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M. C. Escher once told Mick Jagger off for using his first name in a letter.
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According to research from the University of Essex, the world's most boring person is probably a data analyst who lives in a small town and who enjoys watching TV.
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There is a restaurant in New York that only employs grandmothers as their chefs.
The menu is set by the grandmothers in charge that night, and consists of her family recipes.
(Image: Garrett Ziegler; CC BY-NC-ND.)
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Experts believe there are 5.25 trillion bits of plastic in our oceans; 50 bits for every star in our galaxy.
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The inventor of the transistor, John Bardeen, won a Nobel prize in 1956 but only brought one of his three kids to the ceremony. When questioned on it, he said he’d bring the others the next time he won, which he then did in 1972.
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Scientists found a new state of matter in 2019 by squeezing potassium until it became both liquid and solid at the same time.
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The decision to capitalise the ‘i’ on the Wikipedia page for Star Trek Into Darkness was made after 40,000 words of argument in the edit pages.
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Just like humans, octopuses have a specific arm they prefer to use.
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Gray whales have threesomes.
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In 2020, the world’s fossil fuel industry was subsidised by $11m per minute.
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For a couple of years, Snoop Dogg and Picasso were alive at the same time.
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The Inca people believed the past, present, and future were all happening in the same moment.
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In 2021 an arrest warrant was issued for a woman in Oklahoma after it was discovered she hadn’t returned a copy of Sabrina the Teenage Witch on VHS to a video rental store in 1999 when it was due.
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The word ‘rhubarb’ comes from two Greek words ‘rheon’ and ‘barbaron’. ‘Barbaron’ means ‘foreign’, and ‘rheon’ means ‘rhubarb’, so ‘rhubarb’ is a ‘foreign rhubarb’.
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Most kangaroos are left-handed.
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In 1996, a store manager in California robbed the store, reported the robbery, and then gave a detailed description of the ‘suspect’ to the sketch artist. When the police pointed out to him that the ‘suspect’ looked exactly like him, the man confessed.
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Defecation can stimulate the vagus nerve and produce a pleasurable sensation that is called ‘poo-phoria’.
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You can get raw herring and onion ice cream in the Netherlands (Image: Redherring NL)
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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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Word of the day: HINDERMATE - the opposite of a helpmate, a friend who only makes things more difficult
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Scientists at the University of Copenhagen believe that they could resurrect an extinct species of rat.
They aren't planning to do so because "probably the world doesn’t need any more rats".
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"The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you." NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
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In early drafts of Lord of the Rings, Frodo was named "Bingo".
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Ponyhenge is a collection of rocking horses in an open field in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
No one knows where the ponies come from, or who is donating them - but the herd continues to grow.
(Image: Jenn Forman Orth; CC BY-NC-SD.)
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Fans of films about the zombie apocalypse found dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic easier.
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves