Measurement

Flying snakes can’t actually gain altitude. They’re gliders, using the speed of free fall and contortions of their bodies to catch the air and generate lift.

Their buzzing can reach 90 decibels, as loud as some power motors. They have been seen in clusters of up to 1.5 million per acre. As if from some horror movie, cicada nymphs have been described as “boiling out of the ground."

Each eyeball is approximately 16 mm (over half an inch) in diameter and is as large as the tarsier's entire brain.

One shopkeeper emerged with a tape measure and proceeded to measure my height and girth -- each time holding it up to the small crowd. (Clarence Holbrook, Loveland, CO)

With a little luck and a crack team behind him, Felix Baumgartner plans to skydive into the record books. Climbing to roughly 23 miles (37 kilometers), he'd be the first human to achieve supersonic speed with just his body.

A study at UCLA demonstrated that brandishing a weapon does in fact make someone appear bigger and stronger, as our brains are hardwired to translate the magnitude of a threat into size and strength.

Using the Gemini Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, a team of astronomers calculated the black hole’s mass, which is vastly larger than the black hole in the center of the Milky Way.

Doctors have built a pulseless artificial heart, helping keep people alive, even though by current metric standards they are not living.

Dealing with things smaller than 100 nanometers (a human hair is 80,000 nm wide), nanotechnologies are poised to revolutionize medicine.