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In Australian cities, escaped parrots sometimes teach wild flocks to chat and swear in English.
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Because of wildfires – many of them started deliberately to clear land for agriculture - the Amazon rainforest now releases more carbon into the atmosphere than it is removes.
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Crows can combine several lengths of stick to create a single tool – a skill only observed previously in humans and apes.
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In 2020 Mathdaniel Squirrel won Name of the Year, beating Courvoisier Dingle, Beanbag Amerika and mathematician Dr Reason Machete.
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The Italian bank Credito Emiliano accepts wheels of Parmesan cheese as loan collateral.
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Word of the day: GRÜBELSUCHT - to obsessively question simple or obvious facts, literally ‘ponder mania’.
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It would take around 3,000 years to count all the brain cells in a single human brain.
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"Ninety percent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact." TERRY PRATCHETT
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Even extroverts find socialising tiring.
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Cats are just as loyal to their owners as dogs are.
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In 1972 a talking statue of Abraham Lincoln was unveiled in Seattle. A malfunction caused the speakers inside it to play the Rolling Stones, so the statue was heard to announce, ‘I wanna get off, mamma’.
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The average person is keeping 13 secrets right now.
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"A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose, and a crooked mouth, and a double chin, and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams, and you will always look lovely." ROALD DAHL
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The last vote needed to pass women's suffrage in the United States was that of Tennessee legislator Harry Burn.
While he was initially opposed to the amendment, his mother had told him to "be a good boy" and vote for it - so he did.
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In 1964 Swedish art critics praised the debut of 'Pierre Brassau', whose paintings were later revealed to be the work of a chimpanzee.
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Even adults sleep better if gently rocked to sleep.
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"Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets." NEIL GAIMAN
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The city of Minneapolis, Minnesota employs twelve mussels to monitor water quality.
If they come across something unpleasant in the water, they close, setting off an alert.
The mussels do not have names.
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Analysis of their earwax shows that World War II was stressful for whales.
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A Spanish expression for daydreaming is ‘pensando en la inmortalidad del cangrejo’, which literally means ‘thinking about the immortality of the crab’.
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Streaming a movie on a gaming console can use 45 times more power than a normal streaming device - gaming consoles aren’t good at using the minimum required energy for the task at hand.
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During their concerts in 2004, Muse’s Matthew Bellamy destroyed 140 guitars and set a Guinness World Record for the most guitars smashed on tour.
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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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At around age 23, the average person falls off what the researcher Jennifer Aaker calls ‘the humour cliff’: we start to laugh and smile less and less. The average 4-year-old laughs and smiles 300 times a day, the average 40-year-old — 300 times every 75 days.
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By changing its colour and shape, the mimic octopus can impersonate more than 15 different species. It's not always obvious; one disguise was described by scientists as looking like ‘a furry turkey with human legs’.
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A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves