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The sperm cell is the smallest human cell and the egg (or ovum) the largest.
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After the French Revolution, the French government introduced a new calendar.
To replace saint's days, every day was renamed in honor of something important to rural French life.
In this calendar, 28 December was the day of manure.
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Word of the Day: APOSTROFEAR (neologism) — fear of not using an apostrophe when one is needed or using one when it is not needed.
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Silver medalists, take heart: on average, athletes that win silver medals at the Olympics live longer than their gold medal-winning counterparts.
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"If an optimist had his left arm chewed off by an alligator, he might say... "Well this isn't too bad... at least nobody will ever ask me if I'm left-handed or right-handed," but most of us would say something more along the lines of, "Aaaaaa! My arm!" LEMONY SNICKET
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A bear named Hank the Tank had been accused of breaking into 28 homes in California since July.
He has recently been partially exonerated by DNA evidence. There are, in fact, no fewer than three different bears breaking into homes.
(Image: Tim Lumley; CC BY-NC-ND.)
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In the mid-1990s, Louisiana authorities put a parrot into witness protection.
The parrot had previously been owned by a crime boss, and had seen some things and would occasionally talk about them.
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Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible. RICHARD FEYNMAN
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Even adults sleep better if gently rocked to sleep.
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Salamanders can count to three (but no further).
Image: Camazine
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In 2006, a robot taste-taster confirmed humans taste like bacon.
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The world’s largest single-celled organism is Valonia ventricosa, a sea-algae that can get to 5 centimetres in diameter.
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Crows can understand the concept of zero.
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Sedona in Arizona is home to the world’s only McDonalds with a blue ‘M’. Officials felt yellow clashed with the scenery. (Image: 1Veertje, CC-BY 2.0)
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The man who wrote the preamble to the US constitution died due to an infection after he inserted a whalebone into his urethra.
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Pet snails can’t travel on high speed trains in France unless they have a ticket.
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50% of Facebook Messenger's voice traffic comes from Cambodian users because the Khmer language is so difficult to type.
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The steeds of knights were not massive, powerful horses - knights actually rode horses the size of modern ponies.
(Image: Miles Wolstenholme; CC BY.)
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After a bad mescaline trip, Jean-Paul Sartre started seeing three or four crabs around him all the time. He would talk to them in the morning (‘Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?’) and during the day (‘We’re going into class now, so we have to be still and quiet’).
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I love telling people spoilers about The Picture of Dorian Gray. Never gets old. ALEX JOHNSON
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Global warming may lead to larger snakes.
(Image: Charles Baker; CC BY-SA.)
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Titivillus, ‘the patron demon of scribes’, was said to be sent by the devil to tempt monks into making errors in their manuscripts. For fifty years, the Oxford English Dictionary listed an incorrect page reference for a footnote on the earliest mention of Titivillus.
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An emordnilap is a word that, if read backwards, spells another meaningful word. For instance: ‘deliver’ — ‘reviled’, ‘reward’ — ‘drawer’, and ‘palindrome’ — ‘emordnilap’.
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One of the early typewriters, patented by Samuel W. Francis in 1857, was known as ‘the literary piano’. [📷: Division of Work and Industry, NMAH, Smithsonian.]
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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.
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves