90 Fun Facts About Interesting

Teaching at which university is recorded as early as 1096?

It is the world's second-oldest university in continuous operation; only Bologna, from 1088, is older.

Cleopatra was born in 69 BC. Which of these events happened closest in time to her life?

The Great Pyramid went up around 2600 BC, roughly 2,500 years before her, while the first Moon landing came just under 2,000 years after her death.

Which of these appeared on Earth first?

Shark-like fish were swimming in the Devonian over 400 million years ago; the first trees appeared later in that same period, and dinosaurs not until about 230 million years ago.

Which planet has the hottest surface in the Solar System, at around 464 C?

A runaway greenhouse atmosphere of carbon dioxide traps the heat, and the surface pressure is 92 times Earth's.

Claude Shannon's famous figure of roughly 10 to the power of 120 is a lower-bound estimate of what?

Claude Shannon worked it out in his 1950 paper that founded computer chess; the figure comfortably exceeds the estimated number of atoms in the observable universe.

Laser ranging to Apollo reflectors shows the Moon drifting away from Earth by about how much per year?

The same tidal tug slows Earth's spin, which is why leap seconds were introduced in 1972.

Which animal's skin secretes 'blood sweat', a red fluid that works as sunscreen and antibiotic?

The secretion is colourless at first and turns red-orange within minutes; its two pigments absorb ultraviolet light.

How long was Gustave Eiffel's concession to run his tower before the city could dismantle it?

It survived because it became useful for radio, joining the International Time Service in 1910.

Lightning heats nearby air to about what temperature, several times hotter than the Sun's surface?

An average negative bolt carries about 30,000 amperes and a gigajoule of energy in a few thousandths of a second.

For thousands of years up to about 5,000 years ago, which desert was covered in grasses, trees and lakes?

The African humid period was driven by wobbles in Earth's axial tilt that strengthened the monsoon; rock art from the time shows swimmers and cattle.

Measured from its base on the sea floor rather than sea level, which mountain is taller than Everest?

About 6,000 metres of the Hawaiian volcano is hidden underwater; from base to summit it tops 10,000 metres.

Vanilla flavouring comes from the cured seed pods of what kind of plant?

The pods must be hand-pollinated outside Mexico because the bee that does the job naturally lives only there.

Before the Spanish conquest, what did Mesoamerican peoples commonly use cocoa beans as?

A rabbit dinner or a few tamales could be paid for in beans; the Aztecs also drank chocolate bitter and spiced.

Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano in the Solar System, rises roughly how far above the surface of Mars?

That is about two and a half times the height of Everest; weak gravity and no plate movement let it keep growing over one hotspot.

Roughly what share of the Solar System's total mass is contained in the Sun?

Its mass is about 330,000 times that of Earth; Jupiter accounts for most of the little that is left.

What happens to an astronaut's height after a month in weightlessness?

With no gravity compressing the spine, the skeleton fully extends; the gain reverses within days of landing.

Which part of the human body has no blood vessels and gets its oxygen from the air via tears?

Blood vessels would spoil its transparency, so it is one of the few tissues that can be transplanted without tissue-type matching.

Woolly mammoths were still alive on Wrangel Island until roughly when?

That means a mammoth herd was grazing off Siberia while the Great Pyramid was already several centuries old.

In what year was the guillotine last used in France, the same year the first Star Wars film opened?

Hamida Djandoubi was executed in Marseille that September; France abolished the death penalty four years later.

Anne Frank was born in June 1929. Which American civil rights leader was born the same year?

He was born Michael King Jr. in Atlanta on January 15, 1929, five months before her.

Alexander Bain patented an early version of which device in 1843, over 30 years before the telephone?

His 'Electric Printing Telegraph' scanned images line by line and sent them down a wire.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi is the only person officially recognised by Japan as having survived what?

He was on a business trip to Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and made it home to Nagasaki in time for the second bomb; he lived to 93.

Which country's Althing, founded in 930, is called the world's oldest legislature?

It first met at Thingvellir, an open-air site about 45 km east of Reykjavik.

How many letters does the modern official Hawaiian alphabet have?

Five vowels, seven consonants and the okina glottal stop, which is why so many place names look like they repeat.

Which country has around 840 living languages, more than any other on Earth?

English and the creole Tok Pisin serve as the common tongues among its many small language groups.

Which microscopic animals, nicknamed water bears, have survived the vacuum of space?

In 2007 dehydrated specimens rode a Russian satellite for ten days in vacuum and came back to life.

Which Mexican salamander can regrow lost limbs, gills and even parts of its brain?

Its genome, published in 2018, is ten times the size of ours and was the largest animal genome sequenced at the time.

Cockroaches can survive for a while without their heads. What lets them keep breathing?

With no lungs and an open circulatory system, the body just keeps ticking until it dies of thirst.

How long is a giraffe's tongue?

It is dark and prehensile, and the animal can tip its head more than 90 degrees to strip leaves from branches directly overhead.

Under its white or yellowish fur, what colour is a polar bear's skin?

The dark skin sits beneath a thick layer of fat; the fur itself is made of hollow, transparent hairs.

What did William Morgan call volleyball when he invented it in 1895?

The name nodded to badminton, from which he had borrowed the net.

Who gave the first public demonstration of a computer mouse at 1968's Mother of All Demos?

The device had a wooden shell and one button; he never earned royalties because the patent expired before mice went mainstream.

What did the world's first text message, sent on 3 December 1992, say?

Engineer Neil Papworth typed it on a computer and sent it to a colleague's Orbitel 901 phone.

How long is the Halberstadt performance of John Cage's As Slow as Possible scheduled to last?

Chord changes happen years apart and draw crowds; the length marks the years between the town's first organ and the year 2000.

At what age was Mozart already composing and performing before European royalty?

By then he was competent on both keyboard and violin; five of his six siblings died in infancy.

Which band failed a Decca audition on 1 January 1962, then signed with EMI and became the biggest act in the world?

Five songs from the failed audition were finally released on Anthology 1 in 1995.

Vincenzo Peruggia, a former Louvre glazier, is remembered for stealing which artwork in August 1911?

He had helped build its protective case, so he knew how to open it in minutes; the painting was missing for two years.

Why did sculptor Bartholdi clad the Statue of Liberty in copper rather than bronze or stone?

The green patina that now defines the statue formed naturally after it went up; when new it was the colour of a penny.

Strictly speaking, what is 'Big Ben' the nickname of?

The 13.7-tonne bell was probably named after Sir Benjamin Hall, the tall official who oversaw its installation; the tower is the Elizabeth Tower.

Which country's flag holds the Guinness record as the oldest national flag in continuous use, since 1625?

Legend says the Dannebrog fell from the sky during a battle in Estonia in 1219.

Which country has an estimated two million lakes, more than the rest of the world combined?

Nearly 32,000 of them are bigger than 3 square kilometres, thanks to a drainage system scrambled by the last ice age.

Which sovereign state is the world's second-smallest after Vatican City, at about 2 sq km?

It is also the most densely populated country, packing around 38,000 people into less space than New York's Central Park.

The Mpemba effect is the surprising observation that, under some conditions, what freezes faster?

It is named after a Tanzanian schoolboy who noticed his hot ice-cream mix set first, and physicists still argue about why.

What did NASA fix to both Voyager probes in 1977 as a message for extraterrestrials?

Carl Sagan's team chose a record because grooves would outlast magnetic tape; the audio was put on SoundCloud in 2015.

Which galaxy, 2.5 million light-years away, is the most distant object visible to the naked eye?

Charles Messier catalogued it as M31 in 1764, though it had been visible to anyone with dark skies for all of human history.

Some species of which plant can grow 91 cm in a single day, roughly a millimetre every 90 seconds?

A rhizome network feeds the shoots, which is why a stand can look totally different from one morning to the next.

Methuselah, a tree in California's White Mountains, is about how old?

The Great Basin bristlecone pine is the oldest known living non-clonal organism; its exact location is kept secret to protect it.

Physical chemist Gilbert Lewis proposed a 'jiffy' in 1926 as a real unit. What did he define it as?

That is about 33 trillionths of a second; in computing the word was later borrowed for one tick of the system clock.

Research in 2023 suggested that Roman concrete lasts so long partly because it can do what?

Lumps of lime in the mix, once dismissed as sloppy work, react with seeping water and seal cracks as they form.

The popular image of Vikings wearing horned helmets dates from when?

Contemporary sagas mention helmets often but never horns; costume designers for Wagner's operas helped fix the look.

Frank Epperson claimed to have invented the ice pop, later sold as the Popsicle, in 1905 at what age?

He said he left a glass of powdered lemonade soda with a stirring stick out on a cold Oakland night.

Why do owls have to swivel their heads so far round?

Forward-facing eyes give them the depth perception needed for hunting in low light, at the cost of not being able to glance sideways.

Which reptile is physically unable to stick out its tongue?

A membrane holds the tongue in place; the salt glands on it are one thing that separates crocodiles from alligators.

Male gentoo penguins traditionally court a female by offering her what?

Nests are piles of stones, jealously guarded, and a choice stone can win a mate.

The tiny fifth compartment on a pair of jeans was added by Levi Strauss in the 1870s to hold what?

The back left pocket was not added to the 501 until 1901, completing the familiar five-pocket layout.

What everyday accident of chemistry gave the world the Post-it note?

The low-tack glue sat unused for years until a colleague wanted a bookmark that would stay put in his hymn book.

Percy Spencer discovered the heating effect that led to the microwave oven in 1945 while working on what?

He was a self-taught Raytheon engineer; the first Radarange went on sale in 1947 and was the size of a fridge.

Kleenex tissues began life during the First World War as what?

The crepe-paper material was later marketed for removing cold cream, until customers wrote in to say they used it to blow their noses.

What does the 40 in WD-40 stand for?

The name is short for Water Displacement, 40th formula; it was developed in 1953 to protect missile parts from rust.

Which US state is simultaneously the northernmost, westernmost and, by longitude, the easternmost?

Its Aleutian Islands cross the 180th meridian, putting part of the state in the eastern hemisphere.

Where was the highest air temperature ever recorded on Earth, 56.7 C, measured in 1913?

The reading was taken at Furnace Creek, then called Greenland Ranch, on July 10.

Which of the world's great rivers has no bridges across its main stem along its entire length?

It is not too wide to bridge for most of its course; there are simply few roads and few places worth connecting.

Which animal is the loudest on Earth, producing clicks of about 236 decibels underwater?

The clicks are used for echolocation and can be heard by hydrophones many kilometres away.

Which flavour can domestic cats not taste, thanks to a broken taste-receptor gene?

They may seem to like ice cream, but it is the fat and protein they are after; most cats actively avoid sugary food.

Research since 2014 suggests a zebra's stripes evolved mainly to deter what?

Horses dressed in striped coats attract far fewer horseflies, which seem unable to judge their landing.

Which of these is a real ability of some turtles?

Large sacs lined with finger-like projections in the cloaca pull oxygen from water, letting them stay under during winter.

Which is the only element that will not solidify at atmospheric pressure, no matter how cold it gets?

Even near absolute zero it stays a liquid; it took extra pressure to freeze one cubic centimetre in 1926.

Observations since 2017 point to which cosmic events as the forge of much of Earth's gold?

For decades supernovae were assumed to be the main source; the 2017 neutron star merger GW170817 showed such collisions forge heavy elements, and magnetar flares may contribute too.

The heart of a stranded North Atlantic blue whale weighed how much, the largest known of any animal?

The whole animal can weigh close to 200 tonnes and is the largest creature known to have ever lived.

Elephants can walk forwards and backwards but cannot do which of these?

Their leg bones point straight down like pillars, which supports the weight but rules out leaving the ground.

Besides bricks, what does the Lego factory produce about 306 million of every year?

The company name comes from the Danish leg godt, meaning play well.

Monopoly descends from The Landlord's Game, created in 1903 by Lizzie Magie to demonstrate what?

Her game had two rule sets, one rewarding everyone and one where a single landlord wins; only the second survived.

Roughly how many possible arrangements does a standard Rubik's Cube have?

That is 43,252,003,274,489,856,000, yet any of them can be solved in 20 moves or fewer.

Alfred Butts, who invented Scrabble in 1931, worked out how many of each tile to include by doing what?

He was an out-of-work architect from Poughkeepsie; the game was first called Lexiko.

Twister took off in 1966 after Johnny Carson played it on The Tonight Show with which actress?

Rivals accused Milton Bradley of selling 'sex in a box'; the publicity did the game no harm at all.

The teddy bear is named after which US president, following a bear-hunting trip in 1902?

He had refused to shoot a captured bear; toymakers in Brooklyn and Germany produced stuffed bears almost simultaneously.

Playing cards were most likely invented in which country, during the Tang dynasty of the 9th century?

The invention followed the spread of woodblock printing; a princess is recorded playing the 'leaf game' in 868.

Chess descends from chaturanga, a game that emerged in the 7th century in which country?

Chaturanga is also the ancestor of Chinese xiangqi and Japanese shogi.

Uranus is unique among the planets because it rotates how?

Its axis lies nearly parallel to its orbital plane, so each pole gets 42 years of sunlight followed by 42 years of dark.

Fingerprints are so individual that even which group of people never share them?

Twins share their DNA, but the ridges are shaped by tiny differences in the womb.

Roughly how long does a human red blood cell circulate before it is recycled?

They have no nucleus, so they cannot repair themselves and are broken down by macrophages in the spleen and liver.

Some porpoises and dolphins keep swimming while they rest thanks to which trick?

Some sharks and rays appear to do it too, resting half the brain while the other half keeps them moving.

Which Australian marsupial produces cube-shaped droppings, which it stacks to mark territory?

The cubes are less likely to roll away, though exactly how the animal shapes them is still debated.

How many hearts does an octopus have?

One systemic heart drives blood around the body and two branchial hearts pump it through the gills.

The Bluetooth wireless standard is named after a 10th-century king of which country?

Intel's Jim Kardach proposed the codename in 1997 after reading about Harald Bluetooth in a Viking novel; the logo merges his runic initials.

Botanically speaking, a banana is what kind of fruit?

It grows on giant herbaceous plants of the genus Musa, not on trees, and has been called a 'leathery berry'.

Sea otters have no blubber, so how do they keep warm in cold Pacific waters?

Their fur packs up to 150,000 hairs per square centimetre, the densest of any animal, and they may wrap in kelp to avoid drifting off.

Nintendo was founded in 1889 to make what?

Craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi's card business only branched into toys in the 1960s and video games later still.

Early ketchup recipes contained mushrooms, oysters, mussels and even which nut?

Tomato only came to dominate later; one theory traces the word to a Hokkien term for a fermented fish sauce.

Why are adult flamingos pink or red when their chicks hatch greyish?

Carotenoids such as beta-carotene in their food do the colouring; a pale flamingo is usually an unhealthy one.