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The president of the Royal Horticultural Society is Mr. Keith Weed.
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Climate change is making it harder to sleep - on average, you are losing 44 hours of sleep a year due to higher temperatures.
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Since 1278, Andorra has been ruled by two co-princes: the head of France and the Bishop of Urgell in Spain. Until 1993, in odd-numbered years Andorra paid about £353 to France; and in even-numbered years gave a tribute to the Spanish of £9, six hams, six cheeses and 12 hens.
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The press release for the 1980 edition of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ contained a section with the following praise from the members of Monty Python. The total number of words is 42.
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The coal, oil and gas we burn each year requires as much organic matter to make as the entire planet grows in roughly 600 years.
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Word of the day: FYLLEANGST (Norwegian) - the unsettling feeling one has the day after drinking when you can’t remember what you did while you were drunk
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"Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power." P. J. O'ROURKE
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Legs are hereditary, and run in most families. SPIKE MILLIGAN
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A word that can be spelled with only musical notes — A, B, C, D, E, F, G — is called a ‘piano word’. The longest one in English is ‘cabbage-faced’.
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‘D’ä e å, å i åa ä e ö’ is a Swedish dialectal phrase that means ‘There is a stream, and in the stream there is an island’.
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A wasp named after Idris Elba is saving Mexico’s broccoli crop from parasites.
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Ever suffer from restaurant menu anxiety? Astronauts on the International Space Station have 200 meal options, but they have to decide what they will want for the whole trip before they go up.
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Britons spend more than twice as much on bird food than the rest of Europe combined. As a result our great tits are developing longer beaks.
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According to a Stanford University study, kids' brains start tuning out their mum's voice at age 13.
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Word of the day: HINGUM-TRINGUM (Scots) - low spirits, just barely getting through it all
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In the 1920s, Cincinnati, Ohio began to build a subway system. When the Great Depression hit, they abandoned the project.
It has never been completed or filled in, so there are still 3.5 km of abandoned subway tunnels below Ohio.
(Image: Jonathan Warren; CC BY-SA.)
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Word of the day: DESIDERATE - to long for something you once had
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Word of the day: 손맛 (son-mat; Korean) - "hand taste", the unique taste each person making a recipe adds to it, usually used to describe how no one can make food like your mum
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Youngest siblings tend to think they're the funniest in the family.
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The nouns ‘slew’ (a great amount of) and ‘slogan’ are related. Gaelic ‘sluagh’ (crowd) transformed into ‘slew’ and in combination with ‘ghairm’ — ‘sluagh-ghairm’ (war cry) — gave rise to ‘slogan’.
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A ‘libfix’ is a part of a word that’s ‘liberated’ and used to create new words. Libfixes include the ‘gate’ from Watergate (making eg plebgate and partygate); the ‘athon’ in marathon (eg walkathon and telethon); and the ‘licious’ in delicious (eg bootylicious, babelicious).
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House cats definitely learn the names of other cats they live with and possibly the names of humans they live with. (Study: go.nature.com/39xzHid.)
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Word of the Day: GUBU - acronym coined in Ireland in 1982 to describe political scandals, standing for Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre and Unprecedented.
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An Ancient Roman mosaic in Sicily shows women sometimes wore bikinis.
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The Tour de France employs a specialist team to adapt or destroy all images of genitals that people paint on the route.
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A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves