What is the largest U.S. city in land area?
It is not New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles.
It is Juneau, Alaska, which covers 3,108 square miles.
Los Angeles, in contrast, covers only 458.2 square miles.
The apple of one’s eye is the pupil, which was likened to an apple because, in the ninth century, it was believed to be a solid round mass.
The term noble gas refers to the lack of chemical reactivity in these inert gases. For the record, there are six noble gases: helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and radon.
Twentieth-century American physicist John Archibald Wheeler (b. 1911) coined the term black hole to describe a collapsed star whose gravitational field is so intense that not even light can escape from it.
There are about 200 million to 300 million sperm cells are contained in an average human ejaculation. Yet sperm cells make up only 2 to 5 percent of total sperm volume. The rest is composed of fluids, known as seminal plasma, that help keep the sperm cells alive.
Named for the patron saint of sailors, Saint Elmo’s fire is actually discharges of electricity that occur during storms. These discharges are seen as blue or bluish white lights at the tips of masts and bowsprits of ships at sea, as well as on church steeples and building spires on land.
An average bolt of lightning raises the air temperature along its way to about 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit.