Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1866.

Giraffes often sleep for only 20 minutes in any 24 hours. They may sleep up to 2 hours (in spurts - not all at once), but this is rare. They never lie down.

The earliest wine makers lived in Egypt around 2300 BC.

The world's smallest winged insect, the Tanzanian parasitic wasp, is smaller than the eye of a housefly.

At over 2000 kilometres long The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth.

The driest inhabited place in the world is Aswan, Egypt where the annual average rainfall is .02 inches.

The speed of light is generally rounded down to 186,000 miles per second. In exact terms it is 299,792,458 m/s (metres per second – that is equal to 186,287.49 miles per second).

Englishman Roger Bacon invented the magnifying glass in 1250.