The oldest known living thing on earth is a
Bristlecone pine named 'Methuselah',
and is nearly 5,000 years old.
A plant that may be even older is
being studied by scientists in the Mojave Desert.
 It's thought that some creosote bushes there may
  be as old as 7,000 years !!!
                    

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The Longest Rivers in the World

River	Country	Miles	Kilometers
Nile	Egypt	4,145	6,670
Amazon	Brazil	4,000	6,404
Chang jiang - Yangtze	China	3,964	6,378
Mississippi-Missouri (river system)	U.S.	3,740	6,021
Yenisei-Angara (river system)	Russia	3,442	5,5

Longest River
The Nile and the Amazon can both be called the longest river in the world
depending on how you define longest. With several mouths, the exact point at which the
 Amazon ends continues to be uncertain. Counting the Para’ estuary (the most distant mouth),
 the Amazon’s length is approximately 4,190 miles.

Once officially recorded as having a length of 4,145 miles,
 the Nile has since lost a few miles due to the formation of
Lake Nasser behind the Aswan High Dam. LEARN MORE

Biggest Ocean Covering 32.6% of the Earth's surface or 64,186,300 miles,
the Pacific Ocean is officially the world's biggest ocean.

Deepest Lake, is Lake Baikal in Siberia, Russia. The Olkhon Crevice, the deepest point
 of the lake, has a depth of 5,370 ft, of which 3,875 are below sea level.

Biggest Lake, is the Caspian Sea, an inland sea which covers parts of
 Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Iran.
It is 760 miles long, with a surface area of 143,560 miles and
an estimated volume of 21,500 cubic miles. LEARN MORE

Smallest Ocean, more than ten times smaller than the Pacific Ocean, the Arctic Ocean, which
has a surface area of 5,105,700 miles, is the world's smallest ocean. LEARN MORE

Biggest Lake Shrinkage Due almost entirely to the extraction of water for irrigation purposes,
 the Aral Sea has shrunk the most in recent times having lost almost two-thirds of its original size.
 By 1994 (with 10,500 miles left compared to 26,300 miles in 1950),
 it had divided into two smaller bodies of water.

 
The Earth's atmosphere is about 300 miles thick,
 but most of the atmosphere, (about 80%), is within 10 miles
 of the surface of the Earth. There is no exact place where the
atmosphere ends; it just gets thinner and thinner,
 until it merges with outer space.
   

Surface Area of the Earth: 196,935,000 Sq. Miles
Land Area on the Earth:  29.1%
Total Water Area:  70.9%
Type of Water: (97% salt), (3% fresh)
Circumference at the equator: 24,901.5 miles
 The earth orbits the Sun at: 66,700 mph per hour.

   
This image shows Cassiopeia A in the most detailed
 image ever made of the remains of an exploded star.
The colors represent different ranges of X-rays with
red, green, and blue representing, low, medium, and
higher X-ray  energies of the supernova remnant.

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Stephen Hawking discovered in 1973 that black holes evaporate over time.

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Fossil fuels supply over 80% of the world’s energy needs .
All fossil fuels, whether solid, liquid, or gas, are the result of organic material
 being covered by successive layers of sediment over the course of millions of years.
 Oil and natural gas were formed from the slow decomposition
and burying of planktonic marine plants and animals
that sank to the muds of the sea floor.  
 
             


                                                                             


The Sun is about 4.5 Billion Years old, 
is some 333,400 times more massive
 than Earth, and contains 99.86 percent
 of the mass of the entire solar system.
It's 93 Million miles away from the Earth,
so by the time it's light reaches us,
(at 186,000 Miles Per Second), it is
 8 minutes old.
                  


 














                            
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We shouldn't waste our time following others...
Look for the glimpses of your true self.
Spend time alone; identity is found in silence and solitude.
Risk fulfilling what you really are.
The most important way to awaken
 is to return to the wonder of the child;
 seek the occasions and seize the day as a child does.
   "Use your eyes," wrote Hellen Keller,
 "as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind.
 Hear the music of voices  and the song of a bird
 as if tomorrow your tactile senses would fail.
 Smell the perfume of flowers, taste with relish each morsel,
 as if tomorrow you could never smell or taste again."
   Inevitably, we live between light and darkness,
live in the bright bowl of the sun,
 and then return to the fall of night.
 "Now I lay me down to sleep".
It's about the immemorial rhythm
of life  that the prayer speaks.
   When we have lived a day richly and warmly,
 running in the sunlight, laughing and loving,
then the night comes sweetly and without regret.
 Perhaps that other night,
 the longer night we call death will come sweetly too.
 If we have spent our lives wisely, blessedly,
with others we love around us,
then death may come sweetly,
and bring, like all the nights we have ever known,
a new and fresh awakening...





                                        



No matter how you measure it,
the speed of light is always the same.

Einstein's crucial breakthrough about
the nature of light, made in 1905,
can be summed up in a deceptively simple statement:
"The speed of light is constant."

So... what does this sentence really mean???

Surprisingly, the answer has nothing to do with the
actual speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second
through the "vacuum" of empty space.
 Instead, Einstein had an unexpected
—and paradoxical— insight:
 that light from a moving source has the same velocity
as light from a stationary source.
For example, beams of light from a lighthouse,
from a speeding car's headlights, and from the
 lights on a supersonic jet all travel at a constant rate
as measured by all observers—
despite differences in how fast the
sources of these beams move.

The Special Theory of Relativity is based on
Einstein's recognition that
the speed of light does not change even when the source
of the light moves.
 Although it might seem logical to add the speed of
the light source and the
speed of the light beam to determine the total speed,
light does not work this way.
 No matter how fast Einstein rides his bike,
 the light coming from his headlight always moves at the same speed.

Thus, contrary to everyday experience with
phenomena such as sound waves,
the velocity of light is the same for
an observer travelling at high speed
 towards a light source as it is for an observer
travelling rapidly away from the light source.
To Einstein it followed that, if the speed of
light is the same for both these observers,
the time and distance framework they use to
measure the speed of light cannot be the same.
So...
Time and distance vary,
depending on the velocity of each observer.

Interesting? Theres A
(Relatively!!!) Clear Explanation
Clicking
Here