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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:
- 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.
- A baby puffin is called a puffling (see feature image).
- M&M stands for Mars and Murrie.
- You can hear a blue whale’s heartbeat from more than two miles away.
- The technical name for a hashtag symbol is an octothorpe.
- The Lyrebird can mimic almost any sound it hears, including chainsaws.
- Elvis only won three Grammys.
- You measure the speed of a computer mouse in “Mickeys”.
- “Triskaidekaphobia” is a fear of the number 13.
- Baby sea otters cannot swim.
- If Facebook were a country, it would have one billion more people than China (population: 1.4 billion in 2019).
- About 700 grapes go into one bottle of wine.
- Surprisingly, only 11% of people are left-handed.
- August has the highest percentage of births.
- A bear has 42 teeth (adult humans have 32).
- An ostrich eye is larger than its brain.
- Lemons contain more sugar than strawberries.
- Snakes can predict earthquakes.
- Bananas have that distinctive curved shape because they grow against gravity towards the sun.
- During your lifetime, you will produce enough saliva to fill 50 bathtubs.
- A sheep, a duck, and a cockerel were the first passengers to take a hot air balloon trip.
- In the 16th century, Turkish women had “grounds” for divorce if their husbands didn’t provide them with enough coffee.
- Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are illegal in China.
- 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!
- Recycling just one tin “can” save enough energy to watch television for three hours.
- 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.
- Sea otters hold hands when asleep to prevent them from drifting away from each other.
- Pokemon Hitmonlee and Hitmonchan are based on Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan.
- As far as we know, snow has only fallen in the Sahara on two occasions.
- 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”.
- Tears contain a natural painkiller that reduces pain and improves your mood.
- The average person walks the equivalent of five times around the world in their lifetime.
- In 1990. Mike Tyson offered a zookeeper US$10,000 (about £16,600 today) to let him fight a gorilla.
- 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.
- 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.