Science Facts for Kids
Mind-blowing science facts
Your body contains about 37 trillion cells, each one working like a tiny factory. Most cells are so small that 10,000 of them could fit on the head of a pin.
Nothing in the universe can travel faster than light, which moves at about 300,000 kilometers per second. At that speed, you could circle Earth more than seven times in just one second.
Your DNA contains about 3 billion base pairs and is packed into nearly every cell in your body. If you unraveled all the DNA from a single human cell and stretched it out, it would be about 2 meters long.
Most liquids shrink when they freeze, but water is special — it expands by about 9 percent. This is why ice floats on liquid water and why fish can survive in frozen lakes.
In space, there is no air, so sound waves have nothing to travel through. This means that huge stellar explosions happening billions of miles away are completely silent from a distance.
According to Einstein's theory of relativity, gravity actually bends time. Clocks on the International Space Station run slightly faster than clocks on Earth's surface because they experience less gravity.
All the gold on Earth was forged in the collision of neutron stars billions of years ago. These cataclysmic cosmic crashes create temperatures hot enough to fuse heavy elements together.
Your brain makes up only about 2 percent of your body weight, but it uses roughly 20 percent of your total energy. It never truly switches off — even while you sleep, your brain is very busy.
When cyanobacteria first started producing oxygen about 2.4 billion years ago, it was actually toxic to most life on Earth at the time. This event, called the Great Oxidation Event, wiped out much of the world's early life.
Diamonds are made entirely of carbon — the same element found in coal, graphite, and the lead in your pencil. The difference is how the carbon atoms are arranged and the extreme pressure used to form them.