The number googolplex is so big there is not enough space in the universe to write it down.

A googolplex is a ten powered by a googol of zeros. It is so big, that there is not enough space in the entire observable universe just to write it down, even if you could write a single zero on each atom.

In the PBS science program Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, Episode 9: “The Lives of the Stars”, astronomer and television personality Carl Sagan estimated that writing a googolplex in standard form (i.e., “10,000,000,000…”) would be physically impossible, since doing so would require more space than the known universe provides.

An average book of 60 cubic inches can be printed with 5×105 zeroes (5 characters per word, 10 words per line, 25 lines per page, 400 pages), or 8.3×103zeros per cubic inch. The observable (i.e. past light cone) universe contains 6×1083 cubic inches (4/3 × π × (14×109 light years in inches)3). This math implies that if the universe is stuffed with paper printed with 0s, it could contain only 5.3×1087 zeros—far short of a googol of zeros. In fact there are only about 2.5×1089 elementary particles in the observable universe, so even if one were to use an elementary particle to represent each digit, one would run out of particles well before reaching a googol digits.

Consider printing the digits of a googolplex in unreadable, one-point font (0.353 mm per digit). It would take about 3.5×1096 metres to write a googolplex in one-point font. The observable universe is estimated to be 8.80×1026 metres, or 93 billion light-years, in diameter, so the distance required to write the necessary zeroes is 4.0×1069 times as long as the estimated universe.

Tarantulas can live up to 30 years

Tarantulas may live for years; most species take two to five years to reach adulthood, but some species may take up to ten years to reach full maturity. Upon reaching adulthood, males typically have but a 1 to 1.5 year period left to live and will immediately go in search of a female with which to mate. Male tarantulas rarely moult again once they reach adulthood. The oldest spider, according to Guinness World Records, lived to be 49 years old.

Females will continue to moult after reaching maturity. Female specimens have been known to reach 30 to 40 years of age, and have survived on water alone for up to 2 years. Grammostola rosea spiders are renowned for going for long periods without eating.

Americans consumed more than twenty billion hot dogs in 2000

Hot dog stands and trucks sell hot dogs at street and highway locations. Wandering hot dog vendors sell their product in baseball parks. At convenience stores, hot dogs are kept heated on rotating grills. 7-Eleven sells the most grilled hot dogs in North America — 100 million annually. Hot dogs are also common on restaurants’ children’s menus.

In the US, “hot dog” may refer to just the sausage or to the combination of a sausage in a bun. Many nicknames for hot dogs have popped up over the years. A hot dog can often be seen under the names of frankfurter, frank, red hot, wiener, weenie, durger, coney, or just “dog”.

On average, a person has two million sweat glands

Domestic animals have apocrine glands at the base of each hair follicle but eccrine glands only in foot pads and snout. Their apocrine glands, like those in humans, produce an odorless oily milky secretion evolved not to evaporate and cool but rather coat and stick to hair so odor-causing bacteria can grow on it. Eccrine glands on their foot pads, like those on palms and soles of humans, didn’t evolve to cool either but rather increase friction and enhance grip.

Both apocrine and eccrine sweat glands contain myoepithelial cells (from Greek myo– ”muscle”), specialized epithelial cells located between the gland cells and the underlying basal lamina. Myoepithelial cell contractions squeeze the gland and discharge the accumulated secretions. The secretory activities of the gland cells and the contractions of myoepithelial cells are controlled by both the autonomic nervous system and by the circulating hormones.

Thirty to forty gallons of sugar maple sap must be boiled down to make just one gallon of maple syrup

Production methods have been streamlined since colonial days, yet remain basically unchanged. Sap must first be collected and boiled down to obtain pure syrup without chemical agents or preservatives. Maple syrup is made by boiling between 20 and 50 litres (5.3 and 13 US gal) of sap (depending on its concentration) over an open fire until 1 litre (0.26 US gal) of syrup is obtained, usually at a temperature 4.1 °C (7.4 °F) over the boiling point of water. Syrup can be boiled entirely over one heat source or can be drawn off into smaller batches and boiled at a more controlled temperature.

Boiling the syrup is a tightly controlled process, which ensures appropriate sugar content. Syrup boiled too long will eventually crystallize, whereas under-boiled syrup will be watery, and will quickly spoil. The finished syrup has a density of 66° on the Brix scale (a hydrometric scale used to measure sugar solutions). The syrup is then filtered to remove sugar sand, crystals made up largely of sugar and calcium malate. These crystals are not toxic, but create a “gritty” texture in the syrup if not filtered out. The filtered syrup is graded and packaged while still hot, usually at a temperature of 82 °C (180 °F) or greater. The containers are turned over after being sealed to sterilize the cap with the hot syrup. Packages can be made of metal, glass, or coated plastic, depending on volume and target market. The syrup can also be heated longer and further processed to create a variety of other maple products, including maple sugar, maple butter or cream, and maple candy or taffy.

One billion seconds is about 32 years

The Lemon shark grows about 24,000 new teeth a year. A new set of teeth grow approximately every 14 days

The lemon shark commonly attains a length of 2.4 to 3.1 m (7.9 to 10 ft) and a weight of up to 90 kg (200 lb) at adulthood, although sexual maturity is attained at 2.24 m (7.3 ft) in males and 2.4 m (7.9 ft) in females. The maximum recorded length and weight is 3.43 m (11.3 ft) and 183.7 kg (405 lb). This stocky, powerful shark is named for the ‘citrus glands’ located between its two dorsal fins. This gland allows the shark to exude a lemon-esque scent in order to attract its prey. The lemon shark has pale yellow-brown to grey skin, which lacks any distinctive markings. This provides perfect camouflage when swimming over the sandy seafloor in its coastal habitat. It has a flattened head with a short, broad snout, and the second dorsal fin is almost as large as the first.

In the U.S. there are approximately 65.8 million cats

Cats are common pets in Europe and North America, and their worldwide population exceeds 500 million. Although cat ownership has commonly been associated with women, a 2007 Gallup poll reported that men and women were equally likely to own a cat.

According to the Humane Society of the United States, as well as being kept as pets, cats are also used in the international fur trade, for making coats, gloves, hats, shoes, blankets and stuffed toys. About 24 cats are needed to make a cat fur coat. This use has now been outlawed in several countries, including the United States, Australia and the European Union. However, some cat furs are still made into blankets in Switzerland as folk remedies that are believed to helprheumatism.

People less often eat cat meat than the flesh of other common domestic animals.

The largest LEGO castle that was ever built was built with 400,000 LEGO bricks and was 4.45 m x 5.22 m

The Lego Group began in the workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen (born 7 April 1891), a carpenter from Billund, Denmark, who began making wooden toys in 1932.In 1934, his company came to be called “Lego”, from the Danish phrase leg godt, which means “play well”.

It expanded to producing plastic toys in 1947. In 1949 Lego began producing, among other new products, an early version of the now famous interlocking bricks, calling them “Automatic Binding Bricks”. These bricks were based in part on the Kiddicraft Self-Locking Bricks, which were patented in the United Kingdom in 1939 and then there released in 1947. Lego modified the design of the Kiddicraft brick after examining a sample given to it by the British supplier of an injection-molding machine that the company had purchased. The bricks, originally manufactured from cellulose acetate, were a development of traditional stackable wooden blocks that locked together by means of several round studs on top and a hollow rectangular bottom. The blocks snapped together, but not so tightly that they required extraordinary effort to be separated.

The Great Comet of 1843 had a tail that was over 300 kilometres long.

The Great Comet of 1843 formally designated C/1843 D1 and 1843 I, was a long-period comet which became very bright in March 1843 (it is also known as the Great March Comet). It was discovered on February 5, 1843 and rapidly brightened to become a great comet. It was a member of the Kreutz Sungrazers, a family of comets resulting from the breakup of a parent comet (X/1106 C1) into multiple fragments in about 1106. These comets pass extremely close to the surface of the Sun—within a few solar radii—and often become very bright as a result.

First observed in early February, 1843, it raced toward an incredibly close perihelion of less than 830,000 km on February 27, 1843; at this time it was observed in broad daylight roughly a degree away from the Sun. It passed closest to Earth on March 6, 1843, and was at its greatest brilliance the following day; unfortunately for observers north of the equator, at its peak it was best visible from the Southern Hemisphere. It was last observed on April 19, 1843. At that time this comet had passed closer to the sun than any other known object.

The Great Comet of 1843 developed an extremely long tail during and after its perihelion passage. At over 2 Astronomical Units in length, it was the longest known cometary tail until measurements in 1996 showed that Comet Hyakutake’s tail was almost twice as long. There is a painting in the National Maritime Museum that was created by astronomer Charles Piazzi Smyth. The purpose of the painting is to show the overall brightness and size of the tail of the comet.

Estimates for the orbital period of the comet have varied from 512 ± 105 years (Kreutz’s classical work from 1901), 654 ± 103 years (Chodas2008 unforced solution), 688 years (JPL Horizons barycentric epoch 1852 solution), and 742 years (Chodas2008 forced solution based on a presumed identity with X/1106 C1). But the comet was only observed over a period of 45 days from March 5 to April 19, and the uncertainties mean it likely has an orbital period of 600 to 800 years.

Albany, NY had a higher population in 1910 than it does now.

Interestingly enough, the population of Albany in the 1910s was 100,253 while the population was 97,856 at the time of the 2010 census. Albany has close ties with the nearby cities of Troy, Schenectady, andSaratoga Springs, forming a region called the Capital District. The bulk of this area is made up of the Albany-Schenectady-Troy Metropolitan Statistical Area(MSA). Its 2010 population was 870,716, the fourth-largest urban area in New York and the 58th-largest MSA in the country.

In the 20th century, the city opened one of the first commercial airports in the world, the precursor of today’s Albany International Airport. The 1920s saw the rise of a powerfulpolitical machine controlled by the Democratic Party. The city’s skyline changed in the 1960s with the construction of the Empire State Plaza and the uptown campus of SUNY Albany, mainly under the direction of Governor Nelson Rockefeller. While Albany experienced a decline in its population due to urban sprawl, many of its historic neighborhoods were saved from destruction through the policies of Mayor Erastus Corning 2nd, the longest-serving mayor of any city in the United States. More recently, the city has experienced growth in the high-technology industry, with great strides in the nanotechnology sector.

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Totally Hair Barbie is the best selling Barbie of all time. It sold over ten million units so far.

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A dime has 118 ridges around the edge

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Average number of people airborne over the US any given hour: 61,000

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The highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere is Mount Aconcagua in Argentina. It rises 22,834 feet above sea level

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U.S. bills are 2.61 inches wide, 6.14 inches long, and are .0043 inches thick and weigh 1 gram

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In Belgium, 172,000 tons of chocolate are produced in a year

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The Pope Benedict XVI wanted to be a librarian and had around 20.000 books in his personal library!

In 1997, when he turned 70, Ratzinger asked Pope John Paul II for permission to leave the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith and to become an archivist in the Vatican Secret Archives and a librarian in the Vatican Library, but the Pope refused such permission.

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On 2013, 84% of the United Kingdom's population live in England

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There are approximately 7,000 feathers on an eagle

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