89 Fun Facts About Weird

Which animal produces cube-shaped droppings?

The wombat is the only animal known to produce cube-shaped droppings, which stack without rolling away on uneven ground; the gut physics behind them won the 2019 Ig Nobel Prize for physics.

How many hearts does an octopus have?

Three: one systemic heart pumps blood round the body and two branchial hearts push it through the gills; the systemic heart stops beating while the octopus swims, which is why it prefers crawling.

Which animal is considered biologically immortal because it can revert its cells to a juvenile stage?

Turritopsis dohrnii, a jellyfish only about 4.5 mm across, can revert from adult medusa to polyp when starved or injured and start its life cycle over, though it can still be eaten or fall ill.

In which animal does the female deposit eggs into the male, who then gives birth?

The seahorse: the female deposits her eggs in the male's brood pouch, where he fertilises and carries them, then expels the fry in contractions that can last hours.

Which of these is a berry in the strict botanical sense?

The banana: a botanical berry develops from a single ovary with seeds inside the flesh, which also makes tomatoes and grapes berries, while raspberries and blackberries are aggregate fruits and strawberries accessory fruits.

Flamingo chicks hatch grey. What turns the adults pink?

Liver enzymes break the pigments in plankton and shrimp down and deposit them in the feathers; zoo birds on the wrong diet fade to white.

Roughly how often does a three-toed sloth climb down to the ground to relieve itself?

About once a week: the sloth digs a small hole, goes, covers it and climbs back up, and that weekly trip to the ground is the most dangerous thing it does.

Where are a butterfly's taste receptors?

A female drums a leaf with her feet to taste whether it is the right plant before laying eggs on it.

What shape are a goat's pupils?

Horizontal slits: the sideways pupil gives a grazing animal a wide panoramic view for spotting predators while cutting glare from the sky, and goats rotate their eyes to keep the slit level when they lower their heads.

What kind of tree is Pando, the single Utah organism with about 47,000 stems sharing one root system?

Quaking aspen: Pando is a single male aspen clone in Fishlake National Forest covering about 106 acres, generally held to be the heaviest living organism at roughly 6,000 tonnes.

How do wood frogs of the far north get through winter?

They can survive being frozen at minus 3 to minus 6 degrees Celsius and simply thaw out and hop away in spring.

Which animal's club-like strike accelerates at around 10,000 g, one of the fastest movements in nature?

The mantis shrimp: its club accelerates at around 10,000 g and moves so fast it forms cavitation bubbles in the water; captive ones have cracked aquarium glass.

On which planet does a single rotation (one day) take longer than a full trip around the Sun (one year)?

Venus: one sidereal rotation takes about 243 Earth days while its year is 224.7 days, and it spins backwards, so the Sun rises in the west.

Which planet is less dense than water and would, given a big enough bathtub, float?

Saturn: its average density is about 0.69 grams per cubic centimetre, roughly 30% less than water, despite a mass 95 times Earth's.

Which body, discovered in 1930, has still not completed a single orbit of the Sun since it was found?

Pluto: found by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, it takes about 248 years to circle the Sun, so its first full orbit since discovery will not finish until 2178.

Sunsets on Mars are mostly what colour?

Fine red dust scatters light the opposite way to Earth's air, so the sky near the setting Sun glows blue while the daytime sky is butterscotch.

A newborn baby has around how many bones, compared with roughly 206 in an adult?

About 270: a newborn's skeleton includes many separate bones and cartilage pieces that fuse as the child grows, which is why the skull and pelvis start out in several parts.

Which is the only bone in the human body not joined to another bone?

The hyoid, a U-shaped bone at the root of the tongue, is held only by muscles and ligaments; a fractured hyoid is a classic sign of strangulation.

The right human lung has three lobes. How many does the left have?

The left lung gives up room to the heart, which is why it is the smaller of the two.

The gene 'sonic hedgehog', which helps shape a growing embryo, is named after what?

A Sega video game character: researcher Robert Riddle named the gene after Sonic the Hedgehog in 1993; its siblings 'desert hedgehog' and 'Indian hedgehog' take their names from real hedgehog species.

