What shape is a raindrop?

Raindrops are spherical shaped, not like a teardrop.

   'Ball-bearing' and 'lead-shot'makers take advantage of this phinomenon of the falling liquid's shape in their manufacturing process. Molten lead is dripped through a copper sieve (strainer) from a towering height into a cool liquid and the finished product is a perfectly spherical lead shot or ball bearing.

   Shot drop towers used to be built for this purpose until the Festival of Britain raised alarm to the fact that one was next to Waterloo Bridge in London.
   The tallest shot-drop tower is the Clifton Hill Shot Tower (1878) in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia and stands (to this day) at 160 metres tall

How High is Cloud Nine?

Cloud 9 isn't the furthest in the air, cloud 0 is.
   According to the International Cloud Atlas scale, Cloud 0 (the Cirrus) is the highest type of cloud. It can be as high as 40,000 feet (12,000 metres) in the air.
   Cloud 9, the massive thundercloud (Cumulonimbus) is at the bottom of the scale because a single cloud can cover the whole range from as low as a couple hundred feet to the very edge of the stratosphere (about 50,000 feet or 15,000 metres).
   As with the origins of most phrases, its unlikely that 'cloud nine' can not be attached to just one specific source. There have also been recorded, clouds seven, eight and thirty nine, so it's more likely that people settled on 'nine' because it's considered a lucky number (phrases like 'the whole nine yards' or 'the cat with nine lives' commonly use reference of the number nine, a trinity of trinities). Also, the idea of riding on a big, surging cloud definately seems appealing to the mind.
   The Internatioal cloud Atlas was published in 1896 after The International Meteorological Conference established a cloud committee to agree on an international system for the naming and identification of the various clouds.
   The ten categories, were based on the pioneering work of Luke Howard, an english chemist who published his essay on The modification of clouds in 1802, influnced by his experience of freak weather conditions as a child.
   Clouds are suspended collections of tiny water droplets or ice crystals in the Earth's atmosphere. These droplets/crystals are formed within the condensed state of water vapour and they surround particles of things like smoke or salt, called condensation nuclei.

   Cirrus clouds are the only clouds in the sky completely made of ice crystals. They are mostly formed by the condensation trails of high flying jets and they help to regulate the earth's temperature.

  When air traffic was stopped after 9/11, daily temperatre variation grew by up to 3°C over the 48 hour period as the cirrus protection began to deteriorate; letting in more sunlight at day, and letting out more heat at night.

how many moons does the earth have?

The earth has one main moon plus six others.
   It is certain that Luna (as astronomers call the moon) is the only celestial body to follow a strict orbit of the earth, but currently there are six other 'Near Earth Asteroids' which do follow the Earth around the sun, though cannot be spotted with the naked eye.
   Also called 'co-orbitals', the first of these to be discovered was Cruithne (Cru-een-ya), a three mile wide satellite. it was discovered in 1997 and named after Britain's earliest recorded Celtic tribe. It has a horseshoe shaped orbit.
   Since then, six more have been identified; The 2000 PH5, 2000 WN10, 2002 AA29, 2003 YN107 and the 2004GU9.
   Many astronomers would argue that these aren't moons, but are cetainly more than just the average asteroid. They also take about one year to orbit the sun (it's like two  runners running around a track in different lanes and at the same speed) and every now and then they would come close enough to exert a very slight gravitational influence.
   So whether it be quasi satellites, pseudo-moons or companion asteriods (as scientists have it), they are worth monitoring; maybe some, or even all of them would one day achieve a more regular orbital pattern.

What makes champagne fizz?

Nooo, it ain't Carbon Dioxide, it's dirt!
   Carbon dioxide particles would evaporate invisibly in a perfectly smooth and clean glass, so for a long time scientists had accepted that it was slight imperfections in production of the glass that made the bubbles form.
   Howbeit, advancement in photographic techniques have now displayed that these demerits in design were much too small for the bubbles to latch onto. What causes these bubbles are the microscopic particles of dust and fragments of fluff that enable them to form in the glass.
   Practically speaking, the 'dirt' in the glass act as condensational nuclei for the dissolved CO2

  According to Moët et Chandon, there are about 250million bubbles in a bottle of champagne. It was believed to be first invented by Dom Perignon, a Benedictine monk at the Abbey of Hautvillers in the 17th century, purely by mistake! Unlike wine, that is made up of one type of grapes, champagne is made from three types of grapes; one variety of white grapes, the Chardonnay and two varieties of black grapes, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier.

Chardonnay

   What's interesting is that, despite of its white colour, champagne is mostly made up of black grapes! The black grapes are pressed just enough to extract no more than the juice and the skin chucked into caskets in the wine cellar, to undergo fermentation.
   The pressure in a champagne bottle is three times that of a car tire, measuring at ninety pounds per square inch.
   The velocity at which the cork leaves the bottle has been recorded to be between 38-40 mph (61-64kmph). It can pop out at up to 100 miles per hour. The furthest flight-distance of a champagne cork was a recorded 177 feet, 9 inches, done by American Heinrich Medicus in 1988.
   Marilyn Monroe is believed to have taken a 'champagne bath', using about 350 champagne bottles to fill the bathtub.
   The world's tallest champagne bottle is about seven feet upright and has the capacity to fit up to 22 normal-sized bottles of champagne. It was unveiled at a festival in Italy.
   There is a rumour that a few bottles of Heidsieck & Co. Monopole Blue Top Champagne Brut was recently recovered from the wreckage of the Titanic and still tasted great!
 

How many senses do we have?

The human being possesses at least nine senses.
   The five senses w learn at school - sight, taste, smell, touch and hearing - were first listed by Aristotle, who while at times can be scintillating often made some deficient mistakes. (Eg. he taught that we thought with our hearts, that flies had only four legs and that bees came from rotting bull carcasses).
   There are four more prevalent senses that we have

1. Proprioception, from the Latin word proprius, meaning 'one's own' is the unconscious knowledge of where our body parts are, without the need to see or touch them as well as the knowledge of the strength of effort being employed in movement.
2. Equilibrioception is the sense of balance. It's determined by the fluid containing cavities (such as the cochlea and semi-circular canals) found in the inner ear.
3. Nociception is the acumen (feeling) of pain from the joints, skin and organs. Quaintly, the brain isn't apart of this sense; it has no nociceptors (pain receptors) at all. Regardless of how it may seem, headaches don't happen inside the brain.
4. Thermoception is the sense of heat (or its absence) in our body. mammals have at least two receptors; one to detect heat (temperatures above body heat) and cold (temperatures below body heat).

   Every contemptuous neurologist has their own opinion as to the correct number of senses that we have, whether more or less than the nine. Some argue that there are up to twenty one. Senses like hunger, thirst, depth, even the senses of meaning and language have been argued to be added to the list. A very fascinating one is synasthesia, where senses are combined to perceive, days of the week, or letters to give off a sense of emotion or colour!

   There is also the sense of approaching danger (when your hair stands up), or even the sense of electricity.

    Some senses that other animals have that we don't are magnetoception (sense of magnetic fields), experienced by bees and other insects and electroception, which allows sharks to sense electric fields. Infrared vision is used by snakes and deer to hunt or feed at night and echolocation is used by dolphins to navigate and for foraging (hunting).

Who first discovered that the world was a sphere?

It's not so much of who, but what? Bees figured it out, no problem.
   Honeybees have created a very intricate language to communicate the location of the best nectar, with reference from the sun. Astonishingly enough, they can do this on overcast days as well as at night; this done by calculating the position of the sun on the other side of the world. This indicates that honey bees can actually learn and store information regardless of having a brain 1.5 million times smaller than ours.
   There are about 950,000 neurones in a bee's brain as opposed o the nearly 200billion neurones found in the human brain.
   Honeybees have a congenital 'map' of the sun's movement across the sky over 24 hours and can modify it to fit their geographical conditions very quickly; within 5 seconds they know where they're headed.
   The honeybee is also the most sensitive creature there is to the Earth's magnetic field. They use this sense to maneuver about and also to make the honeycomb panels of their hives. If a strong magnet is placed next to a hive under construction, the result is a strange cylindrical comb, unlike anything found in nature. The hive's temperature is exactly the same as that of the human body (37°C).
   Bees have evolved over 150 million years ago around the same time as the Cretaceous Period when flowering plants had formed. The Apis genus (honeybees) didn't exist until around 25 million years ago and are really a form of vegetarian wasp.

queen bee

 
 Queen honeybees give off a chemical  called 'queen substance'. The substance is smelled by worker bees through their antennae and prevents them from developing ovaries.
   It takes the full lifetime (about a month) of twelve worker bees to make enough honey to fill a teaspoon. a single bee would have to travel about 46,600 miles (almost twice around the world) to produce one pound of honey.
 


Bees will travel as much as seven and a half miles per trip, many times each day to retrieve nectar for the colony. Hence the alliteration, 'as busy as a bee'.

 

How much of the human brain do we actually use?

Three to a hundred percent.

   Most of us have heard that we only use 10% of our brain, which leads to vast discussions about the great things we might be able to if able to harness the other 90 per cent.
   Frankly, all of the human brain is used every once in a while. On another note, a Peter Lennie of the new york University Center for Neural Science indicates that the human brain should optimally have up to 3 per cent of its neurones firing at any one time, any more and the energy needed to 'reset' each neurone after it fires becomes too much for the brain to handle.
   The central nervous system consists of the brain and spinal chord. It's only made up of only two kinds of cells; neurones and glia. Neurones are basically the processors of information, receiving and sending input and output between each other. Input is received through the neurone's dendrites (a branch like structure), whilst output leaves through the cable-resembling axons.
   A single neurone may have as many as 10,000 dendrites, but no more than one axon. The axon may be thousands of times longer than the cell body of its neurone. The largest axon, found on a Giraffe is 15 feet (4.5 metres) long.
   The convergence between axons and dendrites are know as synapses. It's where electrical impulses are transposed into chemical signals. The synapses link  neurones to one another, operating as a switch and making the brain into a very convoluted network that can be turned on and off between each impulse.
   Glia cells accomodate the structural framework of the brain. They act as the caretaker of the brain, removing the debris of cadaverous (dead) neurones. For every one neurone, there are approximately fifty glia.
   There are nearly three million miles (nearly 5,000,000 km) of axons, up to two hundred billion neurones and one quadrillion(1,000,000,000,000,000) synapses in the human brain. if they were to be spread  out side by side, they would cover 25,000 square metres; the size of four football fields.
   There are more ways that information is exchangeable in the brain than the number of atoms in the universe so the brain, if exercised daily, clearly has high potential for greatness. It's up to the possessor to choose how they use theirs.

What do teachers use to write on blackboards?

Did someone say Chalk? If you did you're absolutely wrong!

   School used 'chalk' is not actually chalk, it's gypsum. Chalk is made of calcium carbonate ( as is limestone, marble, human and fish bones, eye lenses, indigestion pills and the limescale in kettles).
   Gypsum is made of calcium sulphate, they might look very much similar, but they aren't even made of the same chemical elements! Many substances that appear to be inherently different are actually made up of exactly the same chemical elements. Take the combination of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen for example. Synthesised in different ad-measurement they make radically different stuff such as aspirin, cholesterol, testosterone, alcohol, vinegar and glucose.
   Gypsum (scientifically called hydrated calcium sulphate) is one of the most widely abundant minerals in the world, being mined for more than 4,000 years. The plasterwork inside the ancient egyptian pyramids is made of the substance, as well as its use today in a large variety of industrial construction (most commonly used in ordinary building plaster of today).

   Nearly 3/4 of all gypsum is used in plaster and also in products such as tiles, plasterboard and 'plaster of Paris'. It's a key ingredient in the produce of cement and also used in paper and textiles. The average American home contains over 7 Tons of Gypsum.
   'Plater of Paris' is so called because the clay soil in and around Paris is packed with gypsum, most concentrated in Montmartre.

   Alabaster is the natural form of Gypsum. It's a snow-white, translucent material used in statues, busts and vases. It can be artificially dyed any colour and also may resemble marble when heated. Powdered alabaster is believed to help one centre themselves and also promote mental acuity (ability to reason). It was common for people to chip off pieces of church statues to make an ointment for bad legs as well.
   What's so ironic is is that the word 'gypsum' is from the Greek word gypsos, which means 'chalk'
 

Which organisation invented Quaker Oats?

Sorry guys, it's not the Quakers.

   Established in Pennsylvania in 1981,  the Quaker Oats Company was named after the Quakers due to their trustworthy reputation and large numbers in the region.

   Be that as it may, the brand, now apart of PepsiCo corporation has no affiliation whatsoever with the original Quakers (or any religious society for that matter!) and unlike brands like Fry's and Cadbury's, Quaker Oats was neither founded by Quakers, nor established on their principles of levity.

   In the 1950's scientists from Quaker Oats, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University administrated experiments, trying to fathom movement of the nutrients from the cereals through the body.
   They had asked parents of educationally delayed children of the Walter E. Fernald State School (previously called the Massachusetts School for Idiotic Children) to allow their children to append to their 'special science club'. As members of the club, the children were set on a diet high in nutrients and taken to baseball games.
   However, what was left cryptic was that what these children were being fed was intertwined with radioactive calcium and iron so as to trace the path of he nutrients within the body. The parents sued the Quaker Oats company who agreed to pay out $1.85 million to more than 100 victims in 1997.
   The character on the front of the box is sometimes said to be the founder of Pennsylvania and influential Quaker, William Penn, Yet the Quaker Oats company has unequivocally denied this to be true
   It is said that The Quakers got their nickname following the trial for blasphemy in 1650 of George Fox, the founder of the movement, when he suggested that the judge 'tremble at the word of the Lord'. However a more probable source may be from their reputation for 'trembling' during religious exaltation.

Which metals are liquid at room temperature?

Alongside mercury, caesium, francium and gallium may all be liquids at room temperature.
Being very dense (metals), horseshoes, bricks and even cannonballs theoretically may float in these liquids.

   Caesium (Cs) was discovered in 1860 by Robert Bunsen using the spectroscope he had invented with Gustav Kirchoff (the man who discovered that signals travel down telegraph wires at light speed). It wields the atomic number 55 and is mostly used in atomic clocks (used to define the atomic second). It also explodes very violently when it comes in contact with water, even at -116 degrees centigrade (−177 °F). The name Caesium is derived from the Latin word caesius, meaning 'sky blue' due to the bright blue lines it produces as part of its spectrum.

   Francium (Fr), element 87 on the periodic table, is one of the rarest elements known to man. There is a recorded ever 30 grams of it present on Earth. This is due to it's radioactivity, it quickly decays into other, more stable elements (so it's a liquid metal, but just for a few seconds at most!). It's the last element to be discovered in nature and was isolated in 1939 by Marguerite Perey at the Curie Institute in Paris. Francium melts at 27°C (81°F) and boils at 677°C (1251°F).

   Gallium (GA) was discovered by french chemist Lecoq de Boisbaudran in 1875. It was the first new element to confirm Dmitri Medeleev's Prediction of the periodic table. It is mostly used in microchips because of its atypical electronic properties. CD players also make use of this metal because, when mixed with arsenic, converts an electric current directly into Laser Light, which is used to 'read' the data from the discs.
   These metals are liquids at such low temperatures due to the arrangement of the electrons in their atoms. The arrangement makes it difficult for them to get close enough to form a crystalline lattice. Each individual atom flows freely without attracting to each other, exactly the behaviour in other liquids such as water.

Where do diamonds come from?

All diamonds are formed inside volcanoes.
   They are formed under immense heat and pressure below the earth and are exported to the surface during volcanic eruptions. Diamonds are moulded underground at a distance of about 100 - 300miles (160 - 480 km) within. They are mostly found inside the volcanic rock Kimberlite, and mined where volcanic activity is still regular. The others are found exposed due to being washed out of their original Kimberlite.
  There are only twenty places in the world that produce diamonds across the globe. Russia is the leading producer of diamonds, following are Botswana, The Democratic Republic of Congo, Australia and the desecrated South Africa.
   Diamonds are pure carbon, so is graphite (the thing that the 'lead' in pencils are made of), but the carbon atoms are arranged differently.
  Diamond is the hardest naturally occurring substance in the world, and was once the hardest material known to man. That was, of course until August of 2005, when German scientists managed to concoct a harder material in their labs. This material was made by compressing and heating super - strong carbon molecules at 2,226 degrees centigrade and was called Aggregated Carbon Nanorods (ACNR).

   The largest Diamond known to man is 2,500 miles (4,000 km) wide and measures ten billion trillion trillion carats.The diamond sits inside the star White Dwarf BPM 37093, (nicknamed 'Lucy' from The Beatles song 'Lucy in the sky with diamonds') which is 8 lightyears above Australia, located in the Constellation Centaurus.

What is three times more deadly than war?

Work takes more lives than drinking, drugs or war.
   Close to 2,000,000 people die every year from work related accidents and diseases as opposed to the 650,000 who are killed in wars across the globe.
   The most deadly jobs worldwide are in agriculture, mining and construction. According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the year 2000, there were a reported 5,915 people who had died at work, this inclusive of persons having heart attacks at their desks.

  Lumberjacks were the most at risk with a recorded 122 deaths for every 100,000 employed personnel. The second most at risk were fishermen and third were airplane pilots with a figure of 101 to every 100,000 pilots ( Don't worry people they were mostly of small - plane crashes, not passenger jets.)
 
The single most dangerous specific job is believed to be that of the Alaskan crab fishermen working in the bering sea. So respect due to the crew and Captain in the show "Deadliest Catch". They might be the bravest or the dumbest workers in the world, depending on how you see it.

How many feet do centipedes have?

As much as the name implies it, it isn't a hundred.
  The word centipede is a Latin word, meaning 'a hundred feet', and although these chilopods have been studied extensively for over a hundred years, there has yet to be one that actually has exactly a hundred feet.
   Some have more, some have less. The one with the closest number of legs to a hundred was discovered in 1999 with 96 legs. This was actually unique to the race as it is the only known species with an even numbered pair of legs; 48
   All other centipedes have odd numbered pairs of legs ranging from 15 to 191 pairs.