The human brain is the most complex physical structure we know of anywhere in the universe. There are over 80 billion neurons in the average human brain – that’s comparable to the number of stars in an average galaxy.

Just one sperm out of 180 million will find its way into the ovum in order to produce a new human; a chance encounter which seems to defy the odds and is miraculously repeated all over the world and throughout history.

Our current best theory for the origin of the universe, backed up by experimental evidence, suggests that there are an infinite numbers of universes, an infinite number of copies of us, and that the existence of the whole thing in inevitable.

The most common element in the universe is hydrogen. It accounts for about 75% of the element mass of the universe.

Voyager 1 is about 19 billion km into its journey to explore outer space. But in galactic terms it’s only just left home. That’s because the Milky Way is a billion billion km across.

Recent scientific evidence suggests that our evolutionary leap from ape to human was driven by the impact of climate change in the Great Rift Valley in East Africa; remarkably, climate change caused by the way that the Earth moves through space, as it orbits the Sun.

The most important requirement for the evolution of life as we know it is liquid water. This can only exist on a planet that is not too hot or too cold – an area known as the Goldilocks zone.

Thanks to the Kepler Space Telescope, a space observatory designed to look for Earth-like planets, scientists estimate there could be as many as 10 billion habitable planets in our galaxy alone.

Galileo once said that nature is a book written in the language of mathematics. Take for example meanders in a river. If you look at any river on the planet, or indeed the solar system, no matter how small or wide, the ratio of the wavelength of the meander to the width of the river, is always between 10 and 14.

Yuri Gagarin was a Russian-Soviet pilot and cosmonaut and the first human to travel to outer space on 12 April 1961. Nowadays, there are up to five journeys per year to the International Space Station, a habitable artificial satellite in low Earth orbit. Since 2000, the station has been continuously occupied.

If you drop a bowling ball and a feather in an airless environment, they will both fall to Earth at exactly the same rate. Einstein proved that this is because they are not actually falling, a theory he called special relativity and what he referred to as the happiest thought of his life.