The German Autobahn has no speed limits because Western Germany saw them as a Nazi relic. This became effective in 1972.
100 Mind-Blowing Speed Facts
Earth’s rotation is changing speed. It’s slowing. This means that, on average, the length of a day increases by around 1.8 seconds per century. 600 million years ago a day lasted just 21 hours.
Chainsaws were first invented for childbirth. It was developed in Scotland in the late 18th Century to help aid and speed up the process of symphysiotomy (widening the pubic cartilage) and removal of disease-laden bone during childbirth. It wasn’t until the start of the 20th Century that we started using chainsaws for woodchopping.
Protons look like peanuts, rugby balls, bagels, and spheres. Protons come in all different shapes and sizes, with their appearance changing based on the speed of smaller particles within them: Quarks.
Mercedes invented a car controlled by a joystick. The joystick in the 1966 Mercedes F200 showcases car-controlled speed and direction, replacing both the steering wheel and pedals. The car could also sense which side the driver was sitting on, so someone could control it from the passenger seat.
An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain. This could be why the birds often run around in circles when trying to escape predators despite their fast running speed.
The first speeding ticket was issued in 1896. It was given to a Mr Walter Arnold in Kent, UK. Mr Arnold was timed over the speed limit at super-fast 8mph.
Computer mouse speed is measured in “Mickeys.” The roller-ball device was first invented by a British scientist in 1946 while working for the Royal Navy. However, the word “mouse” was not coined until 1965.
Red blood cells circulate in your body at an amazing speed. Within 20 seconds, one RBC would have already completed one lap around your circulatory system. These blood cells help deliver oxygen to all the organs and cells in the body.
Ketchup leaves the bottle at a measured speed. It leaves the bottle at a rate of 25 miles per year.
Driving to space would only take an hour. Theoretically, this is possible if you were to drive in a straight line upwards into the atmosphere at a speed of 60 mph.
Light does not always travel at the speed of light. Research has found that the slowest recorded light moving was at the speed of 38 mph. The light can travel even slower if it is made to pass through obstacles such as water.
Until it blows against something, the wind makes no sound. Ready for more did you know the facts? The sounds you hear during a windy day are due to the speed of the wind coming into contact with various objects at the same time. The process of friction can also cause sounds at higher pitches depending on the speed of the wind.
A fly will always launch backwards to get away faster. Fruit flies can turn midair by shrugging their shoulders. Research has also found that a fly can process information at a much faster speed compared to humans. The average fly can process the ongoings of its surroundings seven times faster than a human being can.
Venus Williams hit the fastest serve in women’s tennis at 205 km/h. If you’re having trouble picturing how fast that is, the maximum speed recorded by a person running is 45km/h.
Some sharks like great whites can raise their body temperature to gain speed and strength.
Sean Wrona, a left-handed typist, set the record for the fastest typing speed on a keyboard, typing at a staggering 256 words per minute.
Earth’s rotation is changing speed. The Earth is slowing down, which means that, on average, the length of a day increases by around 1.8 seconds per century. If you do the math, a day lasted just 21 hours if you lived on Earth 600 million years ago!
Chainsaws began to be used for woodchopping at the start of the 20th century. But before then, chainsaws were used for childbirth to speed up the widening of the pubic cartilage.
The rotation of the Earth is changing speed. The Earth’s rotation is slowing down. On average, every century the length of a day increases by 1.8 seconds.
The Sun loses a billion kilos per second. Particles in the Sun’s upper atmosphere are so hot and energetic that they speed out into space as part of the solar wind. Our star sheds around 1.3 trillion trillion trillion particles every second. This equates to roughly one billion kilograms of matter per second, or one Earth every 185 million years.
Our days are getting longer. Earth’s spin speed is slowing: every year, it takes our planet a little longer to complete one full revolution on its axis. The change is miniscule, however. Every century, Earth slows by 1/500th of a second; 1,000 years from now, one day will be two-hundredths of a second longer than today.
Earth’s magnetic pole is creeping westward. Unlike our geographic North Pole, which is in a fixed location, Earth’s magnetic north wanders. Until the early 1990s, the magnetic North Pole was known to lie some 1600 km south of true north, in Canada. Yet scientists realised that the location of the magnetic north wasn’t fixed and was drifting at a rate of 15 km a year. Since the 1990s, however, the drift of Earth’s magnetic pole has turned into more of a sprint. Its present speed is around 50-60 km a year and is making a dash towards Siberia at a pace not seen before. Why? Scientists studying the drift of Earth’s magnetic north pole, using data from ESA’s Swarm mission, have pinpointed a change in the circulation pattern of magnetic blobs deep below Earth’s surface. They learned a change in the flow underneath Canada has caused a patch of magnetic field at the edge of Earth’s core, deep within the Earth, to be stretched out. This has weakened the Canadian patch and resulted in the pole shifting towards Siberia.
