October 12th, 1999 was declared 'The Day of Six Billion' based on United Nations projections.

At 15 inches the eyes of giant squids are the largest on the planet.

Every second around 100 lightning bolts strike the Earth.

Neutron stars are so dense that a teaspoonful would weigh more than all the people on Earth.

Wilhelm Rontgen won the first Nobel Prize for physics for discovering X-rays in 1895.

The first synthetic human chromosome was constructed by US scientists in 1997.

If the Sun were the size of a beach ball then Jupiter would be the size of a golf ball and the Earth would be as small as a pea.

Even travelling at the speed of light it would take 2 million years to reach the nearest large galaxy, Andromeda.