useless facts

[Jimbuna]

If lightning hits sand or rocks, it can be petrified and will create lightning fossils.

[Ostfriese]

A lightning bolt has enough energy to make nitrogen react with water in the air (from humidity). The product of this reaction, ammonium nitrite NH4NO2, very likely was the compound that -in the very early stages of the development of life on Earth- created the basis for amino acids (which contain the amino group NH2), which in turn are the basis for proteins and ultimatively DNA.

[Jimbuna]

The odds of being struck by lightning are 1 in 12 thousand.

[Ostfriese]

The third nation to have a dreadnought-type battleship under construction (after the United Kingdom and the United States) was Brazil.


HMS Dreadnought, which entered service in 1906, was already obsolete when WW1 broke out just eight years later and was decomissioned in early 1919, after just a little over 12 years of service.
She was the only battleship to ever sink an enemy submarine, Imperial German SM U-29 (sunk by ramming in May 1915).

[Catfish]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

If lightning hits sand or rocks, it can be petrified and will create lightning fossils.

Huh?
Please elaborate.
Afaik certain fossils of e.g. sea lilies were thought to have been created by lightning, which is why they were called "Hexenpfennige" (witch pennies) by the people of the time.
Truth is that the lime sediments containing those fossils are harder than the surrounding sand stone and withstood erosion better, and stood out of the landscape. Which is why they were more often hit by lightning.

[Jeff-Groves]

Hold my beer was first talked about on line in the 1990's.

[Platapus]

Lightening fossils are called Fulgurites.


They are not actually fossils

[Jimbuna]

If you drilled a tunnel straight through the Earth, it would take 42 seconds for an average person to fall to the other side.

[Platapus]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

If you drilled a tunnel straight through the Earth, it would take 42 seconds for an average person to fall to the other side.

Why would they fall though all the way to the other side?

[Platapus]

To be very technical, in order to find a fossil, you have to dig for it.



Fossil comes from the Latin fossilis which means "obtained by digging"

[Jeff-Groves]

Originally Posted by Platapus

Why would they fall though all the way to the other side?

For the same reason the chicken crossed the road?

[Catfish]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

If you drilled a tunnel straight through the Earth, it would take 42 seconds for an average person to fall to the other side.

Originally Posted by Platapus

Why would they fall though all the way to the other side?

They wouldn't. They would fall through the earth's center and then being held back by the gravitation of the hemisphere they just came from, so they would bounce back and forth until an equlibrium would be reached, at the center of the earth (where all forces pull at them from all sides)

[Platapus]

[Jimbuna]

The legal owner of one-sixth of the Earth is the King of the United Kingdom.

[Ostfriese]

Ytterby, a small village on Resarö Island in the Stockholm Archipelago (Sweden) holds the distinction of being the place with the most chemical elements being discovered there. Eight of the 90 naturally occuring elements (the other 28 can only be produced artificially) have been discovered first in the Ytterby feldspar mine. Four of these elements are named after Ytterby directly:

Yttrium (Y)
Terbium (Tb)
Erbium (Er)
Ytterbium (Yb)

The four other elements are

Scandium (named after Scandinavia)
Holmium (named after nearby Stockholm)
Thulium (named after Thule,the place from scandinavian mythology)
Gadolinium (named after Finnish chemist Johan Gadolin, who discovered Yttrium in the minerals found in Ytterby in 1794. The main mineral is named after him as well: Gadolinite.)