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there’s more information in one edition of the New York Times than the average person in the 17th century would have come across in a lifetime.
According to the US’s National Ocean Service, there is only one ocean on the planet, and it’s called the ‘global ocean’. Historically, it has been divided into four smaller ones: the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian and Arctic.
the Dead Sea and the Caspian Sea are both completely landlocked, which means they are actually lakes.
A 1944 edition of the Bible told women to submit to their ‘owl’ husbands instead of their ‘own’ husbands. In 1682, the so-called ‘Cannibal’s Bible’ included the line ‘if the latter husband ate her’, instead of ‘if the latter husband hate her’. Perhaps the most sinful mistake of all came from a 1631 edition, known as the ‘Wicked Bible’, which missed out the word ‘not’ in the Seventh Commandment, so it read: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’
Like all the other stars in the sky, the Sun is just a giant ball of hot gas. It is so big that if the Earth were the size of the full stop at the end of this sentence, the Sun would be the size of a snooker ball.
Light is fast, but it still takes time to travel across the universe. So when you look at the stars in the night sky, you’re seeing light that left those objects a long time ago. This means you’re always looking into the past.
Dad jokes exist all around the world. In Japan, they are called oyaji gyagu, or ‘old man jokes’, while the Korean word for the jokes, ajae, means ‘middle-aged man’. In France, when a child says, ‘Quoi?’ (‘What?’), any self-respecting dad will reply, ‘Feur,’ making the French word for ‘hairdresser’ – coiffeur.
Pretty much all apple trees are grown by grafting because, for some unknown reason, if you plant an apple seed, the tree that grows will produce apples that are completely different from the one that was planted.
When it was playing on Broadway, Bill Murray went to see the musical Groundhog Day. Then, the next day, he went again.
you read sentences written in lower case MUCH QUICKER THAN THOSE IN UPPER CASE. Yuo cna aslo wrko out what a sneteecne says, even if some of the letters in the words are jumbled up. And it’s vErY DifFiCuLt tO reAD words which contain a mix of upper- and lower-case letters. The reason for all this is that, when reading, we don’t look at every letter individually, we scan the shape of the words.
Instead of saying, ‘It’s raining cats and dogs,’ the Welsh say, ‘It’s raining old ladies and sticks.’
In Western music there are twelve notes (A, B, C, D, E, F and G, plus sharps and flats). Working in different combinations, these have given us everything from Beethoven to Beyoncé.
There are more possible games of chess than there have been seconds since the start of the universe.
In 2016, the remote Japanese train station of Kami-Shirataki was scheduled to close, until the authorities realised that a single student was still using it for her journey to school. They rescheduled the closure until after she graduated.
In 1920, the New York Times published an editorial claiming that it was ‘absurd’ to believe that rockets would work in space. They issued a correction on 17 July 1969, the day after Apollo 11 launched.
In 1709, playwright John Dennis staged a production of Appius and Virginia, a tragedy set in ancient Rome. Critics didn’t like the show but were impressed by a new ‘thunder machine’ that had been built to create sound effects for stormy scenes. Appius and Virginia ran for only a few nights and was soon replaced by a production of Macbeth. When Dennis turned up to watch the Scottish Play, he was shocked to hear his distinctive sound effect being used: they had literally stolen his thunder.
When Matt Smith joined the cast of Doctor Who in 2010, proudly wearing a bow tie, sales in the UK doubled within a month.
Grapefruit were first seen in the Caribbean and were originally described in 1750 by Griffith Hughes, a Welsh vicar and amateur naturalist, who called them ‘the forbidden fruit’ of Barbados. No one seems to know why.
The political terms ‘left wing’ and ‘right wing’ were established in 18th-century France, when progressive politicians would sit to the left of the president and conservative politicians to the right.
Why do we say ‘blowing raspberries’? It’s rhyming slang. A ‘raspberry tart’ is a fart.
The word ‘grass’, meaning someone who informs to the police, comes from ‘grasshopper’, cockney rhyming slang for ‘copper’.
One in a hundred people are ambidextrous and can use either hand with equal ability.
In 1868, the world’s first traffic light was introduced on the road outside the Houses of Parliament in London to help deal with the growing number of horse-drawn carriages.
The phrase ‘déjà vu’, which translates as ‘already seen’, was coined by the 19th-century French philosopher Émile Boirac,
Beethoven started going deaf at 26. Some people think this was due to his habit of immersing his head in cold water to keep himself awake.
by the age of 33 most people have stopped listening to new music altogether.
There are 20 new books published in the UK every hour.
In the 18th century, so many books went missing from Marsh’s Library in Dublin that they ended up locking people in cages while they read.
Everybody knows Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Except he didn’t. Italian inventor Antonio Meucci had already had the idea and a patent. Unfortunately, it lapsed when he couldn’t afford the renewal fee, so when Bell submitted his own design in 1876, he received the full credit.
months that begin on a Sunday – they always have a Friday the 13th.
the UK’s banknotes are printed in Essex by De La Rue, the largest such manufacturer in the world.
British coins, meanwhile, are made at the Royal Mint. Once housed at the Tower of London, it relocated in the 1960s to South Wales.
Jupiter’s moon Ganymede and Saturn’s moon Titan are both larger than the planet Mercury.
Loch Ness holds more fresh water than all of the lakes in England and Wales combined.
