60 Fun Facts About Impossible

Which country moved its seat of government to Ngerulmud, a capital with no permanent population, in 2006?

Its name comes from a Palauan phrase meaning 'place of fermented angelfish'.

Nukuʻalofa is the capital of which Pacific kingdom?

The 1875 constitution formally made it the capital.

Point Nemo, the spot in the ocean farthest from any land, lies in which ocean?

It sits inside the South Pacific Gyre, and its antipode is in western Kazakhstan.

Which is the only named sea with no land boundaries at all?

Its edges are defined by ocean currents rather than coastlines, and it covers roughly 4 million square kilometres.

Which South Atlantic island is considered the remotest inhabited place in the world?

Its football team can barely play anyone, since travelling abroad from the island is virtually impossible.

Which African lake is the continent's deepest and holds about 16% of the world's available fresh water?

Worldwide it is second in both depth and volume only to Lake Baikal.

Which country, with around 840 known languages, is the most linguistically diverse on Earth?

English and Tok Pisin serve as common languages across the hundreds of small groups.

Yttrium, terbium, erbium and ytterbium are all named after a village in which country?

Ytterby's mine is the richest source of elemental discoveries in the world; holmium, scandium, thulium, tantalum and gadolinium were also first found there.

In nuclear physics, what is a 'barn'?

One barn is roughly the cross-sectional area of a uranium nucleus; the name was a joke about a target 'as big as a barn'.

Who is the only person to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics twice?

The first was for the transistor in 1956 and the second for the BCS theory of superconductivity in 1972.

Ming, an ocean quahog clam dredged off Iceland, was eventually found to be how old?

Researchers first said 405 years in 2007, then revised it upwards in 2013, though the clam had already been killed to count its growth bands.

What is the approximate half-life of carbon-14?

It decays into nitrogen-14 by beta decay, which is why radiocarbon dating stops working beyond about 50,000 years.

Absolute zero on the Fahrenheit scale is what temperature?

The Rankine scale uses Fahrenheit-sized degrees but starts at absolute zero, so 0 °R equals −459.67 °F.

Which land mammal has the most teeth, at around 80 to 100?

Its teeth are all alike, grow constantly through life and have no enamel.

A giraffe's heart must generate roughly how much blood pressure compared with a human's?

That heart weighs around 11 kg and is 60 cm long.

Who became the world's first female prime minister in 1960?

She led Ceylon, later Sri Lanka, and her daughter later became the country's first female president.

Pope Urban VII holds the record for the shortest recognised papacy. How long did he reign in 1590?

He died of malaria before he could even be crowned.

Which future US state existed as an unrecognised independent republic from 1777 to 1791?

It briefly called itself the Republic of New Connecticut and minted its own copper coins.

Which country was known as the Republic of Upper Volta until 1984?

President Thomas Sankara renamed it on 4 August 1984.

Who wrote The Tale of Genji, often called the world's first novel, in the early 11th century?

Legend says she was inspired to begin it while gazing at the moon from a temple on Lake Biwa.

Which work holds the Guinness World Record for the longest novel?

Marcel Proust's seven-volume work runs to well over a million words.

Which author published early sketches under the pen name 'Boz'?

The nickname came from 'Moses', a family joke that became 'Boses' when said with a head cold.

Who was the first Nobel laureate to voluntarily decline the prize, in 1964?

He argued that a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution.

Bloomsday celebrates the events of Ulysses, which all take place on which date in 1904?

The day is named after Leopold Bloom, the novel's protagonist.

A modern concert harp typically has how many strings?

That gives seven strings per octave across six and a half octaves.

John Cage's 4′33″, in which the performer plays nothing, is divided into how many movements?

Cage later said the durations of the movements could be decided by the musician.

Beethoven's 'Eroica' is which of his numbered symphonies?

He originally intended to dedicate it to Napoleon.

Holst's orchestral suite The Planets consists of how many movements?

Several composers have since tried to add an eighth movement for Pluto, discovered in 1930.

El Apóstol, considered the world's first animated feature, was made in 1917 in which country?

It is a lost film; its director Quirino Cristiani was paid a meagre 1,000 pesos.

Which 1927 film won the first Academy Award for Best Picture?

It remains the only fully silent film to win the award.

Which is the only X-rated film ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture?

The X rating of 1969 is equivalent to today's NC-17.

Which sport is played on the largest field of any modern sport, 300 by 160 yards?

That is roughly the area of six soccer fields or nine American football fields.

Brian Lara's record Test cricket innings against England in 2004 ended on what score?

He also holds the first-class record of 501 not out, made for Warwickshire in 1994.

Tug of war was an Olympic event at every Games between 1900 and which year?

In 1900 a mixed team of three Danes and three Swedes took first place.

The longest tennis match ever, Isner v Mahut at Wimbledon 2010, lasted how long?

The final set alone, 70-68, was longer than any previous match in history.

The Venus Rosewater Dish is the trophy for which sporting title?

It was first presented in 1886.

The cashew belongs to the same plant family as which of these?

The nut's shell contains an irritant related to urushiol, which is why cashews are never sold in the shell.

Roquefort cheese may only carry its name if it is ripened in the natural caves of which mountain?

A 1961 court ruling in Millau outlawed imitations ripened anywhere else.

Casu martzu, a sheep's milk cheese containing live fly maggots, comes from which island?

The larvae's digestion breaks down the fats and turns the cheese very soft.

Which painter created the triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights?

He painted it somewhere between 1490 and 1510, when he was between 40 and 60 years old.

Who stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911?

He had worked at the museum as a glazier and knew how to open the painting's protective case in minutes.

Which is the only large moon in the Solar System that orbits its planet in a retrograde direction?

It is thought to be a captured Kuiper belt dwarf planet, and it was found just 17 days after Neptune itself.

On which planet is a sidereal day (243 Earth days) longer than the planet's year?

Its year lasts only 224.7 Earth days, and because it spins backwards a solar day there is much shorter.

Who invented the QWERTY keyboard layout in the 1870s?

He kept refining his typewriter in Milwaukee, and the layout was settled around 1873.

The famous 'first actual case of bug being found' in a Harvard computer in 1947 was what creature?

It was taped into the log book, which now sits in the Smithsonian.

The Rotokas language, spoken on Bougainville, is written with an alphabet of how many letters?

The letters are a, e, g, i, k, o, p, r, s, t, u and v, with no diacritics.

The shortest recorded war in history, in 1896, lasted between 38 and 45 minutes. Who fought it?

It began after the suspicious death of the pro-British sultan and ended when British warships shelled the palace.

Which Pacific nation stretches into all four hemispheres, eastern, western, northern and southern?

Its 32 atolls and the island of Banaba span three geographic subregions across an enormous exclusive economic zone.

How many years did Louis XIV spend on the French throne, the longest verifiable reign of any sovereign monarch?

He became king in 1643 aged four and died of gangrene at Versailles in 1715, four days short of his 77th birthday.

Which country has the only national flag that is taller than it is wide?

Its double-pennon shape caused headaches at the Olympics, where a 2004 protocol demanded uniform 2:3 rectangles.

How many characters are in the long form of the Welsh village name Llanfairpwllgwyngyll...gogogoch?

Because 'ch' and 'll' are single letters in Welsh, it counts as only 51 letters, split across 18 syllables.

The official highest air temperature ever recorded, 56.7 °C, was measured in 1913 at which place?

A 1922 Libyan reading held the record for 90 years until it was decertified in 2012.

The Challenger Deep, Earth's deepest known seabed point, lies in the ocean territory of which nation?

A 2021 study put its depth at 10,935 metres, give or take six.

Bombay duck, a staple of Anglo-Indian cookery, is actually what kind of animal?

The dried, asafoetida-coated fish is fried and crumbled as a pungent condiment; the nickname is recorded as early as 1815.

How much track does the world's shortest national railway system, in Vatican City, contain?

The whole line to the Italian network is 1.27 km, and its single station was designed by Giuseppe Momo.

The vellum of the undeciphered Voynich manuscript has been carbon-dated to which period?

Stylistic analysis suggests it was composed in Italy; it is named after the Polish book dealer who bought it in 1912.

Wilfrid Voynich's widow Ethel, who inherited the manuscript, was the daughter of which mathematician?

Ethel Voynich also wrote the novel The Gadfly; she left the manuscript to a friend, who sold it to dealer Hans P. Kraus in 1961.

Observations in 2014 showed the 'sailing stones' of Racetrack Playa are moved by wind pushing what?

Ice panels melting in winds of just 4–5 m/s shoved rocks along at up to 80 mm per second.

Jeanne Calment, the longest-lived verified human, died in 1997 at what age?

She first drew media attention in 1985 after turning 110; the record for a man is Jiroemon Kimura's 116 years.

Which Byzantine emperors are excluded from the longest-reign list because they were long only junior co-emperors?

They reigned 65 and 66 years in total, but for years only nominally alongside senior emperors.