Quite Interesting

Frogs use their eyes to swallow by retracting their eyeballs to help push food down their throat.

7-Up used to contain lithium and was originally marketed as a hangover cure that could also help you lose weight.

In the 19th century, people used to throw dead cats at politicians they disliked.

Isaac Newton became an MP in 1689. According to records, he only spoke in Parliament once - to ask that a window be closed.

The inventor of the snowglobe was originally trying to develop an extra bright surgical lamp to use in operating theatres.

In the traditional Iraqi game Mheibes, one person has to guess who in a group of up to 50 people has a silver ring hidden in their hand by studying their facial expressions and body language.

In 1977, three men sailed from Australia to Singapore on a boat called Cantiki, made of 15,000 beer cans.

And how should we behave during this Apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog, if you don’t already have one. KURT VONNEGUT

The Swedish word 'Gift' means married but also means poison, virus, toxin and venom.

A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down—very important traits in times like these. ROBERT BENCHLEY

A recent analysis of Europeans aged 50 and older has found that having a cat is linked with slower decline of verbal fluency, while having a dog is associated with slower decline of memory.

In 1938, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster sold their rights to the character Superman for a $130 cheque. In 2012, the physical cheque itself was sold for $160,000.

The phrase ‘to wing it’ as in ‘to improvise’ comes from 19th-century theatrical slang where it meant ‘to study a part in the wings having undertaken it at short notice’.

Adding ‘Interesting fact: cats sleep most of their lives’ to any maths problem doubles the chances that a reasoning AI model will generate a wrong answer.

A runway at Nice airport, France was once closed for five hours due to an invasion of snails.

Word of the Day: BORBOROLOGY (archaic) — filthy talk.

Science, my lad, has been built upon many errors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth. JULES VERNE

People’s body temperature drops when they watch videos of other people putting their hands into cold water.

All of Shakespeare’s six known signatures are spelt differently and not one is spelt ‘William Shakespeare’.

‘Lolz’, ‘shizzle’, ‘bezzy’ and ‘emoji’ are all acceptable Scrabble words.