HERE are 10 intriguing science facts you can use to impress friends and family.

• There are more atoms in a bucketful of water than there are bucketfuls of water in the Atlantic Ocean.

• Every day nearly 3,000 earthquakes shake our planet.

• Carbon monoxide, notorious as a poison, is invaluable in the chemical industry for purifying metals.

• If Everest, our highest mountain, were placed at the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean, its peak would be more than a mile beneath the surface.

• About 70 per cent of the Earth's surface is water. By coincidence, 70 per cent of the human body is also water.

• The world's fastest supercomputer could take about 7,000 trillion years to find the two prime numbers that make up a 300-digit prime product. But a quantum computer could do the same sum in a few days.

• The star Sirius B is so dense that a piece of it the size of a sugar cube would weigh several hundred tons.

• The speed of light, at 670 million mph, sounds very fast. But a light ray, at this speed, would take about 26 billion years to cross the visible universe.

• The universe is apparently infinite in extent. If you could travel a distance in light-years of one thousand trillion digits, you might find another planet identical to Earth with identical people.