The world's first webcam, set up at Cambridge University in 1991, was pointed at what?

A coffee pot: the Trojan Room camera let Cambridge researchers check the pot without walking to an empty one; it went on the web in 1993 and was switched off in August 2001.

The famous 'first actual case of bug being found' in a computer, in 1947, was literally what?

A moth: operators taped it into the Harvard Mark II logbook on 9 September 1947; 'bug' was already engineering slang for a fault, so the note was a joke.

Nintendo was founded in 1889 to make what?

Hanafuda playing cards: Fusajiro Yamauchi sold hand-painted 'flower cards' from a Kyoto shop, and Nintendo made playing cards for decades before its first toys in the 1960s.

Nokia, later the world's biggest phone maker, was established in 1865 as what?

A pulp mill: Fredrik Idestam opened a wood-pulp mill at Tampere in 1865 and a second on the Nokianvirta river, which gave the firm its name; it spent a century in paper, rubber and cables before phones.

Samsung began life in 1938 as a small trading firm dealing in what?

Dried fish and noodles: Lee Byung-chul's Samsung Sanghoe in Daegu traded groceries including dried fish and its own noodles, and the group did not make electronics until 1969.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin's search project was originally called what before it became Google?

BackRub: the name referred to the way it ranked pages by analysing the web's 'back links'; it ran on Stanford servers from 1996 before becoming Google in 1997.

Under what name did Jeff Bezos originally found Amazon in 1994?

Cadabra: Bezos incorporated the company as Cadabra, Inc. in July 1994, but a lawyer misheard it as 'cadaver' and within months it was renamed after the world's largest river.

What was the first item ever sold on eBay?

It went for $14.83 in 1995; when founder Pierre Omidyar checked, the buyer said he collected broken laser pointers.

Bluetooth wireless technology takes its name from what?

A 10th-century Danish king: Harald 'Bluetooth' Gormsson united Denmark's tribes, and the engineers wanted a standard that united devices; the logo merges the runes for his initials H and B.

The shortest war in recorded history, in 1896, was fought between Britain and which state?

Zanzibar: the Anglo-Zanzibar War of 27 August 1896 lasted between 38 and 45 minutes, ending when British ships shelled the sultan's palace and he fled to the German consulate.

In 1932 the Australian Army took machine guns into the field against which animal, and lost?

Emus: in the 1932 'Emu War' the birds split into small fast groups, Major Meredith compared them to tanks, and the operation was abandoned amid public ridicule.

In the summer of 1518, a 'dancing plague' saw people dance uncontrollably for weeks in which city?

Strasbourg: the 1518 dancing plague began with one woman, Frau Troffea, dancing in the street, and dozens joined over weeks; the leading explanation is stress-induced mass hysteria.

In January 1919 a wave of what swept through Boston's North End, killing 21 people?

Molasses: a tank holding about 2.3 million US gallons burst on 15 January 1919, and the wave moved at an estimated 35 mph, killing 21 people.

Per Suetonius, Caligula planned to give his horse Incitatus which office?

Consul: Suetonius writes that Caligula meant to make Incitatus consul and gave him a marble stall and ivory manger; modern historians read the story as a joke at the Senate's expense.

Wojtek, a Syrian brown bear, was enlisted as a private in which country's army in WWII?

The Polish army: Wojtek was enlisted in the 22nd Artillery Supply Company so he could board a troopship, carried ammunition crates at Monte Cassino and retired to Edinburgh Zoo.

According to Herodotus, how did an ancient Egyptian family mourn the death of a household cat?

By shaving their eyebrows: Herodotus records that a household shaved its eyebrows when a cat died; killing one was forbidden, and the cemetery at Bubastis held hundreds of thousands of mummified cats.

Liechtenstein added a crown to its flag in 1937 after finding at the 1936 Olympics it matched which country's?

Haiti: both flags were plain blue over red horizontal bands, so in 1937 Liechtenstein added a gold crown in the hoist corner to tell them apart.

Which US state has the only non-rectangular state flag?

Ohio: its flag is a swallowtail burgee adopted in 1902, and the state publishes an official 17-step method for folding it.

The unicorn is the heraldic national animal of which country?

Scotland: its kings adopted the unicorn partly as the natural enemy of the lion, England's symbol, and two unicorns supported the Scottish royal arms before the 1603 union of the crowns.

Kinder Surprise chocolate eggs are illegal to import into which country?

The United States: the 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act bans confectionery with a 'non-nutritive object' inside; Kinder Joy, with the toy in a separate half, was allowed in from 2017.

Fanta was created in 1940 in which country, because a wartime trade embargo cut off Coca-Cola syrup?

Germany: Max Keith's team at Coca-Cola's German branch made it from whey and apple pomace after the embargo; the orange Fanta everyone knows was developed in Naples in 1955.

Guinness World Records began when Sir Hugh Beaver got into an argument about what?

The fastest game bird in Europe: after missing a golden plover on a 1951 shoot in Ireland, Beaver could find no book to settle whether it or the red grouse was faster, so he commissioned one.

In 1952 Mr. Potato Head became the first toy to be what?

Advertised on television: the first Mr. Potato Head commercial aired on 30 April 1952; the kit was just plastic face parts, and families supplied a real potato until 1964.

What is Barbie's full name?

Barbara Millicent Roberts: a 1960s series of Random House novels gave her parents as George and Margaret Roberts of Willows, Wisconsin, and her boyfriend as Ken Carson.

Fredric Baur, who designed a famous snack container, had some of his ashes buried in what?

A Pringles can: Baur designed the tubular can and, after his death in 2008, his children put part of his ashes in an Original-flavour can with the rest in an urn.

Play-Doh was first sold in the 1930s as what?

A wallpaper cleaner: Kutol Products sold the putty to lift coal soot off walls; when homes switched to gas heat, the firm relaunched it as a modelling compound for schools in the 1950s.

What were the inventors of Bubble Wrap trying to make in 1957?

Textured plastic wallpaper: Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes sealed two shower curtains together in 1957; the wallpaper flopped, but IBM used the sheets to ship its 1401 computers.

The name 'Frisbee' was borrowed from what?

Yale students had been tossing empty tins from the Frisbie Pie Company of Connecticut; Wham-O adopted the name for its Pluto Platter in 1957.

Naval engineer Richard James got the idea for the Slinky when he saw a spring do what?

Get knocked off a shelf and 'walk': in 1943 James was developing springs to steady ship instruments when one tumbled off a shelf and stepped across the floor; the toy debuted at Gimbels, Philadelphia, in November 1945.

What gave Swiss engineer George de Mestral the idea for Velcro in 1941?

Burdock burrs stuck to his dog: after a 1941 hunting walk de Mestral put the burrs clinging to his dog's fur under a microscope and found tiny hooks that caught on loops of fabric.

The first chainsaw, a flexible chain saw devised by two Scottish doctors in the 1780s, was for what?

Childbirth surgery: John Aitken and James Jeffray's chain saw was drawn in a midwifery textbook for symphysiotomy, cutting the pelvis to widen it; the timber chainsaw did not arrive until the 20th century.

Sir William Cubitt introduced the treadmill to England in 1818 for what purpose?

Punishing prisoners: Cubitt's tread-wheel put convicts on an endless stair for hours a day as hard labour, and the same wheels often ground grain or pumped water.

High heels started out as footwear for whom?

Persian horsemen: a raised heel locks a rider's foot in the stirrup for shooting from the saddle; the style reached European men's fashion in the 17th century and only later women's.

The croissant is a French icon, but it descends from the kipferl, a crescent pastry from which country?

Austria: the kipferl is a crescent pastry from Vienna; after it reached Paris in the 19th century, French bakers switched to laminated yeast dough in the early 20th century, creating the flaky croissant.

Hawaiian pizza was invented in 1962 in which country?

Canada: Greek-born Sam Panopoulos put tinned pineapple on a pizza at his restaurant in Chatham, Ontario, in 1962 and named it after the brand on the tin.

Fortune cookies most likely originated with which group?

Japanese immigrants in America: a near-identical cracker, tsujiura senbei, was made around Kyoto in the 19th century, and Japanese-run bakeries in California served the cookies before Chinese restaurants adopted them; they are almost unknown in China.

The machine that spins cotton candy was co-invented in 1897 by a man of which profession?

Dentist: William Morrison, a Nashville dentist, and confectioner John C. Wharton sold about 68,000 boxes of 'fairy floss' at the 1904 World's Fair; another dentist, Josef Lascaux, patented a rival machine in 1921.

Where does a cashew nut grow?

Hanging beneath a fleshy 'apple': the kidney-shaped shell dangles from the bottom of the swollen cashew apple; the shell's oil, a relative of poison ivy's urushiol, irritates skin, so cashews are never sold in it.

Botanically, peanuts are not nuts at all. What are they?

They are in the pea family and ripen underground, which is why Linnaeus named the species hypogaea, 'under the earth'.

Before Dutch growers developed the orange carrot, what colour were most carrots in the 10th century?

Purple, white and yellow types still exist as heirloom varieties; the orange one owes its colour to beta-carotene.

What does white chocolate lack that dark and milk chocolate contain?

Cocoa solids: white chocolate is only cocoa butter, sugar and milk, with none of the dark cocoa mass, which is why some regulators long refused to call it chocolate at all.

When it launched in 1886, Coca-Cola contained an estimated nine milligrams per glass of what?

Cocaine: the 'coca' in the name is the coca leaf, and early Coca-Cola carried an estimated nine milligrams of cocaine per glass; from 1903 the company used 'spent' leaves with the drug removed.

Which of these foods, when properly stored, does not spoil?

Honey: its high sugar, low moisture and acidity stop microbes growing, and the oldest known remains, found in a Bronze Age tomb in Georgia, are about 5,500 years old.

The marathon distance of 26 miles 385 yards dates from which Olympics, run from a royal castle to the royal box?

The IAAF adopted exactly that 1908 London distance, 42.195 km, as the world standard in 1921.

Tug of war was an official Olympic sport from 1900 until which Games?

1920: tug of war was contested at five Games from Paris 1900 to Antwerp 1920 and then dropped; the Tug of War International Federation runs its own world championships.

Between 1912 and 1948 the Olympic Games awarded medals in which of these?

Painting and sculpture: the art competitions, dubbed the 'Pentathlon of the Muses', ran from Stockholm 1912 to London 1948 and also covered architecture, literature and music; every entry had to be inspired by sport.

During Apollo 14 in 1971, Alan Shepard hit two of what across the Moon's surface?

Golf balls: Shepard smuggled a six-iron head up and fitted it to a sample-scoop handle; later image analysis put his second shot at about 40 yards in one-sixth gravity.

Which future president built a local reputation by beating the leader of the 'Clary's Grove boys' at wrestling?

Abraham Lincoln: in New Salem, Illinois, around 1831 the tall young store clerk wrestled Jack Armstrong, leader of the Clary's Grove boys, and the gang became his supporters afterwards.

An Olympic 'gold' medal is mostly made of which metal?

The rules require at least 92.5% silver plated with just 6 grams of gold; solid gold medals were last handed out in 1912.

Bir Tawil, a patch of desert claimed by no country at all, lies between which two nations?

Egypt and Sudan: each side's preferred border gives Bir Tawil to the other, because claiming it would mean giving up the far more valuable Hala'ib Triangle on the Red Sea coast.

Point Nemo, the ocean spot farthest from any land, is the designated crash site for what?

Decommissioned spacecraft: Point Nemo lies about 2,688 km from the nearest land, so space agencies steer old craft to burn up and splash down there; Russia's Mir station was brought down nearby in 2001.

Big Diomede (Russia) and Little Diomede (US), under 4 km apart, differ by how many hours in winter?

21: the International Date Line runs between them, with Big Diomede on UTC+12 and Little Diomede on UTC-9 in winter, so they are nicknamed Tomorrow Island and Yesterday Island.

Which state is at once the northernmost, westernmost and, by longitude, the easternmost in the US?

Alaska: its Aleutian Islands stretch across the 180th meridian into the Eastern Hemisphere, making it the easternmost state by longitude as well as the northernmost and westernmost.

