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In an experiment conducted in Moscow, people had to answer questions about politics and have a drink every 12 minutes. The study ran for 1.5 hours and has shown that the more people drank, the more they began to support the government.
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The first official vegetarian society in Russia was co-founded in 1901 by a man called Burger.
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We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true. ROBERT WILENSKY.
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According to Huichol Indian tradition, men and women experienced the pain of childbirth together. Men sat in the rafters with a string attached to their testicles and women pulled the string during contractions.
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Word of the day: CAREMONGERING (neologism) - organised acts of kindness and the propagation of good news in the pandemic.
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One of the US’s largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons is guarded by trained military dolphins.
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The ‘$@?%&*’ that you see in place of a swear word is called a grawlix.
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‘Cow-juice’ was a 19th-century slang term for milk.
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In 2008, Barry Farrimond, the actor who plays Ed Grundy in The Archers invented an officially recognised new knot, the Farrimond friction hitch.
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African Matabele ants carry injured colleagues back to the nest after battle to tend to their wounds. They have a triage system; dying ants aren’t treated but those missing a leg or two are. Apart from humans, they’re the only organisms known to do this.
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The word ‘herb’ is derived from the Old French erbe but the initial ‘h’ only appeared in the 15th century and wasn’t voiced until the 19th century (which was why Americans still refer to ‘erbs’).
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There’s a soil bacterium that can ingest chemically unstable gold molecules, transform them into stable metal and excrete miniature pure gold nuggets.
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There are more pet tigers in the USA than there are wild tigers in the world.
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Psychic mediums are worse at identifying how people died from memorial photos than ordinary members of the public are.
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Using extreme high pressure, diamonds can be made from peanut butter.
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When national football teams do well in international competitions, birth rates drop nine months later.
The authors, Dr. Luca Fumarco and Dr. Francesco Principe, speculate "these results might be explained by individuals’ time allocation choices."
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This is a map of all reported UFO sightings, 1906-2014.
(Image: ESRI.)
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“Razors pain you,
Rivers are damp,
Acids stain you,
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful,
Nooses give,
Gas smells awful.
You might as well live.”
DOROTHY PARKER
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A small bog is called a 'boglet'.
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In 1992, St. Liborius Church in St. Louis, Missouri closed due to lack of parishioners.
It is now an indoor skatepark.
(Image: Sk8 Liborious; image used with permission.)
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The first Polish language dictionary (published 1746) included definitions such as:
"Horse: Everyone knows what a horse is."
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"It doesn't stop being magic just because you know how it works." TERRY PRATCHETT
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Transdeletion, or transposed deletion is a process whereby you shorten a word by a letter and form an anagram out of the remaining ones: ‘sure’ → ‘use’. A transdeletion pyramid is a chain of words where each one is a transdeleted version of the previous one.
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There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud. CARL SANDBURG
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Buying your dog a toy will make you happier than buying yourself something of equivalent cost.
(Image: Eric Sonstroem; CC BY.)
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves