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Lose weight - move to India!

By Daniel Smith on May 27, 09 11:17 AM

euro-map-700.jpg

This colourful globe is a gravity map of the Earth.

If you remember school physics lessons, you might recall our planet's gravity is around 9.8m/s2.

This means, ignoring air resistance, the speed of an object falling freely increase by 9.8 metres per second.

Gravity also gives you weight. The less gravity, the less you weigh. So if you go to the moon, which doesn't have as much gravity, you're a lot lighter and, hence, can lark about like Neil and Buzz.

(Visit here to see how much you would weigh on the lunar surface.)

NASA sent up the GRACE satellites to sense variations in local gravity on the Earth.

It turns out gravity isn't the same all over the planet. The map shows our world as a bumpy globe of gravitational ups and downs.

The red shows where the gravity is strongest, blue where it is weakest.

And it turns out India has less gravity than elsewhere, meaning you'll be one per cent lighter straight away without the need of salads and the gym.

The reason for this is thought to be due to the remains of the crunch of tectonic plates that led to the rise of the Himalayas.

Want to be heavier? Head for the South Pacific - there's overabundance of gravity weighing people down.

Weird Science Factoid: The life of an eyelash is about five months. I had no eye-dea! Ouch.

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Authors

Daniel Smith

Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.

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