Dan Bracaglia
5.3 million: the number of Lego bricks used to build the world's largest Lego model, a life-size X-wing fighter complete with Lego Luke Skywalker
40,000: the planned population for Masdar City, a solar-powered eco-metropolis in the middle of the Arabian desert and the world's most ambitious eco-city
15 days: the time it took the journal Cell to accept and publish last week's study on the first cloned human embryo. An anonymous online commenter has now pointed out four potential errors in the paper.
20,000 feet: the height of the ash plume created by the recent eruption of Alaska's Pavlof volcano
2016: the year a "female Viagra," called Lybrido, could hit the market in the U.S.
$390: the price to book a room in Barcelona's futuristic space hotel, which sits atop an artificial island and features a zero-gravity spa, a vertical wind tunnel, and a marina for parking yachts
16: the number of tiger genomes that scientists sequenced in order to discover the single genetic mutation responsible for all white tigers
40 minutes: the time this week's deadly Moore, Okla., tornado was on the ground. See a reconstruction of the twister from start to finish, in videos, as well as satellite images of the disaster.
16 minutes: the warning time residents received before the deadly tornado touched down in Newcastle, Okla. Why are tornados so hard to predict?
-15 degrees Celsius: the coldest temperature at which bacteria have ever been discovered to thrive. Researchers recently found these cold-resistant microbes in the Canadian Arctic-which is great news for life on Mars.
$25: the cost of a newer, stronger 3-D printed pistol created by a Wisconsin engineer
1987: the year a German scientist showed that itching wasn't just a less intense form of pain. Now, researchers have at long last identified the molecule responsible for itchiness.
80 minutes: the length of the first test flight of the U.S. Navy's game-changing MQ-4C Triton spy drone, which can detect and identify a ship from 2,000 nautical miles away and 10 miles above sea level
$249: the price of a video game headset that will zap your brain to improve your gaming ability
30 years: the shelf-life of the "ink" cartridges for NASA's new 3-D printer that can print food from insects and plants
1/10,000 of a second: the speed at which the jaws of a trap-jaw ant can snap shut on prey (see a parasite-infected trap-jaw ant below)
25 percent: the reduction in Ireland's population after the mid-19th-century potato blight. Scientists have finally revealed the specific pathogen responsible for the famine.
2 months: the time it took to build this booze-infused game of Battleship (please sink responsibly)
$1.1 billion: the amount a giant carnivorous plant spent to acquire Tumblr this week
23: the number of infants involved in the small study that sparked the "crack baby" epidemic scare of the 1980s (which turned out to be totally bogus)
50 years: the length of time the U.S. Navy has employed dolphins to search for mines (the hard-working marine mammals recently discovered something really, really cool)
22.22 miles: the distance the Mars rover Opportunity has traveled on Mars, the longest distance a NASA vehicle has ever driven on another planet
$2.6 billion: the cost of a NASA initiative to lasso and asteroid and bring it back to Earth's orbit (NASA Administrator Charles Bolden this week inspected a prototype ion propulsion engine for the mission)
     |