Some More Random But Fabulous Fun Facts

A handful of facts that may be a surprise to you, compiled by the team at BBC Science Magazine.

Five times hotter than the surface of the Sun

A lightning bolt is five times hotter than the surface of the Sun. The charge carried by a bolt of lightning is so intense that it has a temperature of 30,000°C (54,000°F).

You have a 50 percent chance of sharing a birthday with a friend. In any group of 23 people, two people will share a birthday, according to the maths.

Vitomir Maricic just broke the world record for longest human breath hold with a stunning 29 minutes and 3 seconds - almost five minutes longer than the previous record, set in 2021, by another Croatian. On average, a human can hold their breath between 30-90 seconds.

Flamingoes aren’t born pink. They actually come into the world with grey/white feathers and only develop a pinkish hue after starting a diet of brine shrimp and blue-green algae.

Using radiometric dating, scientists have discovered that the Earth is 4.54 billion years old (give or take 50 million years). This makes our planet half the age of the Milky Way Galaxy (11-13 billion years old) and around a third of the age of the Universe (10-15 billion years old).

Your brain burns 400-500 calories a day. That’s about a fifth of your total energy requirements. Most of this is concerned with the largely automatic process of controlling your muscles and processing sensory input, although some studies show solving tricky problems increases your brain's metabolic requirements too.

You can’t fold a piece of A4 paper more than eight times. As the number of layers doubles each time, the paper rapidly gets too thick and too small to fold.

Source

Want some more? See Some Random But Fabulous Fun Facts