FactsVibe: The World Of Facts

The  giant huntsman spider   is a  species  of  huntsman spider  a family of large, fast  spiders  that actively hunt down  prey . It is considered the world's largest spider by leg span,  which can reach up to 1 foot (30 centimeters). The coloration is yellowish-brown with several irregularly distributed dark spots on the rear half.  The legs have wide dark bands before the first bend. Like all huntsman spiders, the legs of the giant huntsman spider are long compared to the body, and twist forward in a crab-like fashion. The giant huntsman spider is the largest member of the family Sparassidae, boasting a 30 centimeters (12 inches) leg-span, and 4.6 centimeters (1.8 inches) body-length.  The largest known member of the  Sparassidae  known prior to the discovery of  H. maxima  was the Australian  Beregama aurea  (L. Koch, 1875) with a body length of about 4 centimeters (1.6 inches). ...

A snowflake begins to form when an extremely cold water droplet freezes onto a pollen or dust particle in the sky.  This creates an ice crystal. As the ice crystal falls to the ground, water vapor freezes onto the primary crystal, building new crystals – the six arms of the snowflake. The ice crystals that make up snowflakes are symmetrical (or patterned) because they reflect the internal order of the crystal’s water molecules as they arrange themselves in predetermined spaces (known as “crystallization”) to form a six-sided snowflake.  Ultimately, it is the temperature at which a crystal forms — and to a lesser extent the humidity of the air — that determines the basic shape of the ice crystal.  Thus, we see long needle-like crystals at 23 degrees F and very flat plate-like crystals at 5 degrees F.   The intricate shape of a single arm of the snowflake is determined by the atmospheric conditions experienced by entire ice crystal as it falls...

The term  sand dollar  (also known as a  sea cookie  or  snapper biscuit  in  New Zealand , or  pansy shell  in  South Africa ) refers to species of extremely flattened, burrowing  sea urchins  belonging to the  order   Clypeasteroida .  Sand dollars, like all members of the order Clypeasteroida, possess a rigid  skeleton  known as a  test .  The test consists of calcium carbonate plates arranged in a fivefold  radial  pattern.  In living individuals, the test is covered by a skin of  velvet -textured spines which are covered with very small hairs ( cilia ). Coordinated movements of the spines enable sand dollars to move across the seabed.  The velvety spines of live sand dollars appear in a variety of colors—green, blue, violet, or purple—depending on the species. Individuals which are very recently dead or dying (moribund) are sometimes found on beaches...

Greenland is the  world's largest island . It has a population of only 50,000 residents, because of its cold climate. Most of the civilian population lives in the southern part of the island, on the coasts.  The capital of Greenland is  Nuuk . The island is the least  densely populated   country in the world, with a density of 0.26 people per square kilometer. In Greenland, there are no  forests . In the south, at the  coastal  area, only some dwarf trees are found. Greenland  is a Danish-occupied territory of  Denmark , but Greenland is not a member of the  European Union . It is part of the North American continent. The island has many mountains. All of the cities are on the coast, because everywhere else is covered by a big layer of ice.   The name of the country in the indigenous  Greenlandic language  is  Kalaallit Nunaat  ("land of the Kalaallit")   The  Kalaallit ...

Kalpana Chawla   was an American astronaut and the first woman of Indian origin in space. Chawla was born on 17 March 1962, but her official date of birth was altered to 1 July 1961 to allow her to become eligible for the matriculation exam. In 1988, she began working at NASA, where she did  computational fluid dynamics  (CFD) research on  vertical and/or short take-off and landing (V/STOL)  concepts. Her first space mission began on November 19, 1997, as part of the six-astronaut crew that flew the  Space Shuttle Columbia  flight  STS-87 . Chawla was the first Indian-born woman and the second Indian person to fly in space, following astronaut  Rakesh Sharma  who flew in 1984 on the  Soyuz T-11 . She spoke the following words while traveling in the weightlessness of space, "You are just your intelligence". On her first mission, Chawla traveled over 10.4 million miles (16737177.6 K M) in 252 orbits of the ea...

