Lightning

 Photo to the left is a historic photo taken on May 6, 1919, of the Eiffel Tower being struck by lightning.
Lightning strikes the Empire State Building about twenty-five times a year.
Every 24 hours, about 8,640,000 lightning bolts touch the earth.
A lightning flash can contain 1 billion volts of electricity and is 5 times as hot as the surface of the sun!
Why do we hear thunder? Due to the excessive heat produced by lightning, air molecules expand and vibrate with such a immense speed that a thunder noise is created.

Flu Virus

The virus (also known as influenza) that causes the flu is 1/1,000,000 (one millionth) of an inch long.

A person can never have permanent imunity to the flu virus, since it mutates every year.

Gravity in Space

Scientifically, there is no such thing as free gravity. The power of gravity decreases as we head away from earth, but it never totally fades away

 The ocean contains 80% of life on earth and covers 70% of the earth's surface. Its average depth (about 12,500 feet) is about 5 times the average height of land (about 2,500 feet).

The Challenger Deep, in the Mariana Trench, is the deepest place on earth: it reaches 10,920 meters (35,827 feet) below the ocean surface.

The Earth

• Deserts are advancing and taking over the land. In Mali the desert has taken over about 220 miles in as few as 20 years. Deserts can be repelled, by developing tree-planting projects, having better agriculture and by managing the land better. However, governments still are reluctant to fund anti-desertification, despite horrific droughts that have occurred in recent years.

• The Earth has been around for 4.6 billion years. Scaling this time down to 46 years we have been around for 4 hours and our Industrial Revolution began just 1 minute ago. During this short time period we have ransacked the planet for ways to get fuels and raw materials, have been the cause of extinction of an unthinkable amount of plants and animals, and have multiplied our population to that of a plague.

Despite all of the damage we have caused the environment most of it is reversible. We can restore habitats and return species to them; clean rivers; renovate buildings; replenish the topsoil, replant forests. However, these activities do not relieve the worst symptoms of the damage. We still have to fix the source of these problems, us and our vision that we must progress

The Rainforest

• In Peninsular Malaysia, more tree species are found in 125 acres of Tropical Forest than in the entire North America.

• In Peru a single bush may contain more ant species than in the British Isles.

• A study has shown that there are possibly over 30 million species of insects dwelling in the canopies of tropical forests.

• 63,000 square miles of Rainforests are being destroyed each year.

• Rainforests higher than 3,000 feet above sea level are called cloud forests.

• Already over half of the world's tropical forests have been lost.

• Madagascar is the home to a rainforest where 60 percent of it's 12,000 different plant species are unique to that island.

• When you visit a pharmacist, one in every four purchases will have come from a tropical forest.

• Medicine produced in tropical forests bring in commercially 30 billion dollars a year.

• Large areas of South and Central America are cleared and burned for cattle ranching. This is so that farmers can provide cheap beef to consumers in the West.

• Every year approximately four billion tons of carbon accumulates in the air each year, about 30% of this comes directly from the continued burning of the rainforests.

• More than anything else, rainforest is destroyed by peasant farmers. However, the responsibility for this lies largely with the governments who fail to promote land reform and sustainable agricultural practices as an alternative to forest clearance.

• Greater than a quarter of our rainforest is in Brazil