Really Interesting Stuff for Kids

1,500 Fascinating and Educational Facts

De: David Fickes

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

With added illustrations !!

This book has 1,500 fascinating and educational facts chosen just for kids. To make it both entertaining and educational, it has periodic illustrations, and the content is focused on animals, geography, history, and science and nature; for example:

• The king cobra is the only snake that builds a nest. They can lay up to 40 eggs at once; the nest is built from vegetation and helps keep the eggs safe.
• Aristarchus of Samos first proposed that the Sun was the center around which the planets orbit in the 3rd century BC; Copernicus developed a fully predictive model in the 16th century but wasn't the first to propose the concept.
• In 1958, a B-47 carrying an atomic bomb larger than the one dropped on Nagasaki accidentally dropped it on Mars Bluff, South Carolina. The core of the bomb was still on the plane, so there wasn’t a nuclear explosion, but the 6,000 pounds of conventional high explosives detonated. The bomb fell on a garden in a rural area and created a 35-foot-deep by 75-foot-wide crater and destroyed the nearby house and outbuildings. Fortunately, no one was killed, and there were only minor injuries.
• It would take 1.2 million mosquitoes each sucking once to drain the average human of all their blood.
• Australia has the world's largest feral camel herd, as many as one million camels at one point. They were imported in the 19th century, and many were later set free as the automobile took over; they now roam freely with no natural predators.
• Humans need 16 to 20 images per second to perceive something as a moving picture rather than a flickering image; dogs need 70 images per second. Older televisions could only produce 50 images per second, so dogs would only see flickering images; modern televisions are fast enough to appear as moving pictures to dogs.
• The blanket octopus has the largest size difference between males and females of any non-microscopic animal. Females are 10,000 to 40,000 times larger than males; females may be 6.5 feet in length; males are 1 inch.
• Educated people have believed the Earth was round for about 2,500 years. Pythagoras postulated the Earth was round in the 6th century BC; Aristotle agreed it was round in the 4th century BC.
• Twenty-seven states are at least partly north of the southernmost point of Canada; Middle Island in Lake Erie is the most southern point of Canada. It is approximately the latitude of Chicago which means that Alaska, California, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming are all at least partly north of Canada.
• The force required to topple a domino is less than the force it generates when it falls; this force amplification can be used to topple ever larger dominos. Each domino can be about 1.5 times larger than the preceding one. Starting with a regular size domino at about 1.875 inches tall and pushing it over, the 25th domino toppled would be about 2,630 feet tall, about the height of the tallest building in the world.
• Koala bear fingerprints are virtually indistinguishable from human fingerprints, even with careful analysis under a microscope. They have the same loopy, whirling ridges as humans.
• Research has shown that most mammals on average live for about 1.5 billion heartbeats. Larger animals have slower heartbeats, so they live longer; humans used to fit the pattern but with health and medical improvements, we last longer than our size predicts. At 60 beats per minute, 1.5 billion heartbeats would be 47.5 years.