Fun Facts

A day is a measure of how long it takes a planet to make one full rotation around its axis. One day on Earth is 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.091 seconds.

Other planets have different lengths of day:

• Mercury: 59 days
• Venus: 243 days
• Mars: 24 hours, 37 minutes, 23 seconds
• Jupiter: 9 hours, 55 minutes

We measure a day beginning at midnight. The Ancient Babylonians measured the day from sunrise and the ancient Jews measured it from sunset.

You've probably heard of "Buzz" Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and John Glenn. Do you know what they have in common with Robert Thirsk, Dave Williams and Bjarni Tryggvason? The answer is that they've all orbited around the Earth in a spaceship. Thirsk, Williams and Tryggvason are three of the 7 Canadians who have left Terra Firma to travel into space. The others are: Marc Garneau, the first Canadian in Space; Roberta Bondar, the first Canadian woman in space; Julie Payette, the youngest Canadian in space and the first to work on the International Space Station; Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian to space walk! (No, not like Michael Jackson!)

The chalk your teacher uses on the blackboard used to be alive. It is made from limestone, a rock composed of tiny vegetable and animal fossils.

The Iroquois were accomplished farmers and agricultural engineers. They cultivated more than 15 species of corn, including 61 varieties of sweet corn and 25 varieties of popping corn. They also grew more than 60 varieties of beans, including over 8 varieties each of bread beans and soup beans.

Oxygen, iron and silicon are the most abundant elements on Earth. Aluminum, calcium, magnesium, nickel and sulfur make up most of the remaining 20%. The other 100+ elements account for only about 1% of everything on Earth!

All over the world agricultural and chemical engineers are working together to convert animal fats and vegetable oils into bio-diesels, a type of biodegradable fuel. THEIR CHALLENGE: to make this environmentally friendly fuel cheap enough so that it can compete with fossil fuels.

You're taller in the morning than you are at night. During the night your spine stretches to its full length so when you get up in the morning you're at your tallest. During the day gravity acts to compress your spine, so you get shorter as the day progresses. An average adult shrinks by 16 millimeters between getting up and going to bed.

They use anti-freeze!

Well, actually they eat lots and lots of moss, which contains chemicals that help them keep their body fluids warm. When the weather gets really cold these chemicals prevent the reindeer from freezing solid.

Some microchips are so small they can fit through the eye of a needle, and a single fibre optic cable thinner than the dots at the beginning of this line can carry 2000 two-way conversations at the same time.

Some animals are natural construction engineers and build amazing things. Their construction methods are often so good that humans copy them!

A web is a spider's home. It's also its version of a trapline. Using a part of its body called spinnerets (most spiders have 6), a spider spins out liquid silk which quickly hardens into strong, sticky webbing. Building a web takes a lot of work. Some of them are damaged quickly by the thrashing of trapped bugs, so spiders are constantly repairing and reconstructing their webs. Take a look at the similarities between a spider's web and a hockey net!

Bees construct hexagonal (6-sided) cells from beeswax to make their hives. The shape of the cell is very efficient, it makes the hive strong, but lightweight - an important consideration when 40,000 to 60,000 bees might be living there. The hexagon honeycomb is a shape which appears in other places in nature like in plant stems and the cornea in the human eye. Because of its high strength-to-weight ratio, the hexagon is used by human designers in things like cardboard boxes.

The structures that ants build to live are called nests, but they're actually a lot more like cities! There are lots of different rooms called chambers in an ant's nest. Each chamber has a specific function. Some are used for storing food, others as garbage dumps, there are even special chambers like nurseries which are used for raising ant larvae. All of these chambers are connected by tunnels, which look a lot like highway interchanges.

Another city-builder is the prairie dog. Prairie dogs live in dry grasslands and they are very small which makes them easy targets for predators, so they spend a lot of their time underground where it's both cooler and safer. Prairie dog towns, as they are called, can be huge - up to the size of a city block! Within each town there may be many families, each with its own burrow which is connected to others by tunnels. The towns have lots of entrances; when predators appear the prairie dogs can escape to safety quickly.

