Interesting Facts

6th August 1926 - The American Olympic athlete, Gertrude Ederle, became the first woman to swim across the English Channel. It took her 14 hours, 39 minutes to swim the 56 kilometers from France to England. She held the record for 35 years. 1945 - The world's first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. An estimated 140,000 people were killed by the bomb and its aftermath.

You could fit the entire human race in the volume of a sugar cube. (The human body is made up of atoms, and these atoms are practically empty. Imagine an atom the size of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, a grain of sand inside it would make up the nucleus of the atom and the rest of the space would be a void. So, if you squeezed all the space out of the atoms that make up all the humans on earth you would be able to fit the entire human race in the volume of a sugar cube. Tom Stoppard, the playwright, described it like this, "If the nucleus is like the altar of St Paul's cathedral, an electron is like a moth in the cathedral, one moment by the altar, the next by the dome.") Source: BBC's The Story of Science - 2 / 6

According to modern physics, 98% of the universe is invisible. (Only four per cent of the mass of the Universe is in the atoms that make up you and me, the stars and planets. And we’ve only ever seen half of that with our telescopes. 23 per cent of the mass of the Universe is invisible, “dark”, matter. We know of its existence only because its gravity tugs on the visible stars and galaxies. No one knows what it is. And 73 per cent of the mass of the Universe is dark energy. Discovered only in 1998, this invisible stuff fills all of space and it has repulsive gravity.  Although I do think that calling gravity repulsive is a bit over the top, gravity simply sucks.) Factoid Source

Two new elements have been added to the periodic table, but they haven't got a name, yet. (It took a three-year review by the governing bodies of chemistry and physics before the nameless elements were added. They are both highly radioactive and exist for less than a second before decaying into lighter atoms. Maybe they could call them caterpillium and butterflyium.)

Researchers at Cern, home of the Large Hadron Collider have trapped antimatter atoms for the first time. (They formed 38 stable atoms of antihydrogen which lasted about two tenths of a second each. For each basic particle of matter, there exists an anti-particle with the same mass but the opposite electric charge, but when a particle and its anti-particle collide, they are "annihilated" in a flash of energy, yielding new particles and anti-particles. Physicists believe that the Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and its opposite, but no one knows what happened to all the antimatter. The word "annihilated" makes me think that's a good thing.)

Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived two atomic bombs. (He was visiting Hiroshima on a business trip for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, when he stepped off a tram the first bomb exploded. He was badly burnt, temporarily blinded and lost much of his hearing, but he managed to return home to Nagasaki. He was in his boss's office explaining how he had almost been killed only days before, when the second bomb detonated. Does this make him the luckiest man in history, or the unluckiest?)