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We are pleased to update you that Yakei's rule has survived the mating season. No other macaques attempted to usurp her position. twitter.com/qikipedia/stat…
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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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The custom of relaying the Olympic torch has no ancient precedent: it was invented as a stunt for the Berlin Games in 1936.
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In 2009, Ontario, Canada passed a law stating that reflexively saying "sorry" would not count as an admission of guilt in a court of law.
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The ‘step’ in words like ‘stepmother’ or ‘stepsister’ has nothing to do with our word ‘step’. It comes from Old English ‘astiepan’ (‘to bereave’), which produced ‘steopcild’ meaning ‘orphan’. So ‘stepmother’ originally meant someone who became mother to an orphan.
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Atheists and agnostics sleep more soundly at night than Catholics or Baptists.
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When hunting, weasels and ferrets dance around their prey to disorient them.
It is called the "weasel war dance".
(Image: USFWS Mountain-Prairie; CC BY.)
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"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." ALDOUS HUXLEY
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Axolotls, the Mexican salamanders famous for being able to regenerate whole limbs, spinal cords, eyes and parts of their brains, have a genome ten times bigger than that of humans.
Image: th1098, CC BY-SA 3.0
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"Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men." NEIL GAIMAN and TERRY PRATCHETT
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"Ninety percent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact." TERRY PRATCHETT
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There is evidence that Greenland sharks can live as long as 500 years, meaning some older specimens might have been born during the reign of Henry VIII.
(Image: Hemming1952)
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As part of its COVID response, Seoul has recently banned gyms from playing music with a tempo higher than 120 beats per minute — so that people won’t breathe too fast or splash sweat on others. This means that Gangnam Style (132bpm) is officially banned.
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"The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues." TERRY PRATCHETT
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"To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem." DOUGLAS ADAMS
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After Mo Saleh joined Liverpool F.C, hate crimes against Muslims in the Liverpool area dropped 16%.
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A London tennis club attempted to train dogs to replace "ball boys" at Wimbledon.
The trial failed because the dogs did not want to return the tennis balls.
(Image: carterse; CC BY-SA.)
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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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The winner of the first modern Olympic Marathon stopped at a tavern mid-race for a glass of wine.
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In 1908, the Russian shooting team arrived the Olympics twelve days late.
The Russian team had made sure to arrive a few days before the event was scheduled, but Russia still used the Julian calendar. The UK had switched to the Gregorian calendar 150 years earlier.
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"Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them." TERRY PRATCHETT
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Word of the Day - KLEPTOTHERMY: the act of stealing someone else’s body heat.
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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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Two-thirds of the universe’s predicted quantity of lithium is missing and no-one knows where it is. This is known as the ‘cosmological lithium problem’.
(Image: W. Oelen)
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Something to think about when you put your Christmas decorations up. #QI 🎄
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves