Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does the Moon Always Show Us the Same Face?
The Moon does spin, but exactly once for every trip round the Earth, so one side always faces us, and the side we never see is not dark at all.
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Fact-based Weird Facts
A Day on Venus Lasts Longer Than Its Year
Venus needs about 243 Earth days to turn once and only 225 to circle the Sun, yet the gap between two sunrises there is just 117 days.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Do Stars Twinkle When Planets Shine Steadily?
The stars are not flickering at all: their light is being nudged about by the air above your head, and a planet looks calm for a surprisingly simple reason.
Fact-based Weird Facts
There Are More Trees on Earth Than Stars in the Milky Way
A global count using satellites and four hundred thousand forest plots put Earth's tree total near three trillion, several times the stars our whole galaxy is thought to hold.
Fact-based Odd Places
After the Rain, Bolivia Gets the World's Biggest Mirror
The Salar de Uyuni is so flat that a thin film of rain turns it into a mirror 129 kilometres across, and when it dries, satellites use it to check their eyesight.
Fact-based Weird Facts
A Teaspoon of Neutron Star Would Weigh a Billion Tons
Squeeze more than the mass of our Sun into a ball the size of a city and you get a neutron star, where a single teaspoonful of matter would weigh about a billion tons on Earth.
Fiction Animal News — Fiction
Dung Beetle Rejects Directions, Says It Will Follow the Milky Way
Offered a shortcut round a tuft of grass by a helpful ant, a dung beetle pushing a ball twice its size climbed on top, looked at the night sky and carried on in a perfectly straight line.
Fact-based Weird Facts
You Cannot See the Great Wall of China From the Moon
It is one of the most repeated facts in the world, and it is wrong: from the Moon the wall is invisible, and even from orbit it is so hard to spot that astronauts argue about it.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does the Moon Look Bigger Near the Horizon?
A rising full moon can look enormous, yet a camera shows it is no wider than when it rides high in the sky, which means the giant moon is being built inside your head.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Tardigrades Spent Ten Days in Open Space and Lived
Three thousand microscopic animals were bolted to the outside of a spacecraft, the lids were opened, and most of them came back perfectly fine.