These facts were originally published in Word Magazine, a prison magazine from Cessnock in New South Wales. Thank you for the contribution!

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• In 1931, William Tilden served a tennis ball at a record 263 kilometres per hour. 
• The oldest known living tree in the world is a Bristlecone Pine in California. It is more than 4,600 years old. 
• Swifts (a bird similar to a swallow) can spend weeks continuously in the air, even sleeping on the wing. 
• The Sultan of Brunei's palace has over 1,800 rooms with 260 bathrooms and toilets. 
• The driest desert in the world is South America's Atacama, which gets only one millimetre of rain every 5-20 years. 
• If all of Antarctica's ice melted, world sea levels would rise by more than sixty metres. 
• In 1976, a US Lockheed SR-71A (also called a Blackbird) aircraft travelled at almost 3,600 kilometres per hour. 
• The longest known snake was a Malaysian reticulated python that measured over ten metres. 

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• The hailstones in a deadly 1986 Bangladesh storm each weighed over a kilogram. They punched through car roofs and split people's heads open.
• The Blue Whale is so big that its tongue weighs over four tonnes. 
• Bamboo can grow more than a metre per day. 
• Tokyo now has fifty per cent more inhabitants than the entirety of Australia, and there are more seventeen year-olds in India than there are people in Australia.
• The population of the world is eight billion, but that's only 6.5 per cent of the total number of people who have ever lived. 
• When the Krakatoa volcano in the East Indies erupted in 1883 the blast was so loud that it was heard more than 5,000 kilometres away in Australia. The event disintegrated the entire island. 
• Over 90,000 square kilometres of precious tropical forest and wetland habitats are lost each year. 
• The average income in Burundi, a country in East Africa, is only US$280 a year, the lowest in the world. 
• In the month of July 1861, the Indian region of Cherrapunji was deluged with a record 930 centimetres of rain. 
• Australia's width is just slightly greater than that of the moon. 
• We are all made from the dust of dead distant stars.