Antarctica, the southernmost continent and site of the South Pole, is a virtually uninhabited, ice-covered landmass. Most cruises to the continent visit the Antarctic Peninsula, which stretches toward South America. It’s known for the Lemaire Channel and Paradise Harbor, striking, iceberg-flanked passageways, and Port Lockroy, a former British research station turned museum. The peninsula’s isolated terrain also shelters rich wildlife, including many penguins. Antarctica has the fourth-most number of time zones (9) among all countries in the world. Area:   14 million km²   Population:  1,106 Population Density:   0.00008/km 2  (0.0002/sq mi) Number Of Countries:  0 Highest Point:  Mount Vinson Lowest Point:   Bentley Subglacial Trench Longest River:   Onyx River Largest Lake:   Lake Vostok

Australia  is the smallest of the seven  continents . The smallest continent in the world, called Australia and Oceania, is surrounded by the Indian, Southern and Pacific Oceans. It includes the entire Australian mainland, such big islands as New Zealand, Tasmania, New Guinea (only its eastern half), and many thousands of tiny, tropical islands of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia regions, scattered throughout the South Pacific. Area:   8,600,000 km 2  (3,300,000 sq mi)  Population:  35,000,000 (estimated population of  Australia ,  Papua New Guinea ,  Papua  and  West Papua  for 2009) Population Density:   4.2/km 2  (11/sq mi) Number Of Countries:  3 Biggest Country:  Australia   Highest Point:  Mount Kosciuszko Lowest Point:   Lake Eyre Longest River:   River Murray Largest Lake:   Lake Eyre Countries in Australia and Oceani...

South America is the fifth-most-populous continent (422,535,000) in the world. South America is a continent located in the western hemisphere, mostly in the southern hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the northern hemisphere. Area:   17.84 million km² Population:     420,458,044 (2016) Population Density:   21.4/km 2  (56.0/sq mi) Number Of Countries:  12 Biggest Country:  Brazil Smallest Country:   Suriname Highest Point:  Mt. Aconcagua(Argentina) Lowest Point:   Laguna del Carbón Longest River:  Amazon River Largest Lake:   Lake Titicaca Countries in South America: Argentina,  Bolivia,  Brazil,  Chile,  Colombia,  Ecuador,   Guyana,  Paraguay,  Peru,  Suriname,  Uruguay,  Venezuela

North America  is a  continent  entirely within the  Northern Hemisphere  and almost all within the  Western Hemisphere ; it is also considered by some to be a northern  subcontinent  of the  Americas .  It is bordered to the north by the  Arctic Ocean , to the east by the  Atlantic Ocean , to the west and south by the  Pacific Ocean , and to the southeast by  South America  and the  Caribbean Sea . North America is the fourth-most-populous continent (579,024,000) in the world. Area:   24,709,000 km 2 (9,540,000 sq mi) Population:   579,024,000 (2016) Population Density:   22.9/km 2  (59.3/sq mi) Number Of Countries: 23 Biggest Country: Canada Smallest Country:  Saint Kitts and Nevis  Highest Point:  Mount McKinley Lowest Point:  Badwater Longest River:   Missouri river Largest Lake:  Lake Superior Countries...

The  Bermuda Triangle , also known as the  Devil's Triangle , is a loosely-defined region in the western part of the North  Atlantic Ocean , where a number of  aircraft  and  ships  are said to have disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Bermuda Triangle is one of the rare places in the world where the compass does not show towards North.   Popular culture  has attributed various disappearances to the  paranormal  or activity by  extraterrestrial beings . Documented evidence indicates that a significant percentage of the incidents were spurious, inaccurately reported, or embellished by later authors. In 1964,  Vincent Gaddis  wrote in the pulp magazine  Argosy  of the boundaries of the Bermuda Triangle,  giving its  vertices  as  Miami ,  San Juan ,  Puerto Rico , and  Bermuda . Subsequent writers did not necessarily follow this definition.  Some writers ...