Amazing Life Science Facts
a pigment-free Morpho butterfly wing Largest leaves
     The raffia palm, which grows on islands in the Indian Ocean, has leaves up to 20 metres long.
Tree house
     The baobab tree has a huge swollen trunk, which is quite soft. In parts of Africa and Australia, people
     sometimes hollow this out, so that they can make a home inside the tree.
Heart power
     The heart has the strength to pump a jet of blood two metres high up into the air.
Nail growth
     Fingernails grow about one milimetre each month, which is four times faster than toenails.
Hair
     We have about 120,000 hairs on our head and about 20,000 on the remaining surface of our body. A healhy man loses between 40
     and 120 hairs per day. Our hair grows at a rate of about one-and-a-quarter centimetres a month. Hair has been known to grow
     to fourteen and a half metres in length.
A rhinoceros beetle - Mariusz Pudzianowski can't cope with it :-) Sneezing
     This can cause particles to be blown out of our nose at a speed of 167 kilometres per hour.
Strong creature
     The rhinoceros beetle can lift objects that are 850 times its own weight. We can lift objects that are
     equal to seventeen times our own body weight.
Body cells
     Cells lining the intestine last just three days, but brain cells can survive throughout our lives.
Penguins
     Penguins can dive to depths of 265 metres. They may stay underwater without coming up to breathe for as long as eighteen
     minutes.
Polar bears
     Polar bears have no fear of people. They will hunt us if they are hungry. This makes polar bears the most dangerous mammals
     on the planet.
Icebergs
     The largest iceberg ever recorded had an area of 31,000 square kilometres, making it bigger than the country of Belgium.
A three-toed sloth - in the film entitled 'Enter the Dragon' presumably it wouldn't be given enough time to defend :-) Slowest mammals
     Three-toed sloths, which live in the rain forests of South America, are the slowest of all mammals. They move,
     on the ground, at about two metres per minute.
Body surface and volume
     Body surface of an adult man equals to approximately 2 square metres, whereas body volume is only 0.06 cubic metre.
Protein denaturing and HIV
     Theoretically, we could have fight HIV virus by warming human body up to 57 Centigrade, yet this action proves to be aimless in
     terms of the highest temperature we can stand; proteins of our cells denature at only 43-44 Centigrade.
IQ tests reliability
     Constant ratio of mental age divided by chronological age was given the name "Intelligence Quotient". In fact, the intelligence
     quotient is defined as 100 times the Mental Age (MA) divided by the Chronological Age (CA), so IQ = 100 MA/CA. IQ score is a
     combination of brain speed and brainpower. The average IQ of the population as a whole is, by definition, 100. IQs range from
     0 to slightly more than 200, and among children to above 250. You have a certain amount of time to take an IQ test, but if you
     don't mind the time and just make the test and take more time than allowed, you can score up to 30 points higher. Hence,
     although Albert Einstein's IQ was only just above 160 (which is certainly very high), he could take his time and raise his thinking
     to an amazing level. In this way you can compare him to somebody with an IQ of 200. To sum up, Einstein had a lot of brainpower
     but his brain speed compared to brainpower was low. Robert James Fischer, former Chess World Champion, had an IQ reported
     to be 187. Tournament chess games are strictly timed. As you can easily see the conclusion is as follows: time is a more important
     factor to achieve oustanding results in chess than in science.


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