Perhaps the most famous construction engineer in the animal world is the beaver. Beavers build dams, lodges, food stashes and even canals and logging trails. Their homes provide them with everything they need while keeping them incredibly safe from predators. Beavers build dams only in places where the water in shallow, in this way they make sure the water will be deep enough during the winter so that the entrance to the dam is not covered in ice. Where water is deeper, beavers build lodges which they cover in mud (except around the air intake near the top). When the cold weather begins the mud cements the outer twigs and wood of the lodge together so that no predators can get in. In order to get trees to their lodges or dams more easily, beavers often clear logging trails (routes which they clear of trees) or excavate canals. Canals can be 1.5m wide and 1m deep; sometimes beavers divert nearby streams through them to maintain the water level near their lodge or dam.

What other animals are construction engineers?

Counting is one of the first things we learn as children. But did you know there are different ways of counting? The number system we use everyday is called the decimal, or base-10, system. In it there are ten symbols - 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0 - that can be use to represent any number no matter how big or how small.

Another way of counting was used by the Mayan people of central America. They developed a base-20, or vigesimal system. In it there are twenty symbols, each representing a number from zero to nineteen. A dot represents ones, a line represents fives, and a special symbol represents zero. A dot or dots over a zero indicate that a cycle is starting again, so 20 is one dot over a zero and 40 is two dots over a zero.

Computers use yet another way of counting. It is a binary, or base-2, system. It uses two symbols, 0 and 1. Each 0 or 1 is called a bit. While we see normal looking numbers and letters on our computer monitors, they are each actually stored in the computer as a series of 8 bits, also called a byte. Although computers are really modern machines, the binary system was developed by European mathematicians in the 1700s.

Get binary equivalents of decimal numbers

Get more information on Mayan numbers

What ROM and RAM mean

• Silly Putty has been to space. The astronauts of Apollo 8 were given a special silver egg of Silly Putty to play with during their flight. They used it to keep tools from floating around the rocket cabin while in zero gravity.
• The Columbus Zoo in Ohio has used Silly Putty to make hand and foot prints of gorillas.
• Some non-smoker groups tell their members to play with Silly Putty when they're trying to quit smoking. It gives them something to do with their hands.
• Silly Putty can be used to clean computer keyboards, plug leaks, remove lint and animal hair from clothing and steady wobbly tables.

Source: http://funstuffusa.com

• Coastal BC supports the largest number of slugs in Canada - as many as 3 per square foot of garden soil!
• Only the Prairie Provinces with their hot, dry summers and bitterly cold winters are wholly unpopular with slugs. Slugs avoid light. They seek out cool, moist dark conditions.
• If a slug looses one eye and is stuck in the light, it will crawl around in circles in the direction of the missing eye. It thinks it's moving towards the dark.
• Slugs cause the loss of about 36,000 tons of potatoes every year - the average annual consumption of about 400,000 people.
• Banana slugs deposit a valuable nitrogen-rich fertilizer in their droppings, giving young redwood trees a boost in growth.
• Members of the family Vitrinidae range into the Arctic and can sometimes be seen gliding along the surface of the snow.

When cars started driving on the streets of New York City in 1900 they were hailed as pollution relieving devices. At the time there were 120,000 horses in the city; they produced more than a million kilograms of manure each day!

Water stays in Lake Superior for an average of 191 years, in Lake Michigan for an average of 99 years, in Lake Huron for an average of 22 years, in Lake Ontario for an average of 6 years and in Lake Erie for an average of only 2.6 years.

Construction has begun on the International Space Station, the most challenging and ambitious construction project ever thought up!

• The Space Station will allow people to live in orbit for an extended period of time.
• The project will take at least 45 space flights over 5 years to complete.
• 16 countries are involved in the co-operative project including Canada.
• 3 Canadian astronauts will help in construction in space - Julie Payette, Marc Garneau and Chris Hadfield.
• Dr. Hadfield was the first Canadian to make a space walk during a space shuttle mission on April 22nd , 2001.
• A robot arm designed and made in Canada, similar to the one on the Space Shuttle, is a permanent part of the space station. It will help in construction and during experiments once the station is complete.
• When complete the Space Station will be as large as two football fields and will be visible to the naked eye from Earth.

Bit The smallest unit of computer data; either 0 or 1.

HTML The language used to create Web pages; it stands for Hyper Text Markup Language.

Internet The huge collection of inter-connected networks and computers all over the world. The World Wide Web is only a part of the Internet.

Modem A device which connects your computer to a phone line and allows access to other computers.