a very small galaxy cluster however, for example the relatively close by Virgo Cluster contains 2,500 galaxies.. Superclusters and More: Clusters form together into superclusters, which contain tens of thousands of galaxies, with our own being the Local Supercluster. Galaxies and superclusters still show more organization,
forming into massive filaments across the universe, with massive voids of empty space in between. For example, the Great Wall is a collection of galaxies spanning 70 Mpc, or mega parsecs. (One Mpc is a million parsecs, and each parsec is 3.26 light years. So a distance of 70 Mpc is well over 225 million light years. For comparison, the Milky Way galaxy is about 30 Kpc across, or about 100,000 light years). The largest structures in the universe are between 200-300 Mpc across.

4. Dark Matter: We cannot see or detect about 90% of the matter across the entire universe, although strides have now been made in "mapping" this matter. This dark matter, so named because it does not emit energy at any wavelength, is still a huge mystery in terms of what it really is. Its presence however is unquestionable, because the interactions on large scales within galaxies, between galaxies and galaxy clusters is impossible with the level of mass that can be accounted for by stars, planets and interstellar dust alone.

5. Dark Energy: Dark energy is the mysterious force that causes repulsion between matter in the universe on the largest scales, leading to the known expansion of the universe. Dark energy is the largest component of the matter/energy in the universe, estimated to account for 73%, with dark matter accounting for 23% and luminous matter such as stars only accounting for 4% of the total!

6. Permanent Expansion or Collapse? The fate of our universe is still up for debate, and possible end results could be a permanent expansion, continuing the expansion we are still going, or eventually collapsing back in on itself. This is basically a function of density of matter and energy within the universe, and is a battle between gravity and dark energy. Gravity of course would bring everything back together, while dark energy as mentioned leads to repulsion. Currently, it is believed that our universe exists at the exact critical density needed to prevent collapse back on itself, creating a basically flat universe that is infinitely expanding.