145 Fun Facts About Useless

Roughly how long did the 1896 Anglo-Zanzibar War last?

Under an hour: British warships shelled the sultan's palace for about 38 to 45 minutes, after which Sultan Khalid fled to the German consulate and into exile.

Which animal is known for leaving cube-shaped droppings?

Wombat cubes are stackable and hard to roll away, which is thought to be the point of the shape.

How many hearts does an octopus have?

Three: two push blood through the gills and one sends it round the body, moving a blue blood that carries oxygen efficiently in cold water.

What is the name for the dot that sits above a lowercase i or j?

Tittle: the word survives in 'jot or tittle', and 'to a T' is thought to be short for 'to a tittle', a phrase recorded in 1607, long before the shorter form.

Which video game company began in Kyoto in 1889 as a maker of handmade playing cards?

Nintendo: craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi started out selling hanafuda, the flower cards, and the firm released its first home video game machines only in 1977.

In heraldry, the unicorn is the emblem of which country?

Scotland: the unicorn is its national animal, and when James VI inherited the English throne in 1603 his new arms paired it with England's lion, as the royal arms still do.

Which planet of the Solar System has an average density lower than water?

Saturn would float in a big enough bathtub: its average density is about 0.69 g/cm3, roughly 30 percent below water.

Which packaging material was born in 1957 when two inventors tried to make textured plastic wallpaper?

Bubble wrap: Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes sealed two shower curtains together, trapping air bubbles; it flopped as wallpaper and as greenhouse insulation before IBM used it to protect computers in transit.

Which website's first sale, in 1995, was a broken laser pointer?

eBay: Pierre Omidyar listed the pointer on the site he had built over Labor Day weekend, then called AuctionWeb, and to his surprise it sold for $14.83.

Which search engine began in 1996 as a Stanford research project called BackRub?

Google: Larry Page and Sergey Brin's engine ranked pages by the links pointing back to them, hence BackRub; the later name plays on googol, a 1 followed by 100 zeros.

What sort of creature is Sir Nils Olav III, the knighted Norwegian military mascot living at Edinburgh Zoo?

A king penguin: the Norwegian King's Guard adopted its first Nils Olav on a 1972 visit to Edinburgh, and promotions passed down to his successors have made Nils Olav III a major general.

A clay tablet sent to the merchant Ea-nasir in Ur around 1750 BC complains about his delivery of what?

Copper: a customer named Nanni complained that the ingots were not the fine quality promised; Ea-nasir traded the metal from the Persian Gulf, and not always the best of it.

The world's shortest scheduled flight, about 1.7 miles, links Westray and Papa Westray in which archipelago?

The Orkney Islands: Loganair's hop takes about two minutes including taxiing, with a record of 53 seconds, and locals such as teachers and the vet use it as a lifeline.

Beating a Welsh village, the 85-letter longest place name in an English-speaking country belongs to a hill in which country?

New Zealand: the Maori name of the 305-metre hill, shortened to Taumata, means the summit where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, played his flute to his loved one.

In 1932 the Australian Army deployed soldiers with Lewis machine guns against which animal, and lost?

Emus split into small, mobile groups; the commander compared them to tanks and the cull was abandoned.

A wave of what killed 21 people in Boston's North End in January 1919?

Molasses from a burst storage tank rushed through the streets; residents said the neighbourhood still smelled sweet on hot days decades later.

In 1814 a burst vat in London sent a flood of which drink through a slum, killing eight?

Porter: a giant vat of the dark beer burst at Meux's Horse Shoe Brewery by Tottenham Court Road, and the inquest ruled the deaths an accident, so the brewery paid no compensation.

What did Frau Troffea start doing in a Strasbourg street in July 1518 that dozens of others then joined?

Dancing: the council heeded physicians who blamed 'overheated blood' and paid dozens of musicians to keep the dancers moving until they recovered; stress-induced mass hysteria is the favoured modern explanation.

Which 1859 US-British standoff is named after its only casualty, shot in a settler's garden?

The Pig War: settler Lyman Cutlar shot a Hudson's Bay Company pig on San Juan Island, troops and warships gathered, and a British admiral refused to fight 'over a squabble about a pig'.

In 897, Pope Stephen VI put whom on trial in Rome, propped up on a throne?

His dead predecessor's corpse: Formosus had been dead about nine months; a deacon answered for him, and after the guilty verdict the body was stripped of its vestments and thrown in the Tiber.

What fell from the sky over Bath County, Kentucky, for several minutes in March 1876?

Chunks of meat: locals blamed vultures disgorging their meal in flight, still the favoured explanation, and two men who tasted the flakes judged them mutton or venison.

Gary Dahl became a millionaire in 1975 selling what for just under $4 each?

Pet Rocks came in a cardboard carrier with air holes and a spoof training manual, an idea Dahl hatched in a bar as friends griped about their pets.

Andre Geim, who won a spoof science prize in 2000 for levitating a frog, went on to win what in 2010?

A Nobel in physics, for graphene, the one-atom-thick carbon that he and Konstantin Novoselov first peeled from pencil graphite using ordinary sticky tape.

After 'Boaty McBoatface' won a 2016 public vote to name a polar research ship, what was the ship actually called?

RRS Sir David Attenborough: ministers overruled the poll although Boaty drew 124,109 votes, over ten times Attenborough's, and gave the Boaty name to one of the ship's remotely operated submarines.

Stubbs, honorary mayor of the small town of Talkeetna from 1997 to 2017, was what kind of animal?

A cat: Stubbs kept his 'mayoral office' at Nagley's General Store and each afternoon drank catnip-laced water from a stemmed glass at a nearby restaurant.

Which Roman emperor reportedly planned to make his favourite horse, Incitatus, a consul?

Caligula: Suetonius says Incitatus had a marble stall, an ivory manger and purple blankets, but only that the emperor planned the consulship; the horse never held it.

According to chroniclers, how did several German nobles die at a royal assembly in Erfurt in 1184?

Drowned in a cesspit: the hall floor gave way under the crowd and dropped them into the latrine pit below, while the monarch, sitting in a window alcove, was spared and brought down by ladder.

The WWII 'bat bomb' idea came from a Pennsylvania dentist after a visit to which national park?

Carlsbad Caverns: dentist Lytle Adams, impressed by its bat colonies, sent the idea to the White House in January 1942; each bomb casing held more than a thousand bats carrying tiny timed incendiaries.

Which agency's 1960s 'Acoustic Kitty' project surgically wired a cat as a walking listening device?

The CIA: a vet implanted a microphone in the cat's ear and a transmitter at the base of its skull, but the agency judged trained cats impractical and dropped the idea in 1967.

B. F. Skinner's WWII 'Project Pigeon' trained birds to do what?

Guide bombs by pecking a screen: Skinner trained the birds with grain to peck at a ship's image, and inside the nose cone their pecks on the screen steered the missile toward it.

Sergeant Stubby, often called World War I's most decorated dog, reportedly caught a German soldier by what?

The seat of his pants: Stubby is said to have held the man until American troops arrived, and he also learned to warn the 102nd Infantry of incoming gas attacks.

Tama, a cat paid in cat food, drew tourists to a struggling rural railway after it gave her which job in 2007?

Station master: Wakayama Electric Railway gave Tama a custom cap and a gold name tag at unstaffed Kishi Station, and passenger numbers on the indebted line rose about 10% in her first year.

Which Kevin Bacon film opened the TV run that set three students inventing 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon'?

Footloose: three Albright College students in Pennsylvania saw it followed by more Bacon films in 1994, began linking actors to him, and explained their game on Jon Stewart's MTV show.

Which product was the first scanned with a UPC barcode, in 1974?

A pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum: Marsh executive Clyde Dawson picked the ten-pack from his cart in Troy, Ohio, cashier Sharon Buchanan scanned it, and he later said the choice was deliberate.

Which toy was born in 1943 when naval engineer Richard James knocked a spring off a shelf?

Slinky: the spring 'stepped' down to the floor instead of dropping in a heap, and when James and his wife Betty demonstrated the toy at Gimbels in Philadelphia in 1945, all 400 sold within two hours.

Fortune cookies, a Chinese-restaurant staple, most likely arrived with immigrants from which country?

Japan: a similar fortune cracker was sold near Kyoto shrines in the 1800s, Japanese-American bakers in California made the sweet version, and Chinese-American firms took over in the 1940s, when Japanese-Americans were interned.

Despite its name, Hawaiian pizza was invented in 1962 in which country?