The point on Earth's surface farthest from the planet's centre is the summit of which mountain?

Chimborazo: Earth bulges at the equator, so the summit of this Ecuadorian volcano is about 2 km farther from the planet's centre than Everest's, despite standing roughly 2,500 m lower above sea level.

Which country's national anthem, dating to at least 1572, is the oldest still in use?

The Netherlands: the Wilhelmus was written during the Dutch Revolt between 1568 and 1572, long before it became the official anthem in 1932; Britain's 'God Save the King' dates only to the 1740s.

On a hot day the top of the Eiffel Tower can lean away from the Sun by up to roughly how much?

18 cm: the iron on the sunny side expands more than the shaded side, so the top bends up to about 18 cm away from the Sun, and the whole tower grows roughly 15 cm taller in summer heat.

An 85-letter hill name, the longest place name in any English-speaking country, is found where?

New Zealand: Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu is a hill in Hawke's Bay on the North Island; locals just say Taumata.

The 'Wilhelm scream' stock sound effect is named after a character in a 1953 Western who is hit by what?

An arrow: Private Wilhelm takes an arrow in the leg in The Charge at Feather River (1953); the scream was recorded for Distant Drums in 1951 and has turned up in Star Wars, Indiana Jones and hundreds of other films.

Psycho (1960) worried censors by showing what, almost unseen in American cinema then?

A toilet flushing: the shot of Marion's torn-up note failing to flush was kept as a plot clue, making Psycho one of the first mainstream American films to show a toilet flushing.

In 2015 a US federal judge invalidated a publisher's long-standing copyright on which song?

Happy Birthday to You: in 2015 Judge George H. King ruled Warner/Chappell never held a valid copyright on the lyrics, and the publisher agreed to repay $14 million in licensing fees.

A 2006 BusinessWeek article named which firm the world's top tyre maker by units?

Lego: its Billund factory turns out around 300 million tiny rubber tyres a year, more units than any car-tyre maker, a claim later recognised by Guinness World Records.

'Dord', defined as 'density' in Webster's 1934 dictionary, was really what?

A ghost word created by an error: a slip reading 'D or d', listing abbreviations for density, was misread as one word; the mistake went unnoticed until 1939 and was dropped from later printings.

What is the dot over a lowercase i or j called?

The phrase 'to a T' may come from 'to a tittle', meaning to the smallest detail.

For centuries European apothecaries sold 'mummia', a pricey cure-all made from what?

Powdered human mummies: mummia was ground from embalmed Egyptian bodies and prescribed for everything from bruises to epilepsy; demand so outstripped supply that some dealers embalmed fresh corpses and passed them off as ancient.

In 1986, a Cleveland charity set a world record by releasing roughly how many balloons at once?

1.5 million: Balloonfest '86 released nearly 1.5 million balloons over Cleveland, which drifted back over the city and Lake Erie, snarled traffic and an airport, and led to lawsuits and a net loss.

Which scientist dropped white paper into the Thames in 1855 to test how filthy the river was?

Michael Faraday: his July 1855 letter to The Times described white cards vanishing an inch below the surface; the 'Great Stink' of 1858 finally pushed Parliament to fund Joseph Bazalgette's sewers.

Where did advertising executive Gary Dahl get the idea for the 1975 Pet Rock?

In a bar, hearing friends gripe about pets: Dahl joked that a rock was the perfect pet; the rocks shipped in boxes with air holes and straw, and the fad lasted about six months after an August 1975 trade-show debut.

How many of the 159 pupils at a Kashasha girls' school were hit by the 1962 Tanganyika laughter epidemic?

95: it began with three girls on 30 January 1962 and spread to 95 of the 159 pupils, with symptoms lasting from a few hours to 16 days while the teachers were unaffected.

About how many tree seeds did Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Roosa carry around the Moon in 1971?

About 500: Roosa's 'Moon tree' seeds came from five species, loblolly pine, sycamore, sweetgum, redwood and Douglas fir, and were planted across the US after the flight; Artemis I revived the idea in 2022.