The anaerobic bacterium of spoiled food, which causes botulism (dangerous food poison), is so deadly-even more than strychnine, arsenic or even snake venom-that 30 g m could kill 30 million tonnes of living matter and 500 g m could kill the entire human population.
Solar I in California (USA) is the world's largest solar power station. It cost US $ 141 million to build in 1982.
Oxygen, one of the most abundant elements forms 21 per cent of the atmospheric air, 49% of the Earth's crust, oceans and atmosphere, as well as 65% of the human body. It is a gas at room temperature, can be cooled sufficiently to be transformed into liquid or solid. Liquid oxygen is one of the fuels used by the space shuttle and booster rockets.
The world's biggest optical telescope is the Keck telescope in Hawaii (USA). It has 36 mirrors, each 108 m wide. Using lasers, the mirrors are adjusted as one giant mirror, four times more powerful than Mount Palomar telescope in California (USA).
On a long sea dive, the pressure in a diver's lung makes extra nitrogen dissolve in the blood. If the diver surfaces too quickly the nitrogen forms bubbles, giving 'the bends' which can be painful or even fatal.
Thrust SSC, a British-built car, weighing 6.4 tonnes, driven by a Scottish-born Andrew Green, broke through the sound barrier and created a revolutionary land speed record in October, 1997 in the Nevada desert (USA). It is powered by a 1, 10, 000 horsepower jet reactor instead of an engine. It consumed 20 litres of fuel per second and enabled the car to reach the speed of 1228 KMPH.
More than 21 million copies of Microsoft's flight simulators game have been sold worldwide.
An ultra PC, fully functioning, unveiled by QQO (USA) in 2002 with 1 GHZ processor, 20 GB hard drive and 256 MB of RAM, capable of running full version of MS Windows XP, is the smallest PC measuring only 10.4 x 7.3 x 22 cm and weighs less than 225 gm.
At a British university, a fibre-optic was made 10 km long, and with a thickness of 0.00000001 mm. It is the finest fibre-optic in the world.
More than half of the world's silver is used to manufacture chemicals. It is also used for photography and making mirrors.
