Baby

Fun Facts About Small Things

• A grain of sand is pretty small, between 1/400 to 1/12 inch. That makes about 10,000 to 400,000 grains in your typical handful. (They are also pretty old, dating back 1 to 2 billion years.)
• Ants are small, no doubt. But they are incredibly strong, able to carry 10–50 times their own body weight. That's like a 180-pound man carrying a full-grown cow.
• Dust mites are so small (about 1/100 inch) that up to 2 million of these arachnids can live in your bed.
• The bee hummingbird is the world's smallest bird, measuring less than 2.3 inches from beak to tail. It weighs less than a penny and its heart can beat over 1,200 times per minute.
• The dot on the letter "i" is called a tittle. For a typical 12-point font on the printed page, a tittle is roughly 1/72 of an inch.
• Microchips today can pack 50 billion transistors into a space about the size of a fingernail. Each transistor is smaller than bacteria (about 0.000000079 inches wide, or the width of two strands of human DNA).
• In theory, a pinhead-sized piece of DNA can store more data than a modern hard drive, upwards of 470 petabytes of data — or about 98 billion MP3 songs.
• If you arranged hydrogen atoms in a straight line, you would need approximately 254 million of them before you reached a single inch.