How fast does a tornado go? What’s the tallest tree in the world? Find out!
When it comes to conversation, nothing beats the weather, especially if you can spout off a few cool facts about weather science or space trivia for the kids. Use these fun science facts to create your own trivia questions for teens or kids for a game night or just to learn something new.
12 Fun Science Facts About the Weather
1. Some tornadoes can be faster than Formula One race cars!
2. There are 2,000 thunderstorms on Earth every minute.
3. The wind is silent until it blows against something.
4. There are ice caves in Iceland that have hot springs.
5. The fastest recorded raindrop was 18 mph!
6. The US gets over 1200 tornadoes a year.
7. Lightning can strike twice.
8. Clouds look white because they are reflecting sunlight from above them.
9. Yuma, Arizona gets over 4000 hours of sunshine a year, making it the sunniest place on Earth. The least sunny place is the South Pole, where the sun only shines on 182 days a year (Which would you rather live in?).
10. Rain contains vitamin B12.
11. A bolt of lightning is five times hotter than the sun.
12. A hurricane releases enough energy in one second to equal that of 10 atomic bombs.
13. It can be too warm to snow but never too cold.
18 Cool Science Facts About Space
1. The moon is very hot (224 degrees Fahrenheit, average) during the day but very cold (-243 degrees average) at night.
2. Venus spins clockwise. It’s the only planet that does!
3. One teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh six-billion tons.
4. Sally Ride was the first American woman to fly in space on June 18, 1983.
5. One million Earths could fit inside the sun!
6. Even in an airplane, a trip to Pluto would take about 800 years.
7. Ham the Astrochimp was the first hominid in space, launched on Jan. 31, 1961.
8. Neptune’s days are 16 hours long.
9. It takes eight minutes and 19 seconds for light to travel from the sun to Earth.
10. The footprints on the moon will be there for 100 million years.
11. A neutron star can spin 600 times in one second.
12. Jupiter is the fastest-spinning planet in the solar system (it only takes about 10 hours to complete a full rotation on its axis).
13. Sound does not carry in space.
14. The Earth's core is as hot as the surface of the sun.
15. The very first animals in space were fruit flies... they were sent up in 1947 and recovered alive.
16. In 2011, ten-year-old Kathryn Aurora Gray discovered a supernova (a star that has run out of energy, explodes, and then collapses before it dies) that no one else had seen before.
17. Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, has saltwater geysers 20x taller than Mt. Everest.
18. Saturn's rings are made from trillions of chunks of orbiting ice.
12 Crazy Cool Facts About the Human Body
1. The nose can detect a trillion smells!
2. One-quarter of your bones are in your feet.
3. Human teeth are as strong as shark teeth!
4. Your blood is as salty as the ocean.
5. Not only does everyone have unique fingerprints, humans also have unique tongue prints!
6. The average brain weighs about three pounds. A newborn brain weighs about 3/4 of a pound.
7. Your nose and ears never stop growing.
8. A human body contains almost 100 trillion cells.
9. Your heart beats 100000 times a day.
10. Earwax is a type of sweat.
11. You shed over 30,000 dead skin cells every minute.
12. The only muscle that never tires is the heart.
5 Fun Science Facts About Botany
1. Tomatoes are fruit and watermelons are technically berries!
2. There are some plants that smell like rotting flesh when they flower, attracting pollinators like beetles and flies (who like smelly things).
3. In Utah, there is a forest of aspens that is thought to be one of the oldest living organisms on earth, an estimated 80,000 years old.
4. The tallest tree in the world is the Sequoia redwood, which stands over 379 feet tall.
5. There are more than 391,000 known plant species in the world.
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