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Axolotls, the Mexican salamanders famous for being able to regenerate whole limbs, spinal cords, eyes and parts of their brains, have a genome ten times bigger than that of humans.
Image: th1098, CC BY-SA 3.0
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Bolivia has a 5,000 man strong navy. What Bolivia does not have is a coastline.
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The world’s deserts receive enough solar energy in six hours to power the world for a year.
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When divorcing Aaron Burr, his second wife hired Alexander Hamilton Jr. as her divorce attorney.
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In England in the 1700s, 90% of men had one of these eight names: John, Edward, William, Henry, Charles, James, Richard, Robert.
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For a couple of years, Snoop Dogg and Picasso were alive at the same time.
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Word of the Day: BINFLUENCER (neologism) — ‘the person on a street who takes the lead in putting out the correct waste and recycling bins on the correct day, thus prompting neighbours to follow suit’.
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The oldest surviving British joke dates to the 10th century. It goes:
Q: What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before?
A: A key
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Only 1% of English-language tweets that use the 🍑 emoji actually refer to the physical fruit itself.
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You likely overestimate how interesting you are to talk to, but underestimate how good you are at dancing.
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To make the war less visible and traumatising for the small children of Kyiv, a local concrete manufacturer and a children’s charity have turned some of the military roadblocks in the city into fairy-tale characters. (Images: childrenheroes.org/en/; h/t @VlOstrovskyi)
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The female blue tit weaves aromatic plants like lavender and mint into its nest to ward off bacteria, fungi and insects.
(Image: Francis C. Franklin)
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WEBSITE OF THE DAY: This one lets you calculate journey times and costs of travel in the Roman Empire orbis.stanford.edu (h/t @jessicamdalt)
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Analysis of their earwax shows that World War II was stressful for whales.
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During the period from 2019 to November 2021, the usage of English swearwords increased by 41% on Facebook and 27% on Twitter.
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Paper planes are older than planes, so they were originally known as paper darts. (Image from 1882).
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OCKHAM'S BROOM is a proposed addition to Occam's razor, and is "the principle whereby inconvenient facts are swept under the carpet".
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The Spanish village of Trasmoz was officially cursed and excommunicated by the Pope in 1511 for witchcraft. Neither the curse nor the excommunication have ever been lifted.
Trasmoz now crowns the woman who has best served the community "witch of the year".
Image: Juanje 2712.
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Buying your dog a toy will make you happier than buying yourself something of equivalent cost.
(Image: Eric Sonstroem; CC BY.)
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"When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction." MARK TWAIN
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January 14th was the Feast of the Ass in the medieval Christian calendar, a day when all Biblical donkeys were celebrated.
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In Norway, you can look up anyone's tax returns and see how much money they made - but they can see that you've looked.
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In World War II New Zealand designed and built a tank after studying a picture of one on an American postcard. It was a tractor covered in corrugated iron, with a mattress where the gunner was supposed to lie. It never made it to combat.
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In Italy, it is not a crime to steal food if you are hungry.
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In 1924, an elaborate tunnel was accidentally found under a street in Washington, D.C. Despite theories that it was a lair of bootleggers or ‘Teuton war spies’, the tunnel was dug by the Smithsonian entomologist Harrison G. Dyar, who just liked to dig tunnels in his spare time.
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves