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When this sea slug gets parasites, it rips its own head off and grows an entire new body.
(Image: Steve Childs; CC BY.)
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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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"It is likely I will die next to a pile of things I was meaning to read." LEMONY SNICKET
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Many happy returns to the wonderful @stephenfry on his birthday, from all of us at QI!
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A collection of some of the Elves' favourite bits from the late, fantastic Sean Lock on QI over the years:
youtu.be/YcGoVXDh0Ts
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Word of the Day: URINATOR (17th century) — someone who dives under water.
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In 1979, mathematicians David A. Cox and Steven Zucker wrote a joint paper about an algorithm that is now known as the ‘Cox-Zucker machine’.
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The town of Levi in northern Finland hosts the Tree Hugging World Championships. There are three categories: speed hugging (hugging as many trees under a minute), dedication (showing passion and emotion), and freestyle (imaginative ways to hug a tree).
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In his dictionary of 1755, Samuel Johnson defined ‘rant’ as ‘a high sounding language unsupported by dignity of thought’.
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Site of the Day: artist Uli Westphal has charted the evolution of the depiction of elephants in the Middle Ages when European illustrators did not know how the animal actually looked and had to rely on second-hand sources. bit.ly/3B61a34
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In 1903, The San Francisco Examiner reported the story of a woman who, before visiting a neighbour, put her baby’s crib in front of the telephone, took off the receiver, and told the operator to call her up at the neighbour’s should the baby began to cry.
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‘Calenture’ is the heat-induced illusion suffered by sailors that the sea is a green field they can walk on. It comes via Spanish from the Latin calēre, meaning ‘to be warm.’
Image: European Space Agency
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The sperm cell is the smallest human cell and the egg (or ovum) the largest.
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When the 83-year-old historian, sociologist and civil rights activist, W.E.B Du Bois was indicted by the FBI as a foreign agent in 1951, Albert Einstein offered to stand as a character witness and the case was dropped.
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Over 26 years, zoologist Jennifer Owens recorded 2,673 different species living in her small suburban garden in Leicester, including 474 plants, 1,997 insects, 54 species of birds and seven mammals.
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Word of the day: APOPHENIA, n. the tendency to see patterns in unrelated things (apo- ‘from’ + phainein ‘to show’).
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Saccadic masking is the process by which the brain edits out the motion of our eyes. Look in a mirror, first at one eye and then the other. You won’t be able to see your eyes move but an observer standing next to you will.
Image: Petr Novák
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The Lapland town of Salla, the coldest in Finland, put in a request to host the Summer Olympics in 2032 to raise awareness of climate change.
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Female octopuses throw things at males that harass them.
(Image: Morten Brekkevold; CC BY-NC-SA.)
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Internet trolls are just as badly behaved offline.
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PILGARLIC is a sixteenth-century term for a bald man.
It derives from his supposed resemblance to a peeled garlic.
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"There are of course many problems connected with life, of which some of the most popular are 'Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?'" DOUGLAS ADAMS
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In 2007, Russia planted a Russian flag on the Arctic sea floor to claim the area as Russian territory.
The Canadian foreign minister responded that "this isn’t the 15th century. You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say, ‘We’re claiming this territory.’ "
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Word of the day: RAGGABRASH - someone who is absolutely, completely disorganised
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In 2001, a Belgian beer society convinced a local primary school to offer beer at lunch rather than fizzy drinks.
The move was intended to prevent childhood obesity, but proved unpopular with parents.
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves