Tag Archives: United States

Cherry stone spitting – greatest distance

The longest spit of a cherry stone in competition is 28.51 m (93 ft 6.5 in) by Brian “Young Gun” Krause (USA) at the International Cherry Pit-Spitting Championship at Eau Claire, Michigan, USA in 2004. On the same day in the freestyle competition he spat a stone 33.62 m (110 ft 4 in).

Closest Calypso Pass

The closest that two planes flying at high-speed have performed a mirror image is 45 cm (18 in) – that is just over the height of this book! The manoeuvre, known as the ‘Calypso Pass’, was performed by two 71,000-hp Lockheed-Martin F-16 Falcons belonging to the United States Air Force Thunderbirds display team at the Aviation Nation Air Show 2005 in Nellis, Las Vegas, USA on 12-13 November 2005. Both planes were flying at a speed of 1,223 km/h (760 mph) – close to the Continue reading →

Closest margin of victory in a car race

The record for the closest margin of victory in a car race is 0.0005 of a second, when Logan Gomez (USA) beat Alex Lloyd (UK) in the 16th round of the 2007 Indy Pro Series, the Chicagoland 100, at Chicagoland Speedway, in Joliet, Illinois, USA, on 9 September 2007. The Indy Pro Series is the developmental racing series sanctioned by the Indy Racing League. The Sam Schmidt Motorsports cars of champion Alex Lloyd and Logan Gomez battled for the lead with Robbie Pecorari throughout the Continue reading →

Crash tests (most)

By February 2003, W. R. “Rusty” Haight (USA) had endured 718 collisions in cars as a “human crash test dummy”, due to his work as a traffic-collision reconstructionist. In each collision Rusty and the vehicle are fitted with an array of sensors to gather data on the crash. He runs a course to teach law enforcement accident investigators and engineers about understanding crashes, and participates in private or publically funded studies to improve crash safety in vehicles.

Country with the most millionaires

The USA is home to 2,886,200 millionaires, according to figures from the World Wealth Report 2010. A millionaire is defined as an individual with a net worth of at least $1 million in assets other than their primary residence. The number of US millionaires has dropped from a figure of 3,028,000 in the previous year.

Darkest manmade substance

The darkest man-made substance is a low density carbon nanotube array created by researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Zu-Po Yang, James A. Bur, Prof. Shawn-Yu Lin) and Rice University (Dr. Lijie Ci, Prof. P.M. Ajayan) (both USA). The substance demonstrated reflectance of 0.045% when tested at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on 24 August 2007