Canada: Greek-born Sam Panopoulos first served it at his Satellite Restaurant in Chatham, Ontario, and took the name from the brand of canned pineapple he used.

Racers at Cooper's Hill in England chase a wheel of which cheese down a steep slope every spring?

Double Gloucester: the wheel gets a one-second head start and can reach 70 miles per hour, so the first racer to the bottom of the Gloucestershire hill wins it instead.

The 1922 Straw Hat Riot, days of street brawls over men's summer hats worn out of season, broke out in which city?

New York: straw hats were meant to come off by September 15, and in 1922 gangs of youths began snatching and stomping them two days early, setting off eight days of fights.

The 1618 Defenestration of Prague helped start which war?

The Thirty Years' War: Protestant nobles threw two Catholic regents and their secretary from a Prague Castle window in May 1618, and the Bohemian revolt that followed spread into a Europe-wide war.

Which flower drove a speculative frenzy that collapsed in February 1637?

Tulips: in the Dutch tulip mania the costliest bulbs, some priced above ten times a craftsman's yearly income, were 'broken' varieties whose prized flame-streaked petals were in fact caused by a virus.

Which pig was nominated for President of the United States in Chicago in 1968?

Pigasus: the Yippies nominated the pig outside the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, and police confiscated him and arrested his handlers at the launch rally.

The 'Year Without a Summer', 1816, was caused by the eruption of which volcano the year before?

Tambora, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, erupted in April 1815; global temperatures fell, New England saw summer snow, and a rainy Swiss holiday in 1816 produced Frankenstein.

A 2005 University of British Columbia study calculated that which rural prank is impossible for one person alone?

Cow tipping: Margo Lillie and her student Tracy Boechler put the push needed at nearly 3,000 newtons, and reckoned on five or six people because a cow braces itself.

Rin Tin Tin, the canine film star of the 1920s, was rescued from where?

A World War I battlefield: American soldier Lee Duncan found the days-old puppy in a shelled kennel in September 1918, nicknamed him 'Rinty', trained him and got him silent-film work.

For how long did Mike, the Colorado chicken beheaded in 1945, go on living without his head?

Eighteen months, because the axe missed the jugular and most of his brain stem, so Mike could still balance on a perch; Fruita holds an annual festival in his honour.

London built Joseph Bazalgette's vast sewer network after which crisis of summer 1858?

The Great Stink: a heatwave made the sewage-filled Thames reek so badly that MPs sat behind curtains soaked in chloride of lime, and Parliament then backed Bazalgette's sewers.

The Dutch and the Isles of Scilly made peace in 1986, ending a 'war' that ran how long?

335 years: a Dutch admiral is said to have declared war on Royalist Scilly in 1651 and no treaty followed, so in 1986 council chairman Roy Duncan invited the Dutch ambassador to sign one; not a shot was fired.

Fred Baur had some of his ashes buried in the packaging he designed for which snack?

Pringles: his children placed part of his cremated remains in an Original-flavour Pringles can in his grave near Cincinnati; Baur had designed the tubular canister in the 1960s.

Which European country added a crown to its flag after finding Haiti's was identical at the 1936 Olympics?

Liechtenstein: its team reached Berlin to find Haiti flying the same blue-and-red bicolour, so a small prince's crown was sewn onto the flag for the Games and made official in 1937.

Which landmark's summit can tilt as much as 18 cm away from the sun on a hot day?

The Eiffel Tower: the sunlit side of its ironwork expands more than the shaded side, pushing the top away from the sun.

The world's first webcam, set up at Cambridge University in 1991, was pointed at what?

A coffee pot: the Trojan Room camera let researchers elsewhere in the Cambridge computer lab check whether a trip down the corridor would be rewarded with a full pot.

'Steady' Ed Headrick, whose ashes were moulded into memorial Frisbees, is known as the father of which sport?

Disc golf: Headrick perfected the modern Frisbee for Wham-O, invented the sport's basket target, and left instructions that sales of his memorial discs should fund a museum.

Which state is technically both the westernmost and the easternmost in the United States?

Alaska: the Aleutian Islands stretch across the 180th meridian into the Eastern Hemisphere, which is what wins Alaska the 'easternmost' title on top of northernmost and westernmost.

Which rock and roll star's twin brother, Jesse Garon, was stillborn?

Elvis Presley: Jesse Garon was delivered first in a two-room house in Tupelo, Mississippi, leaving Elvis to grow up an only child who stayed especially close to his mother.

The word 'nerd' first appeared in print in a 1950 children's book by which author?

Dr. Seuss: in If I Ran the Zoo, Gerald McGrew vows to collect 'a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too'; a year later Newsweek reported 'nerd' as Detroit slang for a square.

Which animal almost always gives birth to identical quadruplets?

Nine-banded armadillo: after a single fertilised egg implants in the womb it buds into four identical embryos, so every litter starts out as one egg.

Strictly speaking, 'Big Ben' is the nickname of which part of London's Elizabeth Tower?

The great bell: its nickname is usually traced to Sir Benjamin Hall, the commissioner of works, and it has rung with a crack since shortly after it first struck in 1859.

Which stock sound effect, first recorded for 1951's Distant Drums, was reused in Star Wars?

The Wilhelm scream: recorded for a soldier dragged under by an alligator, it takes its name from Private Wilhelm, hit by an arrow in a 1953 Western; sound designer Ben Burtt named it and made it his signature.

In World War II, the future Queen Elizabeth II trained in the women's army corps as what?

A driver and mechanic: Princess Elizabeth joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service in February 1945, trained to drive and maintain army vehicles, and was an honorary junior commander within five months.

In which Olympic sport did British police teams sweep the 1908 medals?

Tug of war: countries could enter several club teams, so the City of London Police took gold, Liverpool Police silver and the Metropolitan Police's K Division bronze; Antwerp 1920 was the event's last Games.

'Octothorp' is a name coined at Bell Labs for which symbol on the telephone keypad?

Engineers needed names for the two extra keys added to the keypad in the 1960s; the word first appeared in a US patent in 1973.

Which fairground treat did a dentist, William Morrison, co-invent a machine to make in 1897?

Cotton candy: Morrison and confectioner John C. Wharton sold it as 'Fairy Floss' at the 1904 fair in St. Louis, and that first name stuck in Australia.

Australia, home to the world's largest wild camel herd, has exported camels as a delicacy to which country?

Saudi Arabia: the herd descends from camels shipped in during the 1800s for outback transport and later turned loose, and buyers abroad prize the animals for being free of disease.

Twitter's bird logo was nicknamed 'Larry' after a star of which sport?

Basketball: the tribute was to Boston Celtics legend Larry Bird; co-founder Biz Stone grew up in Massachusetts.

Turritopsis dohrnii is nicknamed the 'immortal jellyfish' because it can do what?

Revert to a juvenile polyp stage: when starved or injured, the adult shrinks into a blob that settles as a polyp, its cells reprogrammed into younger types, and new jellyfish then bud off it.

Which South Korean giant began in 1938 as a small company trading dried fish and other foods?

Samsung: Lee Byung-chul opened Samsung Sanghoe in Daegu, and the group spent some 30 years in food, textiles, insurance and retail before it made any electronics.

Which phone maker began in 1865 as a wood-pulp mill beside a river rapids?

Nokia: mining engineer Fredrik Idestam built the mill at the Tammerkoski rapids in Tampere, Finland, and the company took its name from the town where he opened a second mill.

Which Italian sports-car maker's founder first made his fortune building tractors from surplus military vehicles?

Lamborghini: Ferruccio Lamborghini's tractor money bought him a Ferrari, and after it gave him mechanical trouble he decided to build a rival sports car himself.

Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin is credited with inventing which car safety feature in 1959?

The three-point seat belt: it debuted in the Volvo PV544 and Amazon in 1959, and Volvo left the patent open so rival carmakers could adopt the design.

Which toy began in 1930s Cincinnati as a compound for cleaning coal soot off wallpaper?

Play-Doh: when sales of the cleaner dried up, Joe McVicker heard from a nursery teacher that children found modelling clay too stiff, and by 1956 it was a toy.

Which mouthwash was first formulated in 1879 as a surgical antiseptic?

Listerine: chemist Joseph Lawrence named his antiseptic after Joseph Lister, the pioneer of germ-free surgery, and it reached shop shelves as a mouthwash only in 1914.

Which playing-card king is nicknamed the 'suicide king'?

