Almost every atom in your body heavier than hydrogen was made by a star: inside one during its life, in the explosion that ended it, or in the collision of the dense remnants stars leave behind.
Mount Everest stands about 8,849 metres above sea level. The deepest point in the ocean, Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, lies somewhere between roughly 10,935 and 10,994 metres below it.
Roughly 2.4 billion years ago, the atmosphere of the Earth underwent the most consequential chemical change in the planet's history.
Type "3,000-year-old honey" into any search engine and the same story appears hundreds of times.
The arithmetic is one of the oldest and most reliable demonstrations in physics, and the conclusion is one of the harder facts about the size of atoms to actually believe.
The rock formations of the Scottish Highlands and the western coast of Newfoundland match each other to a degree that surprises people the first time they see the comparison.
Saturn's average density is about 0.687 grams per cubic centimetre. Water sits at roughly 1. On that measure alone, Saturn is the only planet in the Solar System with an average density lower than water, a point NASA states plainly on its Saturn facts page.
The story is well known to anyone who has paid attention to the history of artificial intelligence.
Thomas Parnell set up the pitch drop experiment at the University of Queensland in 1927 to prove that a substance hard enough to shatter with a hammer is actually a fluid. Nine drops have fallen in 98 years, each one missed by every human observer.
According to the Natural History Museum's timeline of shark evolution, the earliest evidence of sharks in the fossil record consists of a few tiny scales found in Late Ordovician rocks roughly 450 million years old.
The Sun is depicted as yellow in children's drawings, in weather icons, on flags, and in the standard astronomical shorthand.
The Pacific Ocean covers about a third of Earth's surface. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's ocean facts page, the Pacific spans more than 155 million square kilometres, or roughly 60 million square miles.
Sunlight takes about eight minutes and twenty seconds to travel from the Sun to the Earth.
The length of a day on Earth is not constant. The planet's rotation has been slowing for billions of years, primarily because tidal friction transfers rotational energy from Earth to the Moon, which slowly moves outward to a higher orbit.
The Sahara is the standard answer to the question "what is the world's largest desert," and it is also wrong.
In the direction of the constellation Boötes there is a roughly spherical region of space, around 330 million light-years across, in which almost nothing is found.
