Wacky Facts

Turritopsis dohrnii, the “immortal jellyfish”, can revert to an earlier life stage when stressed, potentially repeating its life cycle.

A 2022 study found sleeping glass frogs pull most of their red blood cells out of circulation and pack them into the liver, becoming two to three times more transparent.

Pillars in the Vittala Temple at Hampi produce musical tones when struck gently.

Chand Baori in Abhaneri, built around the 9th century, descends 13 storeys into the ground; the air at the bottom stays several degrees cooler than at the surface.

Why it happens

Rajasthan gets little rain, and most of it falls in a few monsoon weeks. Stepwells were built to reach the water table deep below and store water for the dry months. Steps on three sides let people walk down to the water as the level fell through the year, so the well stayed usable whether it was full or nearly empty.

How we know

Chand Baori in Abhaneri was built around the 9th century, traditionally credited to King Chanda of the Nikumbha dynasty. It descends about 13 storeys, roughly 30 m, with about 3,500 narrow steps in a precise zigzag pattern. A pavilion and royal rooms were added on one side in later centuries.

Did you know?

The air at the bottom can be 5 to 6 degrees cooler than at the surface, so stepwells were also places to escape the summer heat. Chand Baori has appeared in films including The Dark Knight Rises.

Founded in 1865 in Finland, Nokia made paper, rubber boots and cables before phones.

Competitors solve spreadsheet puzzles against the clock in live-streamed rounds.

Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA (1966) mostly turned users’ sentences back into questions. Even so, some users became emotionally attached — Weizenbaum wrote that his secretary asked him to leave the room so she could talk to it privately. Treating a program as more understanding than it is became known as the “ELIZA effect”.

It held the record until Lincoln Cathedral’s spire in England surpassed it around 1311.

They are all in the same plant family, Anacardiaceae. India grows the most mangoes in the world.

On typewriters, pressing Shift raised or lowered the whole typebar basket or carriage so a different character on each bar struck the paper.

His 1924 work with Einstein led to Bose-Einstein statistics; particles called bosons are named after him.

Astronomers noticed Uranus drifting from its predicted path. Urbain Le Verrier calculated where an unknown planet must be pulling it, and in 1846 Johann Galle found Neptune within about one degree of that prediction on his first night of looking.

Arthur Wynne published the first modern crossword in the New York World in 1913.

Competitors alternate rounds of chess and boxing; you win by checkmate, knockout or judges’ decision.

Excel 2007 raised the limit from 7 to 64 nested levels — though a formula that deep usually belongs in LET or a helper column.

Thousands of inscriptions exist, but most are very short and no bilingual text has been found.

Imperatives like “Go.” are even shorter, with an implied subject.

Each snowflake forms along a unique path through clouds with different temperature and humidity, giving it a unique shape.

When coins were made of precious metals, people clipped the edges. Reeding made tampering obvious, and many coins keep it today.

Johannes Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press (around 1440) let a workshop print thousands of pages a day, compared with hand copying. It sped the spread of knowledge across Europe.

Ray Tomlinson sent the first networked email between two computers side by side. He said the message was something like “QWERTYUIOP” and he did not save it.

Roopkund, at about 5,000 m, holds the remains of several hundred people. A 2019 DNA study found at least three distinct groups who died there centuries apart, including people with Mediterranean ancestry.

Why it happens

Roopkund is a small glacial lake at about 5,000 m in the Himalayas of Uttarakhand. It sits on an old pilgrimage route to Nanda Devi. For most of the year it is frozen; when the ice melts, hundreds of skeletons become visible around the shore. The cold, high altitude has preserved bones, and in some cases hair and flesh, for centuries.

How we know

A 2019 study in Nature Communications sequenced DNA from 38 skeletons. It found three distinct groups: people of South Asian ancestry who died around the 9th century, and a later group with Eastern Mediterranean ancestry who died around 1800, plus one person of East Asian ancestry. That ruled out the old idea that all of them died in a single disaster.

Did you know?

A local legend says a king’s party was struck by giant hailstones sent by the goddess Nanda Devi. Some skulls do show injuries consistent with blows from above, so hail may explain at least one of the groups.

The river runs mainly through rainforest with few roads, and its banks shift seasonally, so ferries are used instead.

Without gravity, tears do not fall; they form a ball of liquid on the eye.

In 2021 UNESCO added Durga Puja in Kolkata to its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Enthusiasts have made working games and 3D engines using only formulas and VBA; Excel esports tournaments exist too.

“Me at the zoo”, uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim on 23 April 2005, shows him in front of the elephants at San Diego Zoo. It has since been viewed hundreds of millions of times.

In very dry conditions some snails seal themselves in their shells and become dormant for long periods — a state called aestivation — until moisture returns.

The word “salary” is often linked to Latin “salarium”, connected with salt, though historians debate the details.

Merchants in Sichuan used jiaozi notes in the 11th century, and the Song government later issued them officially.