How much does Santa's Sleigh weigh? | #SciSparksAdvent

7 days to go!

If we're trying to work out how much his sleigh actually weighs, you need to make a lot of assumptions. Lets say that every child on Earth receives Buzz Lightyears - these have a boxed weight of 1.2kg - in total that's 840,000 tonnes of toys. These require a staggering 5.6 million reindeer to pull. Each reindeer weighs around 600lb - so the whole procession has a mass of 2,363,310.33 tonnes - Santa needs a few more than 7 reindeer!

It's December! | #SciSparksAdvent

It's finally December, time to crack open the first door on your advent calendar as there's only 25 days to go until the big day!

Every day until the 25th December I'll be posting every day on Christmas science, to the highlights of the year, keep updated by following me on Twitter @Sci_Sparks and keep your eye out for new posts here!

To get into the Christmas spirit I thought I'd start off by looking at Santa - question is, what would happen if he ate all those sweets?

He'd actually have late onset diabetes by the time he was three hours into his night shift! If you assume every household the world over leaves two chocolate chip cookies, he'd be consuming 170 calories, 8g of fat and 14g of sugar in every household. This means he consumes 374 billion calories, 33,000 tonnes of sugar and 151,000 tonnes of fat - enough to keep him going for the new year!!! Still, who said chocolate chip cookies weren't delicious?? :)

SANTA DOES EXIST! #SciSparksAdvent Day 24

Christmas Eve really wouldn't be the same without Santa, but here's why Santa definitely DOES exist!

Let's assume that all 2.2 billion people are both "nice" and they all want a "typical" toy off of somewhere like Amazon. So if each toy weighs around 200g that means Santa would be hauling 500,000 tonnes of toys. So Santa stays up for around 36 hours in a row all in the same red coat, all in complete extremes of temperature, in some parts of Russia it can reach below -50 degrees Fahrenheit and as much as 70 degrees Fahrenheit in Dubai. But that doesn't make it impossible - even though Santa has one of the most dangerous jobs in the world!....

Scientific Proof that Santa Exists #SciSparksAdvent Day 5

There's 20 days til Christmas and this is my 100th post, so check out this video for proof that Santa really does exist..... :)