Learning is the most important job kids have. It's something you can do each day, since there is always more to know! To help feed your hunger for knowledge, stock up on some Kids Corner Brain Food ... fun facts from everywhere! These little nuggets of knowledge will help your brain grow, and who knows... you may even stump your parents!
Brain Food is made possible with support from Agora Cyber Charter School
- Most elephants weigh less than the tongue of a blue whale, The tongue of a blue whale weighs about 8,000 pounds. That's more than a female elephant - although the male elephant would weigh slightly more - between 12,000-14,000 pounds!
- An adult panda can spend up to 12 hours a day eating, and in order to fulfill their dietary needs, they need to eat at least 28 pounds of bamboo.
- There’s only one letter that doesn’t appear in any U.S. state name ... the letter Q
- Peanuts aren’t technically nuts. They’re legumes. According to Merriam-Webster, a nut is only a nut if it’s “a hard-shelled dry fruit or seed with a separable rind or shell and interior kernel.” That means walnuts, almonds, cashews, and pistachios aren’t nuts either. They’re seeds.
- The longest word, which is a chemical compound, is 189,819 letters long. We won’t spell it out (though you can read it here), but the full name for the protein nicknamed titin would take three and a half hours to say out loud.
- Cats' noses are as unique as human fingerprints. They each have a unique pattern of bumps and ridges on their nose pad, and no two kitty's noses are alike.
- The cheetah is the world's fastest land mammal. With acceleration that would leave most automobiles in the dust, a cheetah can go from 0 to 60 miles an hour in only three seconds. These big cats are quite nimble at high speed and can make quick and sudden turns in pursuit of prey.
- A cough can travel as fast as 50 mph and expel almost 3,000 droplets in just one go. Sneezes win though—they can travel up to 100 mph and create upwards of 100,000 droplets.
- The electric eel gets its name from its shocking abilities! Special organs in the eel's body release powerful electric charges!
- An octopus has three hearts, nine brains, and blue blood. Two hearts pump blood to the gills, while a third circulates it to the rest of the body.
- The earth has over 80,000 species of edible plants. We only eat about 30 varieties. We are better at using them for medicine as about 70,000 plant species are utilized for medicine.
- The oldest living tree in the world is the bristlecone pine tree named Methuselah which still stands at the ripe old age of 4,852 deep in the White Mountains of California - however another bristlecone pine in the area was discovered to be over 5,000 years old. Methuselah and its unnamed senior pine's exact locations are kept a close secret in order to protect them.
- Gravity changes how much the person weighs on a planet. Mars’ gravity is lower than earth’s, which means if you weigh 200 pounds on earth, you’ll weigh just 78 pounds on the red planet.
- Marie Curie, one of the people who discovered radium from uranium, was the first scientist to be awarded two Nobel prizes.
- While robotics is one of the fields that scientists are focusing on now, around the year 1495, Leonardo da Vinci sketched detailed plans for a mechanical knight. The knight showed how a machine based on the human structure could be built.
- Pineapples take almost 2 years to grow Commercial pineapple plant fruiting is grown on a 2- to 3-year fruit crop cycle that takes 32-46 months to completion and harvest.
- The left side of your body is controlled by the right side of your brain while the right side of your body is controlled by the left side of your brain - The left side of the brain also performs tasks that have to do with logic, such as in science and mathematics. On the other hand, the right side of your brain performs tasks that have do with creativity and the arts.
- Not only does everyone have unique fingerprints, but humans also have unique tongue prints The tongue is a unique organ in that it can be stuck out of mouth for inspection, and yet it is well protected in the mouth and very difficult to forge.
- The truth is that while our bones stop growing once they reach a certain point - our nose and our ears do get bigger throughout our entire life, but not because they are growing. The real reason is a common scientific force known as GRAVITY. You see, our nose and our ears are made of cartilage and while many people mistakenly believe that cartilage never stops growing, the fact is cartilage does stop growing. However, cartilage is made of collagen and other fibers that begin to break down as we age. The result is drooping. So what appears to be growth is just gravity doing its job