Hearts: in the standard design the king of hearts appears to be driving his sword into the side of his own head, a relic of an axe lost in early copying.

Thomas Hicks won the 1904 Olympic marathon after his handlers dosed him with brandy, eggs and which rat poison?

Strychnine: his handlers meant the doses to keep him on his feet, and he finished hallucinating and near collapse; Fred Lorz, first across the line, had ridden part of the way in a car.

Which brewery's boss, unable to settle a 1951 argument over Europe's fastest game bird, commissioned a book to end such disputes?

Guinness: Sir Hugh Beaver's shooting party missed some golden plovers in County Wexford and found no reference book to say how fast they flew, so he had the Guinness Book of Records compiled; it appeared in 1955.

Alexander Graham Bell proposed which word as the standard way to answer a telephone?

Ahoy: Bell favoured the nautical greeting for years, but Thomas Edison's suggestion of 'hello', put forward in 1877, won out instead.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi is officially recognised as the only person to have survived what?

Both atomic bombings: he was in Hiroshima on business on 6 August 1945 and made it home to Nagasaki in time for the second blast three days later; he was officially recognised in 2009 and lived to 93.

Which monument hides an unfinished 'Hall of Records' behind its famous sculpture?

Mount Rushmore: sculptor Gutzon Borglum planned a vault behind Lincoln's head for the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, but only a rough tunnel had been cut when work stopped in 1941.

A 'butt' is an old English unit used for measuring what?

Wine: a butt was a cask of two hogsheads, about 126 US gallons, and in Shakespeare's Richard III the murderers drown the Duke of Clarence in a butt of malmsey.

Cashew nuts grow hanging beneath a fleshy structure known as the cashew what?

Apple: the cashew apple's sweet, astringent pulp is pressed into juice or fermented into liquor in Brazil and India, while the nut hangs beneath it.

Kongō Gumi, often called the world's oldest company, was founded in 578 to build what?

Buddhist temples: Prince Shōtoku brought carpenters from Korea to raise Shitennō-ji in Osaka, and their family firm stayed in the trade until debts forced its sale in 2006.

The Pentagon was built with duplicate lavatories to obey which state's segregation laws?

Virginia: the building stands in Arlington, where state law required separate facilities by race, but a 1941 Roosevelt order barred discrimination against federal workers and the duplicate lavatories were never used as segregated ones.

Which Russian tsar introduced a tax on beards in 1698?

Peter I: Peter the Great taxed beards to make Russia's nobles look western; men who paid carried a metal 'beard token' stamped with a nose, moustache and beard.

The term 'spam' for junk messages derives from a sketch on which comedy show?

Monty Python's Flying Circus: in the 1970 sketch, Vikings in a cafe drown out conversation by chanting the name of the tinned meat.

Counting overseas territories, which country spans 12 time zones, more than any other?

France: counting territories from French Polynesia to Wallis and Futuna it spans 12 time zones, and its Antarctic claim would make 13; Russia, the usual guess, has 11.

Which country has the world's only national flag that is not rectangular?

Nepal: its flag is two stacked pennants, taller than it is wide, and until a 1962 redesign the sun and moon on it were drawn with human faces.

Which world's 248-year orbit means its first lap since discovery ends in 2178?

Pluto: found by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 and reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006, it was officially a planet for less than a third of one of its own years.

Jeanne Calment, the oldest verified person ever, said she met which painter as a teenager?

Vincent van Gogh: she said he came into her family's fabric shop in Arles in 1888, when she was 13, and struck her as dirty, badly dressed and disagreeable; she lived to 122 years and 164 days.

Which doll's surname is Roberts, according to 1960s Random House novels?

Barbie: the novels named her Barbara Millicent Roberts of Willows, Wisconsin, and creator Ruth Handler had already named the doll after her own daughter Barbara, with Ken following for her son.

Lizzie Magie's The Landlord's Game was the direct precursor to which board game?

Monopoly: Magie patented The Landlord's Game in 1904 to teach the anti-landlord economics of Henry George, the opposite of how people play Monopoly today.

Which word game did out-of-work architect Alfred Butts first devise under the name Lexiko?

Scrabble: Butts counted letters in newspapers to set the tile mix, renamed the game Criss-Crosswords, and saw games makers turn it down before James Brunot relaunched it in 1948.

Designer Toru Iwatani said the shape of Pac-Man was inspired by what?

A pizza with a slice missing: Iwatani told the pizza story for decades, though he has also said he rounded out the kanji for 'mouth', kuchi.

Which video game hero was named after the landlord of the warehouse his maker rented near Seattle?

Mario: staff at the company's American arm renamed Donkey Kong's hero, until then just 'Jumpman', after landlord Mario Segale, who is said to have stormed in over late rent.

After scrambling his first wooden cube in 1974, how long did Ernő Rubik take to solve it?

A month: Rubik built the cube as a teaching model, saw it was a puzzle only once he had scrambled it, and had no idea whether it could be put back at all.

Which food does not spoil when sealed and has been found in tombs thousands of years old?

Honey: bees dry the nectar by fanning it until it is too sugary, and their enzymes leave it too acidic, for microbes to grow, so a sealed pot can keep for thousands of years.

Botanists class which fruit as a true berry, even though strawberries and raspberries fail the test?

Banana counts because botanists define a berry as a fleshy fruit grown from a single ovary. Grapes, tomatoes and cucumbers make the list too.

Which Australian marsupial has fingerprints so like a human's that even a microscope struggles to tell them apart?

Koala fingerprints are so human-like that one study found the two hard to distinguish even with an electron microscope. They evolved separately from ours, in an animal that spends its life climbing and grasping.

What colour is a polar bear's skin beneath the thick fur that makes the animal look white?

Black skin lies under a polar bear's coat, and the fur is not really white either. The long guard hairs are transparent and hollow, which helps trap heat.

Which toy company makes so many tiny tyres each year that it out-produces every car tyre manufacturer?

Lego was turning out about 306 million small rubber tyres a year for its model vehicles by 2006. Counted by units rather than size, that made it the world's number-one tyre maker.

Which physicist was offered the largely ceremonial presidency of Israel in 1952 after Chaim Weizmann died?

Albert Einstein received the offer from Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who is reported to have fretted, "Tell me what to do if he says yes!" He need not have worried: the answer was no.

Olympic gold medals are merely gold-plated, so which metal makes up at least 92.5% of each one?

Silver forms the bulk of every Olympic gold medal, finished with about six grams of gold plating. Solid gold medals were last handed out at the 1912 Games.

Which planet turns so slowly that one rotation on its axis takes longer than its whole trip around the Sun?

Venus needs 243 Earth days to spin once but only 224.7 to circle the Sun, so its day outlasts its year. It also spins backwards compared with most planets.

Which soft drink was invented in wartime Germany after a trade embargo cut off supplies of Coca-Cola syrup?

Fanta was devised by Max Keith, head of Coca-Cola's German arm, from whatever he could still get: whey, sugar beet and fruit pressings. The parent company took the brand over after the war.

Which sport did Apollo 14 commander Alan Shepard famously play on the surface of the Moon in 1971?

Golf reached the Moon when Shepard fixed a six-iron head to a sample scoop handle and hit two balls one-handed. He joked that the second went "miles and miles and miles".

Puppies of which dog breed are born with plain white coats and only gain their markings days later?

Dalmatian puppies arrive plain white, and their first spots usually show up within about ten days. Faint markings can sometimes be seen on the skin from birth.

Which frozen treat did Frank Epperson say he first made at age 11 by leaving a drink on a cold porch overnight?

Popsicle began, by Epperson's own account, as a mix of powdered soda and water left out with its stirring stick in 1905. His US patent for the frozen treat on a stick was granted in 1924.

Which kitchen appliance grew out of Percy Spencer noticing a candy bar melting in his pocket near radar equipment?

Microwave oven cooking began, the story goes, while Spencer was building magnetrons for radar sets at Raytheon and found the snack in his pocket had gone soft.

Which fastener did George de Mestral invent after studying burdock burrs that kept sticking to his clothes?

Velcro copies the hundreds of tiny hooks de Mestral saw on the burrs under a microscope, which catch on anything with a loop. The name blends the French words velours and crochet.

Which is the only US state that shares a border with just one other state, New Hampshire?

Maine touches New Hampshire to the west and is otherwise boxed in by the Atlantic and two foreign provinces, Quebec and New Brunswick.

Measured from its base on the Pacific sea floor, which Hawaiian volcano stands taller than Mount Everest?

Mauna Kea rises about 9,330 metres from the ocean floor, though less than half of that shows above the waves. Everest still wins comfortably on height above sea level.

Which British landmark was sold in 1968 and rebuilt, block by block, in Lake Havasu City, Arizona?

London Bridge was bought from the City of London by entrepreneur Robert McCulloch for his new desert town. Only the outer granite blocks made the trip, to clad a freshly built structure.

Which Asian island nation has outlawed the sale of chewing gum since 1992 to keep its streets and trains clean?

Singapore acted partly because used gum was being stuck on subway door sensors, inside locks and on lift buttons. Lee Kuan Yew had earlier waved away the idea as "too drastic".

Bluetooth wireless technology is named after Harald Bluetooth, a 10th-century king who united which country?

Denmark was forged from separate tribes by Harald, and Intel's Jim Kardach borrowed the royal nickname in 1997 because the technology was meant to unite communication protocols.

In which Mexican border city did restaurateur Caesar Cardini create the Caesar salad in 1924?

Tijuana drew thirsty Americans dodging Prohibition, and Cardini's restaurant there improvised the salad on a day when the kitchen was overwhelmed and short of ingredients.

Which insect did operators of Harvard's Mark II computer tape into a logbook as a 'bug' in the 1940s?

Moth is right: the culprit was found trapped in a relay and taped in beside the note "First actual case of bug being found." Computer pioneer Grace Hopper made the story famous.

YouTube's first video shows co-founder Jawed Karim admiring the elephants at which American zoo in 2005?

San Diego Zoo is the backdrop of "Me at the zoo", in which Karim observes that elephants have "really, really, really long" trunks. It has been described as the first YouTube vlog.

Which greeting made up the first SMS text message, sent by engineer Neil Papworth in December 1992?

Merry Christmas was typed on a personal computer and delivered over Vodafone's network to the Orbitel 901 handset of Richard Jarvis, three weeks ahead of the big day.

Which soft drink did pharmacist Caleb Bradham first sell in 1893 at his North Carolina drugstore as 'Brad's Drink'?

Pepsi took its present name in stages: Brad's Drink became Pepsi-Cola in 1898, and Bradham promoted the fizzy tonic as an aid to digestion.

Which African country has around 220 surviving pyramids, more than Egypt or anywhere else in the world?

Sudan owes its pyramids to the kings and queens of Napata and Meroë, whose royal tombs went on being built there until about 350 AD.

Which candy lures the alien in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, after Mars refused to let M&M's appear on screen?

Reese's Pieces were still a fairly new sweet in 1982, and the film sent their sales soaring. Mars had turned the part down for fear that the alien would frighten children.

Which Alfred Hitchcock thriller alarmed censors by showing a flushing toilet, then unseen in mainstream American film?

Psycho shows Marion Crane flushing away a torn-up note with the scraps in full view. Toilets were almost never seen in American cinema at the time, so the shot carried a shock of its own.

The Hollywood Sign was built in 1923 as a property advert that ended with which four letters, removed in 1949?

LAND completed the name Hollywoodland, a local real estate development the giant letters were put up to promote. The advert was meant to be temporary, but growing fame kept it standing.

Which character had orange fur for the opening season of Sesame Street before turning green for good?

Oscar the Grouch has his own account of the change: he told interviewer Anderson Cooper that he would still be orange if he ever bathed, because the green is moss.

Which Leonardo da Vinci portrait shows a sitter with no clearly visible eyebrows or eyelashes?

Mona Lisa may not always have looked that way: high-resolution scans in 2007 suggested the brows and lashes were painted in and then faded, perhaps through overcleaning.

Which word, from the Old French for 'needle', names the small sheath on the tip of a shoelace?

Aglet tips keep a lace from unravelling, and their firm, narrow shape makes it easier to feed through the eyelets. The same word covers the ends of cords and drawstrings.

Which word did two Australian scientists coin in 1964 for the earthy smell of rain falling on dry ground?

Petrichor joins the Greek for stone with ichor, the golden fluid said to run in the veins of the gods. Isabel Bear and Richard Thomas introduced it in a paper in the journal Nature.

Which symbol was once taught to schoolchildren as the 27th letter of the English alphabet, coming after Z?

Ampersand is a slurring of "and per se and", the phrase children used for the & sign when it stood alone at the end of the alphabet.

The word 'muscle' comes from the Latin for which small animal, said to resemble a flexed biceps?

Mouse is "mus" in Latin and "musculus" is its diminutive, chosen because a flexed biceps was thought to look like the back of a small rodent.

The Canary Islands most likely take their name from the Latin word for which animal, not from the songbird?

Dogs are behind the usual account of the Latin name Canariae Insulae: Pliny the Elder wrote of "vast multitudes" of very large ones there. The yellow finch was later named after the islands.

Which girl's name owes its popularity in Britain to a character in a 1904 play by J. M. Barrie?

Wendy Darling made the name fashionable, and it went on gaining ground for decades after the play, reaching a peak in the 1960s.

The male narwhal's long spiral tusk, up to three metres long, is really an overgrown example of which body part?

Tooth is right: the tusk is a canine that grows out through the upper lip on the left side. A few males even sprout a second one on the right.

Which musical instrument did Benjamin Franklin invent in 1761, played by touching the rims of spinning bowls?

Glass harmonica was not Franklin's own name for it: he called his invention the armonica, after the Italian word for harmony. Its sound is often described as ethereal and haunting.

Besides Washington, D.C., which is the only other national capital named after a president of the United States?

Monrovia honours James Monroe, who was in office when the Liberian settlement was renamed in 1824 and was a prominent supporter of the scheme to colonise it.

A 1739 war between Britain and Spain is named after which severed body part of sea captain Robert Jenkins?

Ear is the answer: it was allegedly sliced off by a Spanish coastguard captain searching Jenkins's ship for contraband. Opposition politicians later exhibited him in the House of Commons to stir up support for war.

The 1969 'Football War' followed riots at World Cup qualifiers between El Salvador and which neighbouring country?

Honduras and its neighbour fought so briefly that the conflict is also called the 100 Hour War. The matches were the spark and not the cause, since tensions between the two were already high.

The Roman emperor Vespasian refilled the treasury by taxing which liquid, prized by tanners and launderers?

Urine from Rome's public urinals was sold as a source of ammonia, and its buyers paid the levy. The episode gave Latin the proverb "pecunia non olet": money does not stink.

US park ranger Roy Sullivan holds a Guinness record for surviving seven separate what between 1942 and 1977?

Lightning strikes earned Sullivan the nicknames "Human Lightning Rod" and "Human Lightning Conductor". In later life people were said to avoid him for fear of being hit too, which saddened him.

Businessman Jimi Heselden died in 2010 after riding which vehicle, made by a company he owned, off a cliff?

Segway had belonged to Heselden for only nine months when he reversed his machine to let a walker pass and fell from a cliff into the River Wharfe.

Which Ice Age animal still survived on Russia's Wrangel Island centuries after Egypt's Great Pyramid was built?

Woolly mammoth herds hung on there until about 4,000 years ago, cut off in the Arctic Ocean long after their mainland relatives had vanished.

Which large African mammal is the closest living relative of whales, dolphins and porpoises?

Hippopotamus and whale lineages parted about 55 million years ago, a kinship first hinted at by blood proteins and later backed by DNA. Pigs only look like the nearer cousins.

Thanks to Earth's equatorial bulge, the summit of which Andean peak is the farthest point from the planet's centre?

Chimborazo stands 6,263 metres above sea level, well short of Everest, yet sitting almost on the Equator pushes its summit farther from the middle of the planet than any other spot on the surface.

Which soft metal has a melting point just under 30 °C, so a solid lump turns liquid in the hand?

Gallium melts at 29.76 °C, comfortably below body temperature, and is one of only four metals that are liquid at or near normal room temperature.

Which bird has a tongue bone so long that it winds right around the outside of its skull?

Woodpecker tongues are long, sticky and barbed for pulling insects out of holes in trees, and the bone that anchors them wraps right around the braincase.

Which popular snack 'nut' is really a legume whose pods ripen underground, in the same family as beans?

Peanut pods form below ground, a habit so unusual among legumes that Carl Linnaeus named the species hypogaea, from the Greek for "under the earth".

Which part of the human eye has no blood vessels and takes its oxygen from tears instead?

Cornea tissue has to stay perfectly clear, so a healthy one carries no vessels at all. Oxygen dissolves in the tears and then diffuses through it.