World's Largest Known Prime Number

Euclid proved in the 3rd century BC that there are an infinite number of prime numbers. A prime number can be divided only by itself and the number 1. Primes serve as the building blocks for all positive integers, and have applications in cryptography and other fields.

Mersenne numbers are numbers that are one less than a power of two (2n – 1). A Mersenne number that is also a prime number is called a Mersenne prime. These can be found and verified relatively quickly. Before 1952, 12 Mersenne primes were known; with the aid of computers, 30 more have been found. The eight largest have all been found by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a distributed network of volunteers using their spare computer power to find the largest Mersenne primes.

The largest currently known prime, 243,112,609– 1, was found by electrical engineer Hans-Michael Elvenich on 6 Sept. 2008. It has 12,978,189 digits.

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Mothers of Invention

They say necessity is the mother of invention. But mothers are the mothers of these inventions for kids.

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Record-Breaking Foods

Most Noodle Strings: Simon Sang Koon Sung of Singapore really knows how to use his noodle. He made 8,192 strings of noodles from a single lump of dough in 59.29 seconds. That’s a rate of 138 noodles a second.

Largest Custard-Pie Fight: In 2000, 20 people at the Millennium Done in London, England, threw 3,312 custard pies in three minutes.

Longest Bean: Harry Hurley, of North Carolina, has a green thumb—a big one. In 1997, he grew a bean that measured 4.3 ft long.

Largest Ice-Cream Sandwich: At a promotional event in 1998 in Dubuque, Iowa, an ice-cream sandwich was made that weighed 2,460 pounds.

Largest Chinese Dumpling: In 1997, a dumpling weighing 1,058 pounds was made to celebrate the reunification of Hong Kong and China. No word on whether it was steamed or fried.
Most Expensive Meal: No, it wasn’t in McD’s. In 2001, six people in London spent a total of $62,138 on a meal in a restaurant named Petrus. Most of the money was spent on bottles of rare wine.

Largest Breakfast: In 2001, in Taiwan, 23,291 hungry people wolfed down 1,247 gallons of milk and 4,232 pounds of bread.

Longest Sandwich: Created in Italy in 2004, the loaf measured 2,081 feet in length. It was made of 2,028 pounds of flour, 112 gallons of water and 55 pounds of salt. Packed in the sandwich were 1,206 pounds of salami and mortadella, a type of cheese. The super sandwich weighed 34,275 pounds and was eaten by 19,000 people. Now that’s what we call a real hero sandwich!

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