In the 1880s, a baboon worked as a signalman for nine years on a South African railroad. He was paid in brandy and never made a mistake.
Women see more nuanced shades of red because the gene that determines how a person sees the colour red resides on the X chromosome. (Men have one, women have two.)
Doctors use 20 percent more anesthesia on a redhead than a person with another hair colour.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's wife, Mercedes, placed a yellow rose on his writing desk every day for 55 years.
Tennis balls used to be black or white, but the International Tennis Federation changed them to yellow in 1972 to help viewers follow the match.
Wimbledon keeps its tennis balls at a temperature of exactly 20ºC.
Each winter, a reindeer's eye colour changes from gold to blue. This helps the retina capture more light during the sunless season.
DARPA has trained honeybees to detect heroin, cocaine, and explosives.
The ampersand's shape predates the word by more than 1,500 years. In the 1st century, when Roman scribes wrote et (Latin for and), they linked the e and t. By the 19th century & was the 27th member of the alphabet.
In 2007, the House of Representatives in Oklahoma voted 78 to 19 to make watermelon their state vegetable.
Monsieur Mangetout — Mr. Eat Everything — is Frenchman Michel Lotito, who, over the course of 40 years, ate an estimated nine tons of metal. He had incredibly thick lining of his stomach and intestines that allowed him to consume nonfood items such as metal, dirt and plastic.
In 2013, scientists at the University of Southampton partially charged a Nokia cell phone with lightning.
If we harnessed every drop of energy from the world’s lightning for a year, it would last only nine days.
In 2012, James Cameron traveled to the bottom of the Mariana Trench — 35,756 feet below the sea’s surface — in a lime green, stretch limo-sized submarine – creating the record for the deepest anyone has been in the ocean.
The smell of rain or that earthy post-storm aroma comes from Geosmin, an organic compound made by dirt-loving bacteria, and oils from decomposing plants and animals.
The scent of Geosmin helps camels find water in the desert.
In India, you can buy petrichor-scented perfume called matti ka attar.
The Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory in Japan is buried 3,281 feet below a mountain – and has a 50,000-ton pool of ultra-distilled water surrounded by light detectors.
The first transatlantic telegraph cable linked Newfoundland and Ireland in 1858.
In Connecticut, it’s illegal to call a brined cucumber a pickle unless it will bounce after being dropped from a height of a foot. (The statute dates back to a 1948 lawsuit.)
In Vancouver, British Columbia, it is illegal to build a new house with doorknobs. Lever handles must be used instead.
In the 17th century, New York City’s Trinity Church paid a single peppercorn as rent to King William III.
“Huh?” is understood in all languages.
In the past, one metre was defined as one 10-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator.
Sandwich is named after the Earl of Sandwich. Widely known for his prodigious gambling habit, he needed (and loved) sustenance (meat sandwiched between two breads) to enjoy at the gambling table. As others picked up on his habit, they also would ask for a snack by summoning "the same as Sandwich".
The Four Great Inventions of China - paper-making, printing, gunpowder and the compass – still affect the way we write, read, fight, and find our way today.
The average pencil can write approximately 45,000 words, which is equivalent to a line 56.37 km long.
In 2016, a spacesuit cost a little more than 12 million US dollars.
It is surprising but true. There are 7,500 different types of apples in the world, and if you ate a different apple every day, it would take you just over 20.5 years to try all of them.
In Japan, you cannot play a round of golf by yourself and claim to have shot a hole-in- one.
Leaving beside ancient Chinese & Greek versions, the oldest comic book is called The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck (Amours de Mr. Vieux Bois) by Swiss caricaturist Rodolphe Töpffer. It was created in Geneva in 1827 and published in 1837.
Sherlock Holmes was inspired by a famous Scottish professor named Dr. Joseph Bell.
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