FactsVibe: The World Of Facts

There are millions of web pages now, but none of them existed 20 years ago. The first web page went live on August 6, 1991.  It was dedicated to information on the World Wide Web project and was made by Tim Berners-Lee. It ran on a NeXT computer at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN. The first web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. It outlined how to create Web pages and explained more about hypertext.

The Constitution of India is the longest written constitution of any sovereign country in the world,containing 444 articles in 22 parts,12 schedules and 118 amendments, with 146,385 words in its English-language version, while the Constitution of Monaco is the shortest written constitution, containing 10 chapters with 97 articles, and a total of 3,814 words.

The Sarus crane is the tallest flying bird in the world standing 152-156 cm tall with a wingspan of 240cm. It has a predominantly grey plumage with a naked red head and upper neck and pale red legs. Females are smaller, growing to about 35-40kg, while the males grow bigger, up to 40-45kg. It is a social creature, found mostly in pairs or small groups of three or four. Known to mate for life with a single partner, its breeding season coincides with heavy rainfall in monsoon. Nests are constructed on water in natural wetlands or in flooded paddy fields. Usually a clutch has only one or two eggs, which are incubated by both parents for a period of 26 to 35 days. The juveniles follow their parents from the day of birth.

It may be difficult to imagine, but there is a country in the world smaller than New York City’s Central Park and one with a population smaller than a typical high-school class. Based on landmass, Vatican City is the smallest country in the world, measuring just 0.2 square miles, almost 120 times smaller than the island of Manhattan. Situated on the western bank of the Tiber River, Vatican City’s 2-mile border is landlocked by Italy. The official seat of the pope of the Catholic Church since 1377, Vatican City was not declared an independent state until the Lateran Treaty of 1929. After years of power struggles between popes and the political leaders of Italy over who could claim supreme authority in the region, Benito Mussolini and Pope Pius XI agreed to the Lateran Pacts on February 11, 1929, which created the independent state of Vatican City for the Catholic Church in exchange for the pope’s recognition of the Kingdom of Italy. Today, nearly 75 percent of the Vatica...

The heritage of ancient coins is a subject that intrigues and delights collectors and scholars the world over. The oldest coin available today was discovered in Efesos, an ancient Hellenic city and prosperous trading center on the coast of Asia Minor. The 1/6 stater, pictured below, is more than 2,700 years old, making it one of the very earliest coins. Made from electrum, a natural occuring alloy of gold and silver, the coin originated in the area of Lydia. It had a design on one side only, a result of the primitive method of manufacture. This ancient stater was hand struck. A die with a design (in this case a lion's head) for the obverse (front) of the coin was placed on an anvil. A blank piece of metal was placed on top of the die, and a punch hammered onto the reverse. The result was a coin with an image on one side and a punch mark on the other.  The stater is a key exhibit in the Department of Coins and Medals of the British Museum, wh...

You can do some pretty cool things in space. Like float in zero gravity, for example. Or eat in zero gravity. Or tweet in zero gravity. But there are plenty of things astronauts can't do in space thanks to that weightless environment. Which is sad, but they'll never let it show--because astronauts can't cry in space. The Atlantic picked up on a tweet from the International Space Station , in which astronaut Chris Hadfield explained that our eyes will produce tears in space, but it isn't exactly a pleasant experience. Without gravity, tears don't flow downwards out of the eye and wash away irritants like they do here on Earth. They actually conglomerate into a little ball of liquid that hangs out in the eye. According to Hadfield, space tears sting. When those space tears build up enough liquid mass, they'll actually break free of the eye and float around. Perhaps that counts as non-conventional crying, but who wants to cry when the very act sti...