It's Not Hard to Amaze Me

These factoids, discovered while reseaching something else, amaze me:

1. A black hole, five billion times as big as the sun, is in the core of the galaxy Messier 87 (M-87).

2. A 3.1 mile wide comet will collide with the Earth in 2116, and could kill off most forms of life.

3. The King James version of the Bible was completed on William Shakespeare's putative 46th birthday. In Psalm 46, the 46th word is "shake" and the 46th word from the end is "spear".

4. Solitary bees make circular cells, which become hexagonal under pressure.

5. Gout strikes the male population nineteen times for every one time it attacks females.

6. Etruscans invented false teeth around 700 BC.

7. Neutrinos are ghostlike particles that have no mass or electrical charge and can hurtle with ease through the entire earth.

8. There are no houseflies in the state of Alaska.

9. According to Lewis Thomas' The Lives of a Cell, "there are 25 million assorted insects hanging in the air over every temperate square mile, in a column extending upwards for thousands of feet, drifting through the layers of the atmosphere like plankton."

10. There are more than 1,000 rings around Saturn.