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When they sleep in a flock, some birds form a row. Those in the middle sleep with both hemispheres of the brain at the same time, and those at the edges go into deep sleep with only one hemisphere each — leaving one’s right eye and another’s left eye to watch out for predators.
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When Prince officially changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol in 1992, Warner Brothers had to send floppy disks containing a new font to the press so that they could type the artist’s name. (Image: @anildash)
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‘Intransigence' is the longest word to make a palindrome in Morse Code: ··–·–·–··– –······– –··–·–·–··.
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Reading spoilers beforehand doesn't spoil the fun - knowing the plot beforehand actually enhances your enjoyment.
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Scientists hoping to track Australian magpies were foiled because the birds pecked each other’s tracking devices off.
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For over 100 years people tried to crack this code on a gravestone in Ontario until a 94 year-old woman solved it in the 1970s. (Image: Mac Armstrong).
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‘Roomba’, the name of the robotic vacuum cleaner, was created by marketing specialists. Before that, the company had tried to come up with the name on their own and held an internal contest. The best entry was ‘Cyber Suck’.
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"When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning." NEIL GAIMAN
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On July 11, 1979, NASA's first space station, Skylab, crashed to earth, scattering debris across Western Australia.
A local council issued NASA a $400 fine for littering.
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Mount Etna has erupted so much in the last six months, it’s grown about 100 feet (30m).
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"The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues." TERRY PRATCHETT
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On average, being single costs £860 more a month than being partnered.
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Dogs can tell when you're intentionally not giving them treats.
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The sponge crab makes itself a hat from poisonous sponges.
The crab spends up to five hours shaping their new hat juuuuust right.
(Image: Seascapeza; CC BY-SA.)
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By law, over a third of all songs played on Canadian radio must feature Canadian music, artists, performances or lyrics. This rule is known as the MAPL system.
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Every year, Lake Superior University publishes a list of words and phrases they would like to banish the next year.
This year's entries include "moving forward", "does that make sense?" and "it is what it is".
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A newly discovered species of dinosaur found on the Isle of Wight has been given a name which translates as 'horned crocodile-faced hell heron'.
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Word of the day: PANPHOBIA - irrational fear of absolutely everything
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It is against US federal law to correspond with a pirate.
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The 1900 Paris Olympics featured an underwater swimming event in the Seine: The contestants got a point for every second spent underwater and two points for every metre they swam underwater. The event was discontinued due to ‘the lack of spectator appeal’.
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Speaking about the parrot’s ability to mimic human speech, Aristotle wrote that the bird ‘becomes even more outrageous after drinking wine’.
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Samuel Beckett once was enjoying a walk with a friend on a sunny afternoon. The friend remarked it was a beautiful day that made one glad to be alive. Beckett replied, ‘I wouldn’t go that far’.
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"A woman always has half an onion left over, no matter what the size of the onion, the dish, or the woman." TERRY PRATCHETT
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Before reluctantly deciding on the word ‘viewer’, the 1935 BBC Sub-Committee on Words considered many terms for their "users of television apparatus", including auralooker, glancer, looker-in, seer, sighter, teleobservist, viewer-in, visionnaire, vizzior, and witnesser.
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After drummer Pete Best was fired from the Beatles, he released an album called "Best of the Beatles".
Buyers were disappointed to find out it was not a Beatles compilation album.
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves