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A lightning bolt heats the air around it to about 30,000 degrees. That is five times the surface of the sun, for a few millionths of a second. The thunder is the air slamming back. #science

There is a fungus in Oregon covering about nine square kilometres, thought to be one organism, and somewhere between two and eight thousand years old. The largest living thing we know of. #science

Bamboo can grow close to a metre in a day. Some species. You can nearly watch it happen. #science

Trees talk to each other through fungus in the soil. An older tree will send sugar to a struggling young one of the same species through that network. Forests are less a collection and more a thing. #science

Ice is slippery because the pressure and friction melt a microscopically thin film of water under whatever is sliding on it. You skate on water, not ice. #science

The deepest hole humans have ever dug is the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia. 12.2 kilometres. The Earth's radius is 6,371 kilometres.

We have scratched 0.2 percent of the way to the centre. #science

There is more water in the Sun than in all of Earth's oceans. Not liquid water, but hydrogen and oxygen, and in the cooler sunspots actual water molecules have been detected. #science

Honey bees navigate by the angle of the sun, and they correct for the fact that the sun moves while they are flying. An insect doing celestial navigation with time compensation. #science

The Eiffel Tower gets about 15 centimetres taller in summer. Iron expands with heat. It also leans slightly away from the sun. #science

A cloud weighs about half a million kilograms. It stays up because the droplets are tiny and the air beneath is moving up faster than they fall. #science

The sun is 150 million kilometres away and its light takes about 8 minutes to reach us. Meaning every sunrise you have ever seen is 8 minutes old. #science

Octopuses have three hearts and blue blood. Two hearts pump to the gills, one to the rest of the body, and the body one stops beating when they swim. Which is why they prefer crawling. #science

A giraffe's neck has seven vertebrae. Exactly the same number as yours. They are just enormous. #science

A teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh about six billion tonnes on Earth.

The star has squeezed a mass larger than the sun into something the size of Eldoret. #science

Cows have best friends and get stressed when separated. There are actual studies measuring heart rate. #science

Trees in a forest are mostly older than the oldest person you have met, and they will be there after everyone reading this. Worth standing under one for a minute. #science

Honey never spoils. Archaeologists have found pots of it in Egyptian tombs, over 3,000 years old, still edible. Low water, high acidity, and bees add an enzyme that makes hydrogen peroxide. #science

The human body replaces most of its cells over several years, at wildly different rates. Gut lining in days, bone over a decade, and some neurons never. You are mostly new and partly original. #science

Lightning is about five times hotter than the surface of the sun. Roughly 30,000 Kelvin against the sun's 5,800.

It is just extremely brief and extremely thin. #science

Sharks existed before trees. Sharks are about 400 million years old, the first trees around 350 million.

They have also outlived four mass extinctions, which is a better record than most companies. #science

The Mariana Trench is deeper than Everest is tall. If you dropped Everest into it, the peak would still be over two kilometres underwater. #science

A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus. It takes 243 Earth days to spin once and 225 to orbit the sun.

Also it spins backwards. Venus is just like that. #science

Saturn is less dense than water. If you had an ocean big enough it would float, leaving a ring. #science

Octopuses have three hearts, and two of them stop beating when it swims. So it prefers to crawl, because swimming exhausts it. #science

A honeybee has to visit about two million flowers to make one pound of honey. The average worker bee makes about a twelfth of a teaspoon in her whole life. #science