Strange Facts – March 2021

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Do You Know? Strange Facts – March 2021: Here’s the latest collection of weird and wonderful facts to win friends and influence people:

1. The correct name for a chef’s hat is a chef’s toque, the French word for “hat”. In the early days of French cuisine, the number of folds represented the number of recipes a chef had mastered for a given food. Consequently, the taller the hat, the more the chef knew about the food they were preparing.
2. A baby puffin is called a puffling (see feature image).
3. M&M stands for Mars and Murrie.
4. You can hear a blue whale’s heartbeat from more than two miles away.

5. The technical name for a hashtag symbol is an octothorpe.
6. The Lyrebird can mimic almost any sound it hears, including chainsaws.
7. Elvis only won three Grammys.
8. You measure the speed of a computer mouse in “Mickeys”.
9. “Triskaidekaphobia” is a fear of the number 13.
10. Baby sea otters cannot swim.
11. If Facebook were a country, it would have one billion more people than China (population: 1.4 billion in 2019).

11. About 700 grapes go into one bottle of wine.
12. Surprisingly, only 11% of people are left-handed.
13. August has the highest percentage of births.
14. A bear has 42 teeth (adult humans have 32).
15. An ostrich eye is larger than its brain.
16. Lemons contain more sugar than strawberries.
17. Snakes can predict earthquakes.

19. Bananas have that distinctive curved shape because they grow against gravity towards the sun.
20. During your lifetime, you will produce enough saliva to fill 50 bathtubs.
21. A sheep, a duck, and a cockerel were the first passengers to take a hot air balloon trip.
22. In the 16th century, Turkish women had “grounds” for divorce if their husbands didn’t provide them with enough coffee.
23. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are illegal in China.
24. A 68-year-old grandmother got a surprise when a swarm of bees followed her car for two days. It later turned out the queen bee had become trapped inside!

25. Recycling just one tin “can” save enough energy to watch television for three hours.
26. In 1939, Bill Hewlett and David Packard decided to formalise their partnership. They tossed a coin to decide whether the company would be Hewlett-Packard (HP) or Packard-Hewlett.
27. Sea otters hold hands when asleep to prevent them from drifting away from each other.
28. Pokemon Hitmonlee and Hitmonchan are based on Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan.
29. As far as we know, snow has only fallen in the Sahara on two occasions.

33. The Crown Jewels contain the two largest cut diamonds on earth: Cullinan I, known as the “Star of Africa”, and Cullinan II, known as the “Second Star of Africa”.
34. Tears contain a natural painkiller that reduces pain and improves your mood.
35. The average person walks the equivalent of five times around the world in their lifetime.
36. In 1990. Mike Tyson offered a zookeeper US$10,000 (about £16,600 today) to let him fight a gorilla.
37. When visiting the set of Game of Thrones, Queen Elizabeth declined an invitation to sit on the Iron Throne. She was following a royal protocol that recommends the reigning English monarch should not sit on any “foreign” throne.
38. Each year, there are more than 40,000 toilet-related injuries in the United States.

We hope you enjoyed reading our “Strange Facts – February 2021” article. Click here for more from our Do You Know? series.