World's Smallest Post Office

The World's Smallest Post Office is in Ochopee Florida 34141. It was formerly an irrigation pipe shed for the J.T. Gaunt tomato farm. The 8'4" x 7'3" building was converted to a Post Office in 1953. There is room for one postal worker and one customer inside.

World's Heaviest Lemon and Apple

Heaviest Lemon
WHO:
Aharon Shemoel
WHAT:
5.265 kg (11 lb 9.7 oz)
WHERE:
Kefar Zeitim, Israel
WHEN:
January 8, 2003
The world's heaviest lemon weighed 5.265 kg (11 lb 9.7 oz) on January 8, 2003 and was grown by Aharon Shemoel (Israel) on his farm in Kefar Zeitim, Israel.

Heaviest Apple

WHO:
Chisato Iwasaki
WHAT:
1.849 kg (4 lb 1 oz)
WHERE:
Hirosaki City, Japan
WHEN:
October 24, 2005

The heaviest apple weighed 1.849 kg (4 lb 1 oz) and was grown and picked by Chisato Iwasaki at his apple farm in Hirosaki City, Japan October 24, 2005.

World's Tallest Ferris Wheel

The Singapore Flyer is a giant Ferris wheel in Singapore. The final capsule was installed on 2 October 2007, the wheel started rotating on February 11, 2008 and it officially opened to the public on March 1, 2008. The grand opening for the Flyer was held on 15 April 2008.
Reaching 42 stories high, the Flyer comprises a 150 m (492 ft) diameter wheel, built over a three-story terminal building, giving it a total height of 165 m (541 ft). Each of the 28 air-conditioned capsules are capable of holding 28 passengers each, and a complete rotation of the wheel takes approximately 30 minutes.
Cost: $180 million US


The Beijing Great Wheel is a proposed Observation wheel for Beijing, TChina. At the time of its completion in late 2009, it will be the highest and largest in the world. It is planned to stand at 208 m (680 ft) and will carry up to 1,920 passengers. This will make it the tallest Ferris wheel in the world, significantly higher than both the current record holder, the 165 m (540 ft) Singapore Flyer, and the proposed 185 m (610 ft) Great Berlin Wheel.

Cost: around £200 million Euro

What is the largest flower in the world?

The flower with the world's largest bloom is the Rafflesia arnoldii. This rare flower is found in the rainforests of Indonesia. It can grow to be 3 feet across and weigh up to 15 pounds! It is a parasitic plant, with no visible leaves, roots, or stem. It attaches itself to a host plant to obtain water and nutrients. When in bloom, the Rafflesia emits a repulsive odor, similar to that of rotting meat. This odor attracts insects that pollinate the plant.

Another enormous flower found in Indonesia is the Amorphophallus titanum, or Titan arum. It is also known as the "corpse flower" for its unpleasant odor. Like the Rafflesia, the Titan emits the smell of rotting flesh to attract pollinators. Technically, the Titan arum is not a single flower. It is a cluster of many tiny flowers, called an inflorescence. The Titan arum has the largest unbranched inflorescence of all flowering plants. The plant can reach heights of 7 to 12 feet and weigh as much as 170 pounds!

World's New Most Expensive Home

Mukesh Ambani dream's home. Where?? Mumbai, India. How Much?? Nearly cost $2 billion. How many story?? 27. How height?? 550 ft. How many elevator? 9. How big?? 400,000 sq ft. How many housekeeper? 600 staff members to maintain the house, it will be ready by January 2009. Mukesh Ambani at $43 billion richest in India and 5th richest in the world.

Inside the World's First Billion-Dollar Home

World's Fastest and Longest Cars

The Bugatti Veyron is the world's fastest production car. It can reach a top speed of 248 mph (400 km/h).

The longest car in the world is 30.5 Meters
it's a limosine, and has such luxeries as a swiming pool, bar, and even helicopter landing pad on the back!

Vincent Van Gogh

Vincent Van Gogh (30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890), the Dutch painter who cut off his own earlobe, died on this date in 1890, two days after shooting himself in the chest with a pistol. The postimpressionist painter suffered from depression and epileptoid seizures, which caused him to leave home and move to a house in Arles, France. He was joined there for a time by Paul Gauguin. Though he was a prolific artist — he completed nearly 900 paintings, over 1,000 drawings, 150 watercolors, plus letter sketches and graphic designs — Van Gogh succeeded in selling only one painting in his lifetime. Since his death, his paintings have been sold for many millions of dollars, including the Portrait of Dr. Gachet, which went for $82.5 million in 1990.

Grave of Vincent Van Gogh

Quote: "I can't change the fact that my paintings don't sell. But the time will come when people will recognize that they are worth more than the value of the paints used in the picture." — Vincent Van Gogh

How long would it take Earth's fastest space ship to reach Proxima Centauri?

To date, humans have launched only four space probes that will eventually leave the solar system. These vehicles will likely travel across the depths of space for millions of years to come. NASA launched all four of these remarkable craft during the 1970s to make the first close-up studies of the gas giants in the outer solar system. Following their historic visits to our largest planetary neighbors, the four vehicles followed paths that will carry them beyond the edge of the solar system and into interstellar space.

The first of these space probes was Pioneer 10 that was launched in 1972 and visited Jupiter a year later. Pioneer 10 is currently traversing what we believe to be the edge of the solar system. Unfortunately, the vehicle's power source, a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG), has decayed to the point that it can no longer provide enough electricity to operate the probe. Pioneer 10 stopped transmitting signals to Earth on 23 January 2003 when the craft was over 7.6 billion miles away. The trajectory of Pioneer 10 will bring the vehicle close to the star Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus (The Bull) in about 2 million years.
A twin spacecraft named Pioneer 11 also visited Jupiter in 1974 and continued on to make a flyby of Saturn in 1979. Pioneer 11 too is now on its way into deep space as it heads towards the constellation Aquila (The Eagle). The spacecraft should pass close to one of the stars in that constellation in about 4 million years. Pioneer 11 has also stopped transmitting to Earth, and its final signal was received in November 1995.
Two more NASA probes that built on the successful missions of Pioneer 10 and 11 were the Voyagers. Voyager 1 also visited Jupiter and Saturn and is presently sailing towards the outer limits of the solar system. The craft is headed towards the constellation Camelopardalis (The Giraffe), a star of which it will fly close to in about 300,000 years. Voyager 2 flew past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune during its Grand Tour of the solar system, but the probe is now headed towards the star Sirius in the constellation Canis Majoris (The Big Dog). Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky, and Voyager 2 will pass close to it in about 160,000 years. Both of the Voyager probes are still transmitting and are expected to continue sending signals to Earth until around 2020 when their power sources decay.

The two Voyagers will be over 10 billion miles from the Sun by then, and it is hoped they will provide the first scientific measurements of the edge of the solar system and the beginnings of interstellar space. The prevailing theory accepted by most researchers says that the edge of the solar system consists of three boundaries called the termination shock, heliopause, and bow shock. The termination shock is believed to mark the transition in the velocity of the solar winds emanating from the Sun from supersonic to subsonic speeds. Even further away is the heliopause, which scientists conjecture is a region where the solar wind ceases to exist. Beyond may lie a bow shock bombarded by galactic cosmic rays. However, these theories of the solar system's outer reaches remain unproven. Only the Voyager probes may be able to provide scientists with any answers about the true nature of this region of space anytime soon.
All four of these distant space probes used the gravitational attraction of the planets they visited to slingshot themselves onto the trajectories they currently follow. These gravitational assists accelerated the vehicles to some of the highest speeds ever reached by manmade objects. Traveling slowest of the foursome is Pioneer 11 at about 26,000 mph (42,000 km/h) with respect to the Sun. Pioneer 10 is currently moving at a rate of over 27,000 mph (44,000 km/h) while Voyager 2 is speeding along at about 36,000 mph (58,000 km/h). The fastest probe, however, is Voyager 1 with a velocity of nearly 39,000 mph (63,000 km/h). Given its greater speed, Voyager 1 currently holds the record as the fastest interplanetary spacecraft and has passed the Pioneers to become the farthest manmade object from the Sun.
None of these four spacecraft is traveling towards our closest star Proxima Centauri that lies about 4.2 light years away. If Voyager 1 were headed in that direction, however, it would still take the vehicle over 73,000 years to get there!

Helios

The Helios, which holds the record for fastest manmade object, was a series of two spacecraft launched in the mid-1970s to study the Sun. Both probes were developed through cooperation between the US and West Germany with scientists from both nations providing experiments and NASA providing the launch vehicle and booster. Helios 1 was launched in December 1974 and Helios 2 in January 1976, both reaching the Sun within about three months.

What made the Helios missions so unusual was that the two craft made incredibly close passes to the Sun resulting in very high orbital speeds. These high speeds resulted from the fact that both probes were placed into very elliptical, or eccentric, orbits around the Sun. When a probe is placed into a circular orbit, its speed remains a constant. For example, the Space Shuttle orbits the Earth in a circular or nearly circular orbit at a constant speed of between 17,000 and 18,000 mph (27,355 to 28,960 km/h). When in a highly elliptical orbit, however, a vehicle will reach very high speed when it is close to the body it is orbiting but slow down considerably when it is far away.
The Helios missions both orbited in this manner, with a furthest distance (or aphelion) of nearly 1 Astronomical Unit (AU), which is the distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun. Meanwhile, the closest approach (or perihelion) of the Helios probes was about 0.3 AU. The eccentricity of such an orbit is about 0.54 with a period of about 190 days. The maximum speed of Helios 2, which achieved its perihelion distance of 0.29 AU on 17 April 1976, is quoted as about 150,000 mph (241,350 km/h). By applying some simple equations of orbital mechanics, we can confirm that such an orbit would indeed result in a perihelion velocity of 153,800 mph (247,510 km/h). For comparison, the aphelion speed of Helios 2 turns out to be only 45,360 mph (72,985 km/h) at its farthest distance of 0.983 AU. This massive differential between the vehicle's maximum and minimum speeds graphically illustrates how much an elliptical orbit varies from the circular orbit discussed earlier.
The reason the Helios probes were given such unusual orbits is that they were intended to make various measurements of the interplanetary space between the Sun and Earth. Each probe was equipped with ten experiments including high-energy particle detectors to measure the solar wind, magnetometer readings of the Sun's magnetic field, measurements of variations in electric and magnetic waves, and a micrometeoroid experiments. The two probes completed their primary missions by the early 1980s but were still sending data as late as 1985. Though they are no longer functional, both craft remain in their eccentric orbits around the Sun.

Today in History

Comet Hale-Bopp (formally designated C/1995 O1) was probably the most widely observed comet of the twentieth century, and one of the brightest seen for many decades. It was visible to the naked eye for a record 18 months, twice as long as the previous record holder, the Great Comet of 1811.
Hale-Bopp was discovered on 23 July 1995 at a very large distance from the Sun, raising expectations that the comet could become very bright when it passed close to the Sun. Although comet brightnesses are very difficult to predict with any degree of accuracy, Hale-Bopp met or exceeded most predictions for its brightness when it passed perihelion on April 1 1997. The comet was dubbed the Great Comet of 1997.
The passage of Hale-Bopp was notable also for inciting a degree of panic about comets not seen for decades. Rumours that the comet was being followed by an alien spacecraft gained remarkable currency, and inspired a mass suicide among followers of a cult named Heaven's Gate.

Discovery
The comet was discovered by two independent observers, Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp, both in the United States. Hale had spent many hundreds of hours searching for comets without finding one, and was tracking known comets from his driveway in New Mexico when he chanced upon Hale-Bopp, with an apparent magnitude of 10.5, near the globular cluster M70, in the constellation of Sagittarius, just after midnight. Hale first established that there was no other deep-sky object near M70, and then consulted a directory of known comets, finding that no known objects were in this area of the sky. Once he had established that the object was moving relative to the background stars, he emailed the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, the clearing house for astronomical discoveries.
Bopp did not own a telescope. He was out with friends near Stanfield, Arizona observing star clusters and galaxies when he chanced across the comet(Mikkel) while at the eyepiece of his friend's telescope. He realised he might have spotted something new when he checked his star atlases to find out what other deep-sky objects were near M70, and found that there were none. He contacted the Central Bureau of Astronomical Telegrams via telegram. The following morning, it was confirmed that this was a new comet, and it was named Comet Hale-Bopp, with the designation C/1995 O1. The discovery was announced in International Astronomical Union circular 6187.