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The Mafra Palace Library in Portugal has an army of bats that come out each night and dine on the insects that want to eat their 14-19th century leather bound books.
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Word of the Day: DEUTERAGONIST - the second most important person in a story, after the protagonist.
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It was not uncommon for Victorians to keep hedgehogs as kitchen pets to eat beetles.
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The sound of your stomach rumbling is not necessarily because you’re hungry. It’s not even your stomach - it’s your small intestine cleaning itself after digesting food.
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There’s no such thing as a chemical that makes your pee visible in swimming pools.
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Isaac Newton was not a popular lecturer at Cambridge. According to Newton’s assistant, ‘so few went to hear Him, & fewer [...] understood him’ that he ‘read to the Walls.’
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The bonnacon is a mythical creature with the body of a bull, the mane of a horse and the ability to expel corrosive faeces with great force.
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According to the head keeper at San Diego Zoo, the worst farts in the animal kingdom come from sea lions.
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According to the Guinness Book of World Records the world’s most difficult tongue twister is in the Xhosa language of South Africa: ‘Iqaqa laziqikaqika kwazw kwaqhawaka uqhoqhoqha’ which means ‘The skunk rolled down and ruptured its larynx’ (the last word contains three clicks).
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Word of the day: FINGER-FUMBLER n. the equivalent of a ‘tongue-twister’ in sign language, i.e. a phrase that is difficult to sign correctly.
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According to the Roman writer Juvenal, one of the punishments for adultery was the insertion of a mullet in the offender’s anus.
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There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. MAYA ANGELOU
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Word of the Day: SLUMMOCK - to pass the time aimlessly or idly.
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In 1949, Munich Zoo embarked on a rigorous ‘de-nazification’ programme for a parrot who’d started screaming ‘Heil Hitler’ at guests.
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Under evolutionary pressure from poaching, more and more elephants in Mozambique are born without tusks.
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Word of the day: MASKENTROTTEL (German) - someone who wears a face mask below their nose, literally ‘mask idiot’.
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Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca in the Star wars movies, spoke his lines in English, they were later dubbed into Wookie.
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Word of the Day: GRAMMAGRAM — a word or phrase whose pronunciation can be expressed as a sequence of letters. For instance, SX for ‘Essex’, NME for ‘enemy’, or ICQ for ‘I seek you’.
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The German word for compound interest - ZINSESZINS - translates literally to "interest's interest".
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The gene that makes small dogs small also appears to make them more feisty.
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Meerkats are the most murderous animals on earth.
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If you have a song stuck in your head before you go to sleep, you are much more likely to sleep poorly.
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In the 1990s, Mark Strong auditioned for the role of a Bond villain. He failed the audition because he had a severe hangover after a night out with his friend Daniel Craig.
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Movies contain a disclaimer that "any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental" because in 1933, Rasputin's murderer sued MGM for libel in inaccurately depicting the events that lead to Rasputin's death.
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Word of the day: CONJOBBLING (19th century) - to get together to eat and gossip
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A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
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