The Burj Khalifa, rising almost half a mile into the air, is the tallest building in the world. One secret to its height is its shape - the Burj Khalifa is specially shaped so that it almost “twists” as it goes up, which breaks up the wind that runs into it and reduces the amount the wind makes it sway. Reducing sway from wind is extremely important for building tall skyscrapers.

Yes! Well, not MOST planes. But there are TWO planes that have flown in space! They used rockets instead of jets, meaning they carried their own liquid oxygen fuel with them, since there isn’t much air in space. Plus, they were launched from ANOTHER airplane at 40,000 feet in the sky!

Thanks to some clever engineering, it’s impossible to go all the way around on a swing set. The secret to this safety is the chains that connect the seat of the swing to the top bar. Anytime you manage to go above the top bar of the swing, the chains go slack, and you lose your momentum. That makes it impossible to build up enough energy to ever make it all the way around (unless you attach a rocket to yourself). However, if the swing is attached with rigid poles, it IS possible to go all the way around - in fact, this is a common circus trick!

Submarines have large tanks of air that keep them afloat, just like floaties you use in the pool! When submarines want to dive down, they open up those tanks to fill them with ocean water, making them heavy enough to sink. When they want to go back up, they pump compressed air back into the tanks, forcing the water out and allowing them to rise!

The fastest speed achieved by humans was 29,937.7 km/hr (24,816.1 mph) by the crew of the Apollo 10 spacecraft while returning to Earth in 1969. That’s over 32 times the speed of sound, and fast enough to circle the planet in just over an hour.

The current land speed record is 760 mph (1,220 km/hr), which was set in 1997 in a jet-powered car called the ThrustSSC. It was the first land vehicle to officially break the sound barrier!

The deepest any human has ever gone underwater was 35,853 feet - the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the deepest known part of the ocean. It took nearly 4 hours to reach that depth. At the very bottom of the sea, they discovered animals like sea cucumbers and shrimp-like amphipods. They also found a plastic bag and candy wrappers.

Have you ever dropped a leaf or a sheet of paper, and watched it drift slowly to the ground? The reason it doesn’t just drop, like a baseball, is because of something called air resistance. See, the air around you might seem empty, but it’s not - you can even feel it just by waving your hand back and forth really fast. Parachutes are really wide and light, just like a leaf, so for them to come down, they need to push a lot of air out of the way. Pushing all that air slows down the fall of the person attached to it, in exactly the same way an umbrella would be blown in the wind.

The farthest man-made object from Earth is the spacecraft Voyager 1, which was 14.5 billion miles - 156 times farther from the Sun than the Earth is - as of June 29, 2022. The Voyager 1 is a probe launched in 1977 to take measurements and photographs of Jupiter and Saturn. The Voyager 1 left our Solar system on August 25, 2012. Still operational after 44 years of service, the Voyager 1 will shut down sometime in 2025 when its generators run out of power.

The smartest supercomputer in the world as of June 2022 is called Frontier. Over twice as fast as the previous record-holder, Frontier can perform more than 1 quintillion (or a million billion) calculations per second. In other words, if every human on Earth did one math problem every second, then it would take 4 years to do the amount of math Frontier can do in 1 second. It’s used by the US Department of Energy to conduct scientific research on new materials, power sources, and medical treatments.