The most powdered doughnuts eaten in three minutes is six and was achieved by Shamus Petherick (Australia) at Donuts Coffee N More in Deception Bay, Queensland, Australia, on 12 December 2010. The coffee shop hosted multiple attempts for this record on the day, with Shamus being the only one to break it.
The most powerful fighter jet engine is the US aircraft engine manufacturer, Pratt and Whitney’s engine for the F-35 Lighting II Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). Whilst its published power is rated at 28,800 lb thrust (128.1 kN) in intermediate power and 43,010 lb thrust (191.3 kN) in maximum power, on 18 September 2006, it set a record for thrust from a fighter engine reaching more than 40,000 lb thrust (178 kN). NB, it is normal to quote engine power in lb thrust (hence metric in
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Initially designed for the military by Danley Sound Labs (USA), the massive Matterhorn features 40 15-in subwoofers each powered by a 1,000-watt amplifier and housed in a 20x8x8-ft cargo container capable of reproducing bass down to 15 to 20 Hz and generating 94 db up to 250 m (820 ft).
Despite the shameful end to his year, Tiger Woods (USA) still earned $103 million (£67 million) in 2009, mostly from business deals already in place. However, his fraught personal life, which had a knock-on effect on Woods’s image and reputation, saw him lose his place at the top of the 2011 Business Week Sports Power 100 list, a guide to the most powerful people in the sporting world. The under-fire golfer was superseded by Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning (USA), who led his team to
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A 1.45 megaton nuclear explosion occurred in space 399 km. (248 miles) above Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean on July 9, 1962. The 755 kg. (1665 pound) warhead was launched by the US Air Force using a Thor Missile. Codenamed Starfish Prime, the explosion was more than 100 times more powerful than the Hiroshima blast and formed its own artificial aurora. The height of the detonation is equivalent to the orbital altitude of the present-day Space Shuttle. Starfish Prime was part of a series
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Enviromission’s (Australia) prototype solar chimney power station in Manzanares, Spain, produced 50 kW of electricity between 1982 and 1989. It consisted of a large area of greenhouses, in which air, heated by the Sun, expanded upwards through a 200 m-tall (656 ft) central tower, powering turbines as it escaped into the atmosphere.
Most powerful rocket engine Built in the former USSR by the Scientific Industrial Corporation of Power Engineering in 1980, the RD-170 has a thrust of 7,890 kN 1,777,000 lb in space and 7,246 kN 1,632,000 lb at the Earth’s surface. It also has a turbopump rated at 190MW, and burns liquid oxygen and kerosene. The RD-170 powered the four strap-on boosters of the Energiya booster, launched in 1987 but now grounded by budget cuts.
Whereas normal computers use a string of zeroes and ones (bytes) to represent data, experimental quantum computers use qubits, which can be a zero, one, or simultaneously both. On 20 December 2001, IBM’s Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California, USA, announced that they had used a 7-qubit quantum computer to calculate the factors of the number 15. They used a billion billion molecules that have seven nuclear spins for the calculation. Consisting of the nucleii of five atoms of fluorine and two of carbon, these
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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is an international project to study matter by emulating conditions just a few billionths of a second after the Big Bang. It is located in the 27 km-long (16.7 km) circular tunnel at the CERN laboratory, Geneva, Switzerland, that previously housed the Large Electron Positron Collider. The 38,000-tonne (83,775,560-lb) collider will accelerate two beams of matter in opposite directions around the tunnel. Once travelling at nearly the speed of light the two streams of particles will be allowed to collide,
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The most powerful mobile phone gun is a 0.22 calibre (0.22 in) pistol, disguised as a cell phone, which can fire a (close-range) lethal round of four bullets when numbers 5,6,7,8 are pressed in quick succession. It is believed that these phone-guns are made in Croatia, and have already been seized in drug raids across Europe in 2003. NB: do not convert gun calibres.