Wacky Facts

The first cash machine opened at a Barclays branch in London on 27 June 1967.

Tomatoes belong to the nightshade family, and many Europeans avoided them for years after their arrival.

Canada is estimated to hold more than half of the world’s natural lakes.

Gene names like SEPT1 and MARCH1 were auto-converted to dates. In 2020 the naming committee renamed them, e.g. SEPTIN1 and MARCHF1.

Arthur Samuel’s checkers program at IBM learned from experience, including games against itself. Samuel popularised the term “machine learning” in 1959.

Airliners typically cruise at 10–12 km, where thin air reduces drag and saves fuel.

Without gravity compressing the spine, astronauts can grow up to about 3% taller. They return to normal height after coming back to Earth.

Its earliest known printed use is in Dr. Seuss’s “If I Ran the Zoo” (1950), as the name of a small, grumpy creature. Within a year it was being used as slang for a boring or square person.

The Oxford English Dictionary has recorded hundreds of senses for “set”; “run” has since overtaken it in some counts.

The Great Pyramid of Giza was built around 2560 BC; Cleopatra died in 30 BC, about 2,000 years before Apollo 11 in 1969.

To switch to the Gregorian calendar, 2 September 1752 was followed by 14 September. Until then the English legal new year began on 25 March.

Reginald Fessenden is said to have played “O Holy Night” on violin in a broadcast on Christmas Eve 1906.

Carbon dating published by the Bodleian Library in 2017 placed parts of the Bakhshali manuscript, which uses a dot for zero, centuries earlier than previously thought.

Why it happens

Writing zero as a symbol was a big step: it lets a numeral system show “nothing in this place”, which is what makes place-value numbers (10, 101, 1,000) work. Indian mathematicians developed a place-value decimal system that used a dot, later a small circle, for zero.

How we know

The Bakhshali manuscript was found in 1881 in a field near Peshawar (now in Pakistan) and is kept at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. In 2017 radiocarbon dating showed its 70 birch-bark leaves come from different periods, the oldest from the 3rd or 4th century CE. That made its dot-for-zero hundreds of years older than the zero carved at the Chaturbhuj temple in Gwalior (876 CE). Some scholars question whether the oldest leaves date the writing itself, so the exact date is still debated.

Did you know?

The mathematician Brahmagupta set out rules for calculating with zero in 628 CE, including that a number minus itself is zero. These ideas reached Europe through Arabic scholars, which is why we call our digits “Hindu-Arabic numerals”.

The Indian scholar Pingala used patterns of short and long syllables that correspond to binary numbers in his work on poetic metre.

ISRO’s Vikram lander touched down near the lunar south pole on 23 August 2023. India became the fourth country to soft-land on the Moon.

On 26 June 1974, a pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum was the first product scanned with a UPC barcode at a supermarket in Ohio, USA.

India regularly produces well over 1,500 feature films a year in many languages.

His earliest compositions date from around age five, and he toured Europe as a child performer.

Collective nouns for animals are often playful: a parliament of owls, a murder of crows, a tower of giraffes and a flamboyance of flamingos. Many date back to hunting books from the 15th century.

Archaeological evidence from potsherds uncovered in Harappa and Varanasi reveals that turmeric (Curcuma longa) has been cultivated, cooked, and utilized in Ayurvedic medicine in the Indian subcontinent for more than 4,000 years. Modern pharmacological studies confirm its primary polyphenol, curcumin, possesses potent systemic anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and antimicrobial mechanisms.

Each eye has a spot with no light receptors where the optic nerve leaves; the brain paints over the gap.

Frisson — chills or goosebumps from music — is linked to dopamine release in the brain.

Early models were based on Italian designs such as the Piaggio Ape.

Tree resin that hardens into amber can trap insects, feathers and even a dinosaur tail section found in Myanmar.

The word comes from the Hindi “chāmpo”, meaning to press or massage. Sake Dean Mahomed introduced head-massage “shampooing” baths in England in the early 1800s.

Ostrich eyes are about 5 cm across, the largest of any land animal.

When stressed or injured, Turritopsis dohrnii can revert from its adult medusa form to the polyp stage and start its life cycle again.

Hemis Monastery’s annual festival honours Guru Padmasambhava with cham dances performed by monks in elaborate masks.

Measurements differ by where the source is taken; both are around 6,400–6,650 km.

On typewriters, “Return” moved the carriage back to the start of the line. On early computer keyboards, “Enter” submitted data. Many keyboards still label them differently.