The largest aquatic insect is the giant water bug (Lethocerus maximus), a carnivorous species that inhabits Venezuela and Brazil. It has been measured up to 11.5 cm (4.53 in) long, but as it is relatively long and narrow it is not as heavy as some of this continent’s burly terrestrial beetles and stick insects.

Kibo, the Japanese pressurised module, measures 11.19 m long with a diameter of 4.39 m, and has a mass of 14,800 kg. It was developed by the Japanese space agency JAXA and launched on 31 May 2008 onboard the space shuttle Discovery. As well as 23 racks for science experiments, internal systems and storage, Kibo has two windows and an airlock.

Discounting Australia, which is usually regarded as a continental land mass, the largest island in the world is Greenland, with an area of about 2,175,600 km² (840,000 miles²). The largest sand island in the world is Fraser Island, Queensland, Australia with a sand dune 120 km (75 miles) long. It was the Norwegian explorer Erik the Red, near the end of the tenth century AD. He established Icelandic settlements which until the fifteenth century. Greenland has been governed from Denmark for most of its modern Continue reading →

LG Philips created the largest flexible flexible LCD screen to date, a 36.3-cm (14.3-in) e-paper display. Less than 300 micrometers thin, the panel, made from metal fopil and plastic substrates instead of glass, has a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels and is capable of displaying 16.7 million colors. The e-pare display debuted at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA in 2008.

On 15 January 1965 the Soviet Union detonated a 140 kiloton nuclear device underneath a dry bed of the Chagan River, Kazakhstan. Part of the Soviets´ Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy programme, the raised rim of the resulting crater dammed the river allowing the creation of a reservoir. It is now known as Lake Chagan and has a volume of around 100,000 m³ (3,531,000 ft³).

The largest high-definition video screen is an LED display which measures 250 m x 30 m (820 ft x 98 ft) for a total surface area of 7,500 m² (80,729 ft²). It is located at The Place, Beijing, China. The screen is actually composed of five (still extremely large) screens that are arranged in a line to produce one continuous image.

The world’s largest litter of domestic cats were born on the 7 August 1970 when a Burmese/Siamese cat belonging to V. Gane of Kingham, Oxfordshire, UK, gave birth to 19 kittens, four of which were stillborn. Average for this cat type is 4-6

The largest Zenith telescope in Canada uses a mirror made from liquid mercury. By spinning the 3 tonne (6,613 lb), 6 m (19 ft 8 in) diameter mercury mirror, the liquid forms a perfect concave mirror shape suitable for astronomical observations.

The largest online interactive world map is Earth Viewer, which was acquired by Google in 2004. Relaunched as Google Earth in 2005 it is a virtual 3D globe of the entire Earth comprised of satellite data that can be browsed by home Internet users. Most of the land area of Earth is covered at 15 m (49 ft) resolution, with many areas having resolutions as high as 15 cm (6 in).

The largest animal on Earth based on weight is the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus), which can weigh up to 160 tonnes (352,000 lb). Its average length is 24 m (80 ft), but it is not the longest animal on Earth. A huge specimen caught in the Southern Ocean, Antarctica, on 20 March 1947 weighed 190 tonnes (418,000 lb) and measured 27.6 m (90 ft 6 in). Newborn calves are 6-8m (20-26 ft) long and weigh up to 3 tonnes (6,613 lb). The barely visible ovum Continue reading →