Things I learned lately - 2 September

• About 80% of Canadians don't know that electoral reform work has begun. So, ummm Canada, it has begun.
• IBM's Watson helped make a movie trailer for the movie Morgan. 
• When scientists first studied dinosaur fossils in the 1820s, they had no idea they were looking at dinosaurs, they thought they had discovered giant iguanas.
• A photon takes 3 minutes to reach Mercury, 8 minutes to reach Earth and 5.3 hours to reach Pluto. To reach the inner limits of our solar system's Oort cloud - 4 months, the outer limits - 9.5 months. To get an idea how far away the nearest star is, that same photon would take 4.24 years to reach Alpha Centauri.
• A spacecraft can get to the moon in as little as 8.5 hours. But that's only if it's going at maximum velocity, on the way to an outer location like Pluto, as did the New Horizons probe.
• It does get as warm as 20 C on Mars, at the equator, at noon, in the summer. But it can also get as cold as -153 C at the poles.
• There is a tree in California that is 4,765 years old.