Science Facts for Kids
Mind-blowing science facts
Stars are giant element factories. They fuse hydrogen into helium, helium into carbon, and so on up to iron — but making anything heavier than iron actually costs the star energy rather than releasing it.
Your body is home to roughly the same number of bacterial cells as human cells. Most of these microbes live in your gut and actually help you digest food and stay healthy.
Under certain conditions, hot water can freeze faster than cold water — a strange phenomenon called the Mpemba Effect. Scientists still debate exactly why this happens.
In quantum mechanics, tiny particles like electrons can exist in multiple states or even multiple places at once — a property called superposition. They only 'choose' a single state when they are measured or observed.
Glass is technically an amorphous solid, not a liquid. Old window panes that appear thicker at the bottom were not made from glass that 'flowed' — they were simply installed that way for stability.
A bolt of lightning is roughly five times hotter than the surface of the Sun. The surface of the Sun is about 5,500 degrees Celsius, while a lightning bolt can reach 30,000 degrees Celsius.
A sneeze can send droplets traveling at speeds of up to 160 kilometers per hour. Those tiny droplets can carry viruses up to eight meters through the air.
Venus rotates in the opposite direction to most planets, so the Sun rises in the west and sets in the east there. It also rotates so slowly that one Venus day is longer than one Venus year.
About 27 percent of the universe is made of dark matter — a mysterious substance that cannot be seen or touched, but whose gravity holds galaxies together. Scientists still don't know what it is made of.
The periodic table currently lists 118 confirmed elements. Scientists have created several of the heaviest ones artificially in laboratories, and some exist for only fractions of a second before decaying.