Roundabouts have been proven to reduce dangerous traffic incidents significantly. This is because they greatly lower the speed at which drivers go. They have also been found to improve traffic conditions compared to intersections with traffic lights significantly. They’re also much more versatile, as the wide range of roundabout designs can be adapted to fit many more traffic conditions.
The QWERTY keyboard can slow your typing speed on the computer. This keyboard was designed to address the jam issues of typewriters. However, the most used letters are not placed together on the keyboard.
Japan has the fastest Internet speed of 319 terabits per second. This Internet speed is speedy enough to download approximately 80,000 movies per second. The engineers used fibre-optic cables to make this world-breaking record possible.
People are still using dial-up. As of 2017, 2.1 million people still use AOL’s dial-up service. Mainly, these customers live in rural America, where it can be expensive and unreliable to get high-speed Internet. Meanwhile, dial-up is only $20 per month.
NASA’s Internet speed is 91 GB per second. The average household Internet speeds are roughly 25 MB per second, which is usually fast enough to watch Netflix with no buffer time. And let’s face the fact; if there’s any tech company that would make good use of their Internet speeds, it’s NASA.
The QWERTY keyboard was originally designed to slow you down. When typewriters were introduced, typing too fast would jam the keys. Using a QWERTY keyboard spaced out commonly used characters to slow typists down and prevent jamming. If you want to learn a more efficient keyboard, Dvorak is made for speed. While we’re on the subject of keyboards and typing, did you know that on a typical workday, a typist’s fingers will “travel” about 12.6 miles?
Slow down! On 28 January 1896, Walter Arnold drove his ‘horseless carriage’ through Paddock Wood, Kent, at a reckless 8mph – four times the 2mph speed limit. He also had no man with a red flag preceding him, as required by law. Arnold was chased down by a police officer on a bicycle, and later fined £4 7s, of which 10 shillings was for speeding – the world’s first recorded speeding ticket.
Individual people can experience time differently, too. You’ve probably noticed how time seems to speed up when you’re racing against a deadline or having fun, and how it tends to drag when you’re bored. This is because when you’re focused on something, like a big work project or a party, your brain pays less attention to how time passes. But when you’re bored, or your brain is less stimulated, you become more aware of the passing of time, making it feel slower. One study proposed that dopamine—the neurotransmitter and hormone that helps us feel happy—may be an additional culprit. It showed that increased dopamine production, which happens when you’re enjoying something, may slow down your body’s internal clock, making time feel like it’s flying by.
We can thank Albert Einstein for a lot of our current understanding of the physics of time. Rather than viewing time as a set order, he proved that it’s relative. For example, according to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, there’s an inverse relationship between your speed and the speed of time. The faster you move, the slower time moves. This is why someone blasting through space will age slower than the people still hanging out on Earth: Astronaut Scott Kelly was born several minutes after his twin brother, Mark, but after Scott spent 340 days living on the International Space Station, he returned to Earth around an extra 5 milliseconds younger than his “big” brother. Had Scott been travelling at a speed close to the speed of light, that age difference would have become much more pronounced.
Because astronomical time and atomic time don’t always line up, every so often, we get a leap second. Earth’s spin speed can be a bit unpredictable. Atmospheric winds, Northern Hemisphere winters with heavy snow, and other big weather systems can affect how fast the planet rotates. To keep the difference between astronomical time and atomic time to less than .9 seconds, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service will occasionally announce the need for a leap second. Most people won’t notice a leap second, but they can be a huge pain for tech companies. Because leap seconds are added irregularly, developers have no way of working them into their codes, which has caused websites like LinkedIn and Reddit to crash in the past. A bug caused by 2012’s leap second created so much chaos on Qantas’s servers, more than 400 flights wound up being delayed.
Travelling back in time is possible—theoretically, at least. According to Einstein’s theory, you could travel back in time by moving faster than the speed of light, as long as you could somehow have infinite mass. Since that probably won’t work, you could create “wormholes” between two points in space-time. (This would also be tough since humanity still hasn’t invented the technology to build a wormhole.) Or you could try bending space-time by plucking some “cosmic strings.” Two of these theoretical strings, which are thin streams of pure energy that are moving in opposite directions at very near the speed of light, could theoretically warp space-time enough to create a closed time-like curve—also known as a time machine.
GA PWC report from this year found that 96% of respondents intend to utilise AI simulations like digital twins. Simulations are massive in AI, as they can speed up risk analysis, provide insights, predict supply chain dynamics, and so on.