This is the first in a series of blog posts about our planet and outside forces!

1 - The speed of light is generally rounded down to 186,000 miles per second. In exact terms it is 299,792,458 m/s (equal to 186,287.49 miles per second).

2 - It takes 8 minutes 17 seconds for light to travel from the Sun's surface to the Earth.

3 - 10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.

4 - The Earth spins at 1,000 mph but it travels through space at an incredible 67,000 mph.

5 - Every year, over one million earthquakes shake the Earth.

6 - When Krakatoa erupted in 1883, its force was so great it could be heard 4,800 kilometers away in Australia.

7 - Every second around 100 lightning bolts strike the Earth.

8 - Every year lightning kills 1000 people.

9 - In October 1999 an Iceberg the size of London broke free from the Antarctic ice shelf .

10 - If you could drive your car straight up you would arrive in space in just over an hour.

11 - Human tapeworms can grow up to 22.9m.

12 - The Earth is 4.56 billion years old...the same age as the Moon and the Sun.

13 - The dinosaurs became extinct before the Rockies or the Alps were formed.

14 - Female black widow spiders eat their males after mating.

15 - When a flea jumps, the rate of acceleration is 20 times that of the space shuttle during launch.

16 - If our Sun were just inch in diameter, the nearest star would be 445 miles away.

17 - Astronauts cannot belch - there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their stomachs.

18 - The air at the summit of Mount Everest, 29,029 feet is only a third as thick as the air at sea level.

19 - One million, million, million, million, millionth of a second after the Big Bang the Universe was the size of a ...pea.

20 - DNA was first discovered in 1869 by Swiss Friedrich Mieschler.

21 - The molecular structure of DNA was first determined by Watson and Crick in 1953.

22 - The first synthetic human chromosome was constructed by US scientists in 1997.

23 - The thermometer was invented in 1607 by Galileo.

24 - Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1866.

25 - Wilhelm Rontgen won the first Nobel Prize for physics for discovering X-rays in 1895.

26 - The tallest tree ever was an Australian eucalyptus - In 1872 it was measured at 435 feet tall.

27 - Christian Barnard performed the first heart transplant in 1967 - the patient lived for 18 days.

28 - An electric eel can produce a shock of up to 650 volts.

29 - 'Wireless' communications took a giant leap forward in 1962 with the launch of Telstar, the first satellite capable of relaying telephone and satellite TV signals.

30 - The Ebola virus kills 4 out of every 5 humans it infects.

31 - In 5 billion years the Sun will run out of fuel and turn into a Red Giant.

32 - Giraffes often sleep for only 20 minutes in any 24 hours. They may sleep up to 2 hours (in spurts - not all at once), but this is rare. They never lie down.

33 - There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.

34 - An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.

35 - On the day that Alexander Graham Bell was buried the entire US telephone system was shut down for 1 minute in tribute.

36 - The low frequency call of the humpback whale is the loudest noise made by a living creature.

37 - A quarter of the world's plants are threatened with extinction by the year 2010.

38 - Each person sheds 40lbs of skin in his or her lifetime.

39 - At 15 inches the eyes of giant squids are the largest on the planet.

40 - The Universe contains over 100 billion galaxies.

41 - Wounds infested with maggots heal quickly and without spread of gangrene or other infection.

42 - More germs are transferred shaking hands than kissing.

43 - The fastest speed a falling raindrop can hit you is 18mph.

44 - It would take over an hour for a heavy object to sink 6.7 miles down to the deepest part of the ocean.

45 - Around a million, billion neutrinos from the Sun will pass through your body while you read this sentence.

46 - The deepest part of any ocean in the world is the Mariana trench in the Pacific with a depth of 35,797 feet.

47 - Every hour the Universe expands by a billion miles in all directions.

48 - Somewhere in the flicker of a badly tuned TV set is the background radiation from the Big Bang.

49 - Even traveling at the speed of light it would take 2 million years to reach the nearest large galaxy, Andromeda.

50 - A thimbleful of a neutron star would weigh over 100 million tons.