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"It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people." NEIL GAIMAN and TERRY PRATCHETT
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Out of 145 murders recorded in London for the year 1278, two resulted from a quarrel over a game of chess.
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The steeper the street you live on, the less likely you are to be robbed.
Criminologists speculate that this may be because criminals don't feel like climbing hills.
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A serious drought 150,000 years ago reduced the global human population to 600. They survived by moving to the coast and eating oysters.
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If an election in New Mexico is tied, the two candidates play a single hand of poker as a tiebreaker.
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Some female hummingbirds masquerade as males to avoid harassment.
(Image: Kathy & sam; CC BY.)
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The Honda Jazz was nearly called the Honda Fitta until the company realised it was a rude Swedish word for ‘vagina’ and the tagline ‘small on the outside, big on the inside’ wasn’t going to fly.
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According to new research, less than 1% of Internet communities start 74% of conflicts.
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‘Buccaneer’ originally meant ‘one who barbeques’ from ‘boucanier’ – a 17th century French word for runaway sailors who lived in the forests of Haiti and cooked their meat on a boucan - a kind of Brazilian wooden barbecue.
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Banana trees are not trees that bear fruit, they’re technically herbs that bear berries.
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Two-thirds of the universe’s predicted quantity of lithium is missing and no-one knows where it is. This is known as the ‘cosmological lithium problem’.
(Image: W. Oelen)
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In 1931, a 17-year-old girl named Jackie Mitchell struck out both Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
A few days later, the baseball commissioner voided her contract and declared baseball "too strenuous" for women.
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Word of the Day: NANOLEARNING — learning through consuming small chunks of information on the internet, for instance, reading a 178-character tweet about the word ‘nanolearning’.
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British people spend about 200 million pounds a year feeding birds.
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The ‘mas’ in ‘Christmas’ comes from the word ‘mass’, which, in its turn, is thought to come from the Latin phrase ‘Ite, missa est’ spoken by a priest at the end of the liturgy and which can be translated as ‘Go, it is the dismissal’. So Christmas means 'go away Christ'.
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Using extreme high pressure, diamonds can be made from peanut butter.
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In 1993, a man in Brazil tried to rob a glue factory, but accidentally knocked over two large cans and spilled the contents. The police found him glued to the floor, not being able to move.
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It was not uncommon for Victorians to keep hedgehogs as kitchen pets to eat beetles.
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Word of the day: CONFELICITY - joy in the happiness of others.
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In 1949, the rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun wrote a novel about a manned mission to Mars, in which the leader of the Martian government is called ‘Elon’.
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"Ninety percent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact." TERRY PRATCHETT
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After Christmas, many zoos give used Christmas trees to their animals as enrichment.
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For Christmas 1936, Salvador Dalí sent Harpo Marx a harp with barbed-wire strings. Harpo sent back a photograph of himself with bandaged fingers.
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An Ancient Roman mosaic in Sicily shows women sometimes wore bikinis.
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There's a reason you always have room for dessert - your stomach expands in contact with sugar.
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves