Wacky Facts

Italian money-changers did business on benches, “banco”; a broken bench — “banca rotta” — gave us “bankrupt”.

The Chicxulub impact about 66 million years ago, roughly 10 km wide, triggered the mass extinction of non-bird dinosaurs.

Keibul Lamjao on Manipur’s Loktak Lake sits on phumdis, floating mats of soil and vegetation. It is the last natural home of the sangai, the brow-antlered deer.

Why it happens

Loktak, in Manipur, is the largest freshwater lake in northeast India. Much of its surface is covered by phumdis: thick floating mats of soil, roots and decaying plants. They can be more than a metre thick, strong enough for people to build huts on, and they rise and fall with the water level. Keibul Lamjao National Park lies on these mats in the south of the lake, which makes it the only floating national park in the world.

How we know

The park was created in 1977 to protect the sangai, the brow-antlered deer, which lives nowhere else in the wild. The species was declared extinct in 1951 and then rediscovered on the phumdis. Census counts since then have put the wild population at a few hundred animals.

Did you know?

The sangai walks carefully on the spongy mats, which is why Manipuris call it the “dancing deer”. Fishing families on Loktak build circular phumdi enclosures called athaphum to farm fish.

British officer John Smith found them in 1819 while hunting a tiger; paintings date back about 2,000 years.

Apple flesh contains lots of air pockets, making the fruit less dense than water — which is why apple bobbing works.

Research on crows showed they remember people who threatened them and even teach other crows to scold those people.

The two countries played in New York in 1844 — decades before the first Test match between England and Australia in 1877.

These Mexican salamanders can regenerate limbs, parts of the spinal cord and even heart and brain tissue, which makes them important in regeneration research.

School children recited it at the end of the alphabet as “and per se and”, which became “ampersand”.

This stock sound effect, first recorded in 1951, became an in-joke for sound designers, including in Star Wars.

He was about 1.68–1.70 m tall — average or slightly above for a Frenchman of his time. The myth came from confusion between French and British inches, his nickname “le petit caporal” (a term of affection) and British cartoonists who drew him tiny.

The North American wood frog stops its heart in winter and thaws back to life in spring.

A performance of John Cage’s “Organ²/ASLSP” in Halberstadt, Germany, started in 2001 and is scheduled to end in 2640.

It means “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. Solving them once helped digitise old books and street numbers.

Residents believe the deity Shani protects them, so traditionally homes had no doors.

Food historian K. T. Achaya suggested fermented steamed cakes may have come from Indonesia; the idea is debated.

The name was coined by a nine-year-old, Milton Sirotta, in 1920. Google’s name is a play on it.

He wrote his Ninth Symphony while almost completely deaf, reportedly feeling vibrations through the floor.

Released in 1979, VisiCalc was so useful that businesses bought Apple II machines just to run it — often called the first “killer app”.

Diwali follows the Hindu lunisolar calendar, falling on the new moon (Amavasya) of Kartika, usually in October or November.

Small raindrops are almost spherical; larger ones flatten at the bottom like a hamburger bun as they fall.

“Avatar” comes from the Sanskrit avatāra, meaning descent, used for a deity taking earthly form. The internet borrowed it for profile pictures.

LEGO is from “leg godt”, Danish for “play well”. The company made wooden toys before plastic bricks arrived in 1949.

symbolics.com, owned by computer maker Symbolics, was registered on 15 March 1985, the first .com name ever.

Peanuts grow underground and belong to the bean family, closer to lentils and peas than to almonds.

The Anglo-Zanzibar War of 27 August 1896 lasted roughly 38 to 45 minutes. British ships bombarded the palace after the new sultan refused to stand down, and a ceasefire followed within the hour.

The Maya and Aztecs drank cacao as a bitter, spiced drink; sweet chocolate came later in Europe.

Their ancestors lived alongside dinosaurs; being able to go long periods without food may have helped them survive.

Stegosaurus lived about 150 million years ago; T. rex about 68–66 million years ago — a gap larger than the one between T. rex and today.

They come from coffee cherries. Karnataka produces most of India’s coffee.