Big Number: Different stories, common number- ‘3’

The balloon which had ‘Happy Birthday’ written on it was not found to be carrying “any dangerous payload”, but was believed to have originated from Pakistan, leading to the response.

Melting ice in West Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea sector may lead to a global sea-level rise of 3 m in the coming decades, claimed a study by Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in November 2015.

The massive 7.8-magnitude quake that struck Nepal in April 2015 may have moved the ground beneath Kathmandu about 3 m southward, according to analysis of seismological data by University of Cambridge and University of Adelaide.

In June 2015, a Russian fighter jet “roared” within 3 m of a US spy plane over Black Sea. Pentagon called the move “unsafe, unprofessional” and registered a complaint with Russia over the “Cold War kind” encounter.

The DNA molecule in the human cell is 3 m long. It is carefully folded and compressed into a complex three-dimensional structure, without any knots, and fits within the nucleus of a cell.