Before Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), US cinemas typically ran films continuously and people wandered in mid-screening, then stayed to catch the start of the next loop; Psycho’s strict “no late admission” policy is widely credited with making it normal to watch a film from the beginning. [reference]
The Mercator projection (the most commonly used method for mapping the Earth from a sphere to a plane) inflates land far from the equator, making Europe and North America look much larger than they are; equal-area maps such as the Gall–Peters show truer relative sizes. For example, Africa is about 14 times the area of Greenland. [reference]
The ocean sunfish (Mola mola) is a huge, tail-less bony fish that can release up to ~300 million eggs at once, more than any other known vertebrate; the “heaviest bony fish” record (~2,700 kg) belongs to its close relative Mola alexandrini. [reference]
The blue whale is the largest animal known ever to have lived (bigger than any dinosaur) reaching roughly 30 m and up to about 180–200 tonnes. [reference]
William Caxton set up England’s first printing press in 1476; his East Midlands dialect, along with his Flemish and Dutch typesetters (who imported spellings like the “gh” in ghost) fossilised spellings of the English language that no longer match how words are pronounced (many changes in pronunciation such as the Great Vowel Shift still occured afterwards) and explain why English spelling can seem so irregular. [reference]
Some pines (lodgepole, jack pine) grow “serotinous” cones sealed shut with resin that only melts and releases their stored seeds at fire temperatures (~45–60 °C), thus reseeding the forest right after a burn. Such forest fires are thus part of natural cycles, and can last for decades but cannot happen too frequently for the cones to grow in time. Inversely, if fires happen too infrequently, shades favor other trees, young pines die, and so no species can survive regenerate after the next fire without the long process of seed transport by wind or animals. [reference]
Beer isn’t always vegan: many brewers clarify (“fine”) it with isinglass, a collagen made from fish swim bladders; plant and mineral finings and modern filtration are animal-free alternatives (Guinness dropped isinglass in 2017). [reference]
No mammal is truly green: mammalian fur colour comes almost entirely from melanin (blacks, browns, yellows, reds), with no biochemical pathway for a green pigment and no fur microstructure to make green structural colour; the “green” sloth is only coated in algae. [reference]
The mandrill is the world’s largest monkey and arguably the most colourful mammal; the blue on a male’s face is a rare mammalian structural colour, and the intensity of his red-and-blue face and rump tracks his testosterone and social rank. [reference]
Humans are better than dogs at smelling ripe bananas. [reference]
Eucalyptus makes up 75% of Australian forests [reference]
7% of all people who ever existed are currently alive. [reference]
Humans weigh a third of all mammals on Earth — and 60% of all mammals are the ones we eat. [reference]
The Netherlands is the second largest food exporter in the world, despite ranking 130th+ in land area. [reference]
The Latin root of the word ‘salary’ means ‘related to salt’. Some say Roman soldiers were paid with it; others that the money was used to buy it. [reference]
After Nikola Tesla’s death, his personal notes and research were examined and identified as harmless by John G. Trump — Donald Trump’s uncle. [reference]
Edison Studios employees filmed the electrocution of an elephant in 1903 and released as the first death animal film. It is sometimes wrongly said that Edison organised it to discredit the use of AC in the war of currents. [reference]
In 1797 Britain, for nine months, an act of parliament forced clock owners to pay a tax. As a result, most clocks were hidden and people got time at taverns, which were allowed to have free ‘Act of Parliament clocks’. [reference]
Gold is yellow because it is heavy enough that its electrons move at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Via Einstein’s theory of relativity, this shifts the light it absorbs from the ultraviolet (where it would be in a lighter, grey metal) into the blue part of the visible spectrum — leaving the yellow behind. [reference]
A significant fraction of Earth’s water likely formed before the Sun, originating in interstellar space, although not all of it predates the Solar System. [reference]
Neither animal nor fungus, the blob (Physarum polycephalum) can solve shortest-path problems by optimizing nutrient networks. [reference]
A lot of animals have roughly the same number of heartbeats over a lifetime. Of course, many species (including humans and birds) do not follow it. [reference]
One of the earliest British historical heroes is Boudica, a woman who led a major rebellion against Roman rule in the 1st century CE. [reference]
The English title “earl” derives from the Old Norse word jarl, reflecting Scandinavian influence in early medieval England. [reference]
Bluetooth technology is named after Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson, a Viking king who unified Denmark and Norway. [reference]
During the last Ice Age, megafauna included giant ground sloths that lived across the Americas until around 10,000 years ago. [reference]
The US victory against english, french, mexicans was stopped by native americans in Montana.
Dune is the first science-fiction book to make ecology a central theme.
From 1912 to 1948, competitions in literature, music, architecture, painting, sculpture were part of the Olympics, like in Ancient Greece. [reference]
Children outnumbered adults for most of human history. [reference]
For head trauma, Incas would make a hole in the skull to treat it. [reference]
Scotland and England+Wales, used to be parts of different continents. [reference]
There is 3 to 4 billion years before Andromeda hits the Milky Way and makes Milkomeda but we won’t feel it.
John Von Neumann could have been the last polymath. [reference]
New York was created by the English after trading a nutmeg island for New Amsterdam.
Polynesian tribes had a 2000miles canoe trip to Haiti back in the day, just to get plants. [reference]
Toasts taste stronger upside down. [reference]
Dioecious (coming in male and female trees) figs have tiny wasps crawling inside to lay their eggs, accidentally carrying pollen from male to female trees as they do so: a partnership so intertwined that the two species have co-evolved together for around 80 million years, each entirely dependent on the other’s survival.
Pink is by far the oldest colour (pigment found in ancient fossil) because chlorophyll, now green, used to be pink because of the bacteria it was made of. [reference]
Cambridge market used to be the biggest fair of Europe. [reference]
There is no evidence that Genghis Khan “invented” or spread blood type B. The real genetic claim seems to be a Y-chromosome lineage carried by roughly large amounts of men across parts of Asia predates Genghis Khan by a millennium. [reference]