1Earth's crust
25% of the earth's crust is actually made of iron like in your cereal.
2. "Fishing is the most dangerous occupation in America (128.9 deaths per 100,000 people), compared to logging (115.7), the military (82, the leading cause being "accident"), flying (72.4), structural iron and steel working (46.4), mining (35) and policing (11.1). The average worker's fatality rate is 3.6."
3. Take all the known data from the beginning of human history, up to year 2003. Currently, we produce an equivalent amount of data every 2 days.
4. Over 1.3 million earths could fit into the sun.
5. By the age of 3, the average child in a professional (lawyer, doctor, engineer, accountant, economist, etc.) family will have heard 20 million more words than a child in a middle-class family and 35 million more than a child in a low-income family. Children from professional families also hear more unique words and twice as many "encouraging" vs. "discouraging" conversations than children from middle-class or low-income families.
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6Richest person
The richest 1% person in the world have more wealth than the rest of the planet. The world's 8 richest men have as much money as the poorest half, 3.6 billion people.
7. Everyone was the youngest person alive for a brief moment after their birth.
8. Wearing a seatbelt correctly reduces chance of front seat passenger fatality due to front end collision by 45%. Seat belts save lives. Also airbags are more likely to cause injuries rather than prevent them when seat belts are not worn.
9. Over 80% of sexually active people will contract an STD (permanent or temporarily) at some point, but most won't know it because they won't show any symptoms.
10. If you look at a webpage/ newspaper/ book and find a random number, there's a 30% chance that it will start with a "1".
11World War 2
3% of everyone on earth alive in 1939 died in World War 2.
12. If you're in a group of 23 people, there's a 50% chance that 2 of them share a birthday. If you're in a group of 70 people, that probability jumps to over 99%.
13. If you correctly shuffle a deck of cards, you'll create a configuration that has never existed, and likely never will again. This is because there are 8.1x10^67 possible arrangements for fifty-two cards, and getting through each of them would take longer than the lifespan of the universe. It also turns out that the above statistics are a little bit scarier than many people realize. According to the mathematics of the situation, as many as 91.5% of Solitaire games should be winnable... and yet, in spite of this, people who have actually played the game report that only 8% of games result in a win. Given that shuffling a deck of cards almost always results in a new configuration, and given that approximately 90% of those configurations should result in a winning game of Solitaire, we're forced to conclude that somehow, we're seeing less than 5% of the available configurations for a deck of cards. By a strange coincidence, it turns out that less than 5% of the universe comprises normal matter and energy. The rest of it is dark matter and dark energy. What does this mean? It means that when you shuffle a deck of cards, you're only going to wind up with observable configurations. 95% of that 8.1x10^67 can be classified as "dark configurations." However, mathematically speaking, the more you shuffle a deck of cards, the more likely it is that you'll stumble on one of those "dark configurations." In other words, it's only a matter of time before someone answers some major astrophysics questions using only a deck of cards.
14. By almost all important measures, the world is a better place to live today than at any other time in human history.
15. If all the humans alive right now lived in the same density per square mile as New York City, we could all live in the state of Texas.
16Mexicans
More Mexicans are leaving the U.S. than coming to the U.S.
17. The Vatican has 5 Popes per square mile.
18. The average person is a 28-year-old Chinese man.
19. Sharks are older than trees. Sharks are at least 400 million years old, trees are sitting at 350 million years.
20. If you graduate high school, don't have a child out of wedlock, and are able to hold a job for a year, you most likely will become fairly successful.
21Galactic speed
Hold up your hands and clap them together. Wait one second, then do it again. If you could plot the distance between the first clap and the second clap, it would be more than 800 kilometers. This is because the Earth is moving around the sun, the sun is moving around the center of the galaxy, the galaxy is moving through the Virgo Supercluster, and the Virgo Supercluster is barreling through the universe. When you add up all the velocities and compare the result to the cosmic microwave background (which is the closest thing we have to a universal frame of reference), it comes out to about 800 kilometers per second. In the time it took you to read this, you've traveled farther than you'll ever walk in your life.
22. 29% of California’s air pollution is from China.
23. The oldest person on Earth (Jeanne Calment) has lived on the planet with an entirely different population of people.
24. Atheists, agnostics and the irreligious are growing as a group in America. Currently, about 25% of Americans say they are unaffiliated with any religion, including 35% of Millennials.
25. More US Soldiers died in the Civil War than US Soldiers have died in all other wars ever, combined.
