Numbers in the News

DR STEPHEN BEATTY/MURDOCH UNIVERSITY

Goldfish (See "4" below)

$3.5 billion

The amount Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, have pledged to medical research in the hopes of curing all disease.

1.6 million

Area in square miles of Arctic sea ice remaining as of September, the second lowest on record.

900

Speed in miles per hour of a ping-pong ball shot at a paddle from a special launcher created by engineers at Purdue University in Indiana. That’s about 13 times the record speed for a ping-pong ball hit by a paddle.

199.5

Length in miles of the longest lightning bolt ever recorded, as per a new report by the World Meteorological Organization. The bolt shot across the Oklahoma sky in June 2007.

4

The weight in pounds of a goldfish found in a river in Australia. Scientists think people have been releasing these unwanted pet fish into waterways, where they grow to gigantic sizes and cause problems for local wildlife.

Text-to-Speech