The team behind the QI quiz show has been at it again, compiling a book of intriguing facts and incredible answers to some of life’s most head-scratching questions...
The Abba museum in Stockholm has a piano that is linked to band member Benny Andersson’s home. Whenever he sits down to practise, it plays what he’s playing.
You have to use an artificial Christmas tree for 20 years before it becomes more environmentally friendly than a locally sourced real one. The oldest-known artificial tree still in use was bought in 1886.
Ants can count — in fact, they find their way home by counting their steps to a food source and back again. Scientists attached tiny stilts (made out of pig hair bristles) to a group of ants’ legs after they’d set off in search of food. They found the ants with extended legs overshot their nests on the return journey, revealing they have an internal pedometer to help them get around.
When in London, Queen Louise of Sweden (who was also the Duke of Edinburgh’s aunt) always carried a card saying, ‘I am the Queen of Sweden’ in case she was hit by a bus.
Even DNA tests can’t tell twins apart — but dogs can, by smelling them.
Until the FBI’s fingerprint database was digitalised in 2014, it was kept on 83 million cards.
Dogs may ‘tell the time’ by using their sense of smell: if a dog’s owner usually comes home at the same time every day, then the person’s scent levels around the house will be at their lowest point just before they return, which comes to mean the imminent arrival of their owner.
There’s a light bulb at a fire station in California that has been illuminated since 1901. It took a brief break when it was moved between two different stations, but it holds the Guinness World Record for the longest-burning light bulb.
To cope with the increased demand for electricity around big televised events — for example when viewers jump up in an ad break to make a cup of tea, known as ‘TV pickup’ — the National Grid has a team dedicated to forecasting these surges, even following soap opera plot lines to plan for dramatic moments that might attract high viewing figures.
Bubble Wrap was invented in 1957 when its creators were trying to make a textured novelty wallpaper. They stuck two shower curtains together and ended up with a sheet of bubbly plastic. They hit on the idea of selling it to IBM, which had recently launched a new computer and needed a way of protecting it in transit.
Dogs may ‘tell the time’ by using their sense of smell: if a dog’s owner usually comes home at the same time every day, then the person’s scent levels around the house will be at their lowest point just before they return
Buses often come in threes because of a phenomenon known as ‘bus bunching’: if a bus is delayed, by the time it reaches its next stop there will be more people than usual waiting.
And thus takes longer letting everyone on, which means the bus will be even later at its next stop. There the same thing will have happened, and this will continue around the route. Meanwhile, the bus behind the delayed one will find its stops emptier (because the waiting passengers caught the earlier delayed bus), so it will gain on the first bus, and so on.
The rock band Slade worried the song title Because I Love You looked a bit wet for their image — so they chose the more hard-hitting Coz I Luv You; words that might, according to lead singer Noddy Holder, be easily seen ‘on toilet walls in the Midlands’.
An elephant’s trunk contains up to 40,000 muscles. By dilating its nostrils an elephant can increase the trunk’s volume by 64 per cent, which means they can suck up five litres of water in under two seconds. Elephants can inhale air through
