Wacky Facts

The brain predicts the sensation of your own movements and dampens the response. Because there is no surprise, the tickle reflex does not fire the way it does when someone else touches you.

Its low water content and acidity stop bacteria from growing. Edible honey has been found in ancient Egyptian tombs.

The company grew from a CIA database project code-named Oracle in the late 1970s.

The Gulf rupee was issued by the Reserve Bank of India for use in Gulf states until the 1960s.

Every movement comes from muscles contracting; opposite muscle pairs move a joint back again.

The game originated in ancient India as “Moksha Patam”, teaching that good deeds lead up and bad deeds lead down.

Why it happens

The game began in ancient India as Moksha Patam (also called Gyan Chaupar). It was a teaching tool: ladders stood for virtues such as generosity and faith, which carry a player towards moksha (liberation), and snakes stood for vices such as anger and greed, which drag them back. Landing on a square was decided by dice, a reminder that karma and fate both play a part.

How we know

Old cloth and paper boards survive from many parts of India, often with more snakes than ladders, showing that the path to goodness was harder than the path to vice. The poet-saint Gyandev (Dnyaneshwar) of 13th-century Maharashtra is often credited with an early version, though the game is probably older.

Did you know?

British families took the game home in the 1890s and renamed it Snakes and Ladders; in the United States, Milton Bradley sold it from 1943 as Chutes and Ladders, swapping the snakes for slides.

Its Japanese name was Puck-Man; for the US release it was changed over fears that people would scratch the P into a rude word.

In Hindustani tradition, ragas like Bhairav are associated with dawn and Yaman with evening.

It dominated DOS-era offices in the 1980s; Excel overtook it with the rise of Windows.

A Martian solar day, called a “sol”, lasts about 24 hours and 39 minutes. Mission teams working with rovers have lived on Mars time, shifting their schedule by about 40 minutes every day.

IBM released Fortran in 1957 for scientific computing; it is still used on supercomputers.

Formulas can also nest up to 64 levels of functions. If you ever get close to either limit, it is a strong sign the logic belongs in LET, a helper column or Power Query instead.

The long train belongs to the male Indian peafowl and is used in courtship displays. It is shed and regrown every year.

On August 7, 2021, at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, track and field athlete Neeraj Chopra won India’s first-ever Olympic gold medal in athletics with an 87.58-meter javelin throw. Chopra became only the second individual Indian Olympic gold medalist after Abhinav Bindra (2008), transforming javelin and track-and-field training programs across India.

The Maya and Aztecs used cacao beans as a form of currency. Cacao drinks were prized, and beans could be traded for food and goods.

From Latin nescius, “ignorant”, the word meant silly or simple in Middle English, and only gradually shifted to meaning pleasant.

Czech writer Karel Čapek introduced “robot” in his 1920 play R.U.R. The word comes from the Czech “robota”, meaning forced labour — the artificial workers in the play eventually rebel.

On 26 June 1974 a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum was the first item scanned at a supermarket checkout in Ohio, USA.

Indian Standard Time (UTC+5:30) is used across the country, so the sun rises nearly two hours earlier in the northeast than in the far west.

Jeff Bezos launched it from a garage in 1994–95, selling only books at first.

Apart from Hindi and English on the front, the language panel on the back shows the denomination in 15 other languages.

Eli Whitney’s 1793 machine separated seeds from fibre far faster than by hand.

Swiss engineer George de Mestral examined burdock burrs under a microscope after a walk and saw tiny hooks. He developed hook-and-loop fastening and patented it in the 1950s.

The first iPhone launched in 2007 with only Apple’s built-in apps. The App Store arrived a year later in July 2008 with around 500 apps.

The statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in Gujarat is 182 m tall and was completed in 2018.

Although it is only around 2% of body weight, the brain consumes roughly a fifth of the body’s energy at rest.

The melakarta system organises South Indian ragas into 72 parent scales.

Cai Lun, an official of the Han dynasty, is traditionally credited with improving papermaking around 105 CE using bark, hemp and rags.

Scottish inventor Alexander Bain patented an electric printing telegraph that could transmit images in 1843 — more than 30 years before Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patent in 1876.

Both have seven cervical vertebrae; a giraffe’s are simply much longer, each up to about 25 cm.