Wacky Facts

Launched in 1982, it tours Rajasthan using carriages inspired by royal saloons.

It comes from the Hindi “lūṭ”, from Sanskrit, and entered English in the 18th century.

Flamingos get their pink colour from carotenoid pigments in the algae and shrimp they eat.

Le Corbusier planned the city in the 1950s as one of India’s first planned cities after independence.

The equator and the prime meridian both cross Africa, so parts of it lie in the northern, southern, eastern and western hemispheres.

Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson united Danish tribes; the logo combines his initials in runes.

Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard hit two golf balls on the Moon in February 1971.

The UN General Assembly declared 21 June the International Day of Yoga in 2014, after a proposal by India.

Named after the 5th-century mathematician, it was launched on 19 April 1975 with Soviet help.

Since Excel 2007 every sheet has 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns (A to XFD). Multiply them and you get just over 17 billion cells — per sheet. Your laptop runs out of memory long before you run out of cells.

Nails grow about 3 mm a month on average, faster in summer and on the hand you use most.

“Me at the zoo”, 19 seconds long, was uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim on 23 April 2005 at San Diego Zoo.

It was measured at Death Valley, California, in July 1913 — though some experts question the reading.

A Great Basin bristlecone pine in California called Methuselah began growing before the Egyptian pyramids were finished.

It became popular in 18th-century north India and is central to Hindustani music.

Humpback whale songs are sequences repeated for hours, and all males in a region sing similar songs.

From the ground we see an arc because the horizon cuts it off. From an aircraft, rainbows can appear as complete circles.

Sakichi Toyoda built automatic weaving looms. His son started the car division in the 1930s using money from selling loom patents.

They sense carbon dioxide from metres away, then body heat and skin odours up close.

Water molecules bond in a hexagonal pattern when they freeze, giving snowflakes six-fold symmetry.

Hero of Alexandria described a coin-operated holy-water dispenser in the 1st century CE.

Since 2017 every system on the TOP500 supercomputer list has run Linux.

It covers about 165 million square kilometres, more than the total land area of all continents.

Collective nouns like this date back to medieval English hunting books.

The 42.195 km distance comes from the 1908 London Olympics route from Windsor Castle to the royal box.

Stuffed pastries called sambosa were described in medieval Persian texts and reached India with traders; potato filling came much later.

Around 1157 BCE, workers building royal tombs stopped work because their grain rations were late.

An early Google server cabinet at Stanford was built from LEGO bricks in 1996.

Lotus Improv (1991) introduced the idea of pivoting data. Excel added PivotTables in version 5.0 in 1993, the same release that brought VBA.

Resting sea otters often float together in groups called rafts, and some hold paws or wrap themselves in kelp so they do